“Thea,” he said, “it helps if you look at me.”
Thea let out an uncomfortable laugh.“I’m sorry,” she said.“I don’t know how to do this.”
“I’ve never done it before, either,” he reminded her, “but I think we’re worth figuring it out, don’t you?”
She looked up at Nat, and her eyes filled with tears.
“Oh, Nat,” she said quietly, before she closed the distance between them and threw her arms around him.“I’m so sorry,” she said, the words broken.
“I’m sorry, too.”His arms wrapped around her and pulled her tight.“I’m just as much to blame as you are, if not more, because my brother is the one who got between us.”
“It all seems so silly now,” she admitted.“I should’ve just asked you when I first arrived.”
“You didn’t know,” he said with a shrug—as much as he could shrug with her arms wrapped around him.“Neither of us did.I’m sorry for hurting you, even if I didn’t mean to or know that I was,” he added.“You know I would never want to do that.”
“I know,” she admitted, her voice cracking.“And I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.I think we can both agree that hurting each other was not the intention,” he said with a chuckle.“The question is, what are we going to do about it now?And what do you think we should change going forward?I’ve previously stayed far away, since that’s what I thought you wanted me to do, but I would hope that’s changed.”
He added, with a mischievous grin, “If it hasn’t, I might just murder my brother instead.”
“It’s changed,” she reassured him.“I don’t know exactly what I want things to look like going forward, but I do know that I hope we can figure things out between us.And I would be interested in spending more time with you as we try to figure it out.”
“I like the sound of that,” Nathaniel said, his head slowly leaning toward hers.
She was faced with a choice: allow him to rest his forehead on hers or meet him with a kiss instead.And while her head said that she shouldn’t allow him to kiss her yet, every fiber of her being yearned to kiss Nathaniel Alder.
She was about to close her eyes when she noticed his nose twitching.
“Are you okay?”she asked, pulling back a little to look at him.
Nathaniel’s eyes widened in alarm.“No, no, no, no, no,” he began saying.
And before Thea could ask what was wrong, there was a popping sound, and the man in her arms disappeared—replaced by an orange cat on the floor.
Thea stared down at Baker, her eyes so wide it almost hurt.
“Did you just turn into a cat?”she asked.“Unbelievable.”
She threw her arms into the air.“I’m finally gonna get to kiss you for the first time in far too many years, and you turn into a freaking cat.”
She glared down at him.“You’ve been a cat this whole time and you didn’t think to tell me?Wow.I’m assuming that was you—the cat—when you first showed up the other day?Was that when it first happened?”
And then the thought occurred to her.“You didn’t use your key the other morning, did you?You were already in the building because I locked you in when you were a cat, and you didn’t tell me!”
He started meowing, and a moment later, Ginger appeared around the corner and joined the cacophony.
“I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” she told them both, throwing her hands in the air again.“You’re going to have to tell me later, when you turn back into a human.If you turn back into a human.”
She looked down at the cat, glaring at him.“Youdoturn back into a human, right?”
The cat waited a moment, then nodded his head up and down once.
“I can’t wait for you to turn back so I can yell at you some more,” Thea muttered, still glaring at him.“And we have to figure this out, because I can’t have you turning into a cat in the middle of my café without warning.”
Thea stomped over to the door and opened the café.It was a few minutes early, but this way she didn’t have to deal with the fact that Nathaniel had turned into a cat in front of her.
She’d heard rumors of magic being real, but she’d always assumed they were nothing more than a childhood story.Surely dragons, fairies, sorcerers, and the like couldn’t be real.
