“I understand what it’s like to fear you’re too much.” It struck her so deeply she gasped. I didn’t know if I was allowed to take her hand, so I clenched my own. “Everyone wants you to follow your passions until you’re too passionate. You care too much. Then you’re selfish and obsessive.”
She looked away, lost in memory. “Or you don’t know how to take care of your children.”
I nodded in understanding. The bakery had been the same. It was what I was supposed to do in our small village. A simple life to temper my grand ambitions. I was worried it would be the same here. Tradition used as a shield. There must have been something about the Old Magic that was a bit more feral.
“Standing in the kitchen, perfecting sauce for the fifth night in a row isn’t romantic when it’s your hundredth sauce. Perfection doesn’t leave room for much else,” I said. I learned it the hard way, as all other relationships besides my friends’ melted away in the face of my desire to be better, work harder.
“Including a life full of love. I was too headstrong, too powerful and I paid the price. Declan is not his father, but mates can only take so much.”
That wasn’t true because Declan had never asked me, not once, to leave the kitchen. “I can’t speak for your mate but that sounds like ahimproblem. You can fix those.” My foot mimed the good nut kick.
She smothered a laugh. “Love is the only thing I want for you, my daughter.”
Guilt came with that label, but I forced out, “I wantthat too.”
It was true. I just didn’t admit it often. Love was too much to hope for someone as broken as I was. I would settle for control. I couldn’t explain to her that Iwashere to get my life back. One that probably didn’t include love or her son in the way she hoped. I doubted ‘friends’ was what she was aiming for out of all this. I would never be a mate. No part of me wanted the right things for that. Children, forever, reliance weren’t in the cards for me.
Or were they? The visit to the temple was hells bells confusing when us hanging out as friends became something so strange and delicious that I was still reeling. That wasn’t ‘mates’, right?
She smiled at me with a hope that only produced more guilt. “Let’s start with some simple magic. You have the cooking part down.”
I held my tongue. Apparently, there was something simpler than letting cucumbers sit in a jar of vinegar. Some part of me, no matter how much evidence there was to the contrary, didn’t believe that blowing up my bedroom with ten jars of pickles wasn’t my fault.
We moved to the kitchen. Anise plunked a loaf of bread onto the worktable.
“Mold the bread, bring it back, dry it, reduce it to its parts.”
My gaze snapped to hers. She could do that? “Uh?”
The lesson was off to a good start when I couldn’t form words.
“Like this.” A look of concentration crossed her faceand I worked to keep my amazement behind my shut jaw. Anise taking apart the bread into neat piles of wheat, yeast and water opened my mind to a million possibilities. I had thought my magic was just about making things delicious, but I never considered how it worked on the parts. This was, well, magic.
I fought not to clap my hands and embarrass myself. Only to give up and have it crackle through the room. “Show me!”
Anise laughed and I realized how deep her knowledge of food must run. If she understood how to influence all the parts with magic, then she understood what those parts did and how. Humbled, I gazed at her with new appreciation.
“Please.”
She showed me again, slower, voicing what to focus on. Then let me do it. I wanted a notebook as she presented how it interacted with flame, and how my magic acted the same. She took a break to find one and I scribbled furiously. The family filtered in, all chattering with one another, picking our experimental food off of the platters in the middle of the table.
“Where’s Declan?” Briggs asked and Cosomo punched her on the shoulder. “Shouldn’t he be glued to your side?”
That was what Declan said. We shouldn’t be too far from one another if we were for real mated.
Mate person. It’s time to wake up before you blow ourcover.
“He’s just getting ready,” I said to Briggs out loud.
“Well, tell him to hurry or he’s going to be left with an empty plate. Eilie has half of it in her face already.”
“I can make more,” I mumbled, but that seemed to be beside the point as the smallest wolf at the table jumped up to yell at Briggs.
Your family is getting louder.
They do that,Declan sleepily responded.
Was it bad that the sound made me replay our time in the temple?
