Page 27 of Moth to a Flame

His head turned between the door and the path that led back to the greenhouse, and he rubbed the back of his neck.

“Look, I know Gertrude said we had to work together on this, but…I don’t really know anything about magic or spells or whatever. I was thinking…maybe I could just work on fixing the greenhouse? I did break it, after all.”

“It’s almost a hundred years old. I don’t know how much you’ll be able to do.”

He gave me that shy smile. “I’m pretty good with my hands.”

The sentence hit both of us at the same time, and I swore the night air rose five degrees with how quickly both our minds hit the gutter. The goddess really was testing me, and this desperate, horny witch was found wanting.

“I—I mean I’m good at fixing things,” he stammered, a cute flush on his cheeks.

It wasn’t a bad idea. And with the October chill cutting in, some of my tropical plants were already throwing tantrums. Besides…I wondered how much help he would really be with the spellwork.

“Okay. Help me bring my stuff from the parlor.”

“The serial killer setup? You got it.” He grinned, and I laughed.

“It’s not that bad, is it?”

“Bad? No. Intimidating? Definitely.” His lip piercing glinted in my porch lights as his tiny brethren danced around the glowing orbs.

“Like I said, efficient.”

I waited for the annoyance. You’ve always been too much. Too ambitious, too direct, too cocky. Even before the curse, I’d heard those words from all the small people around me who couldn’t handle a woman who wasn’t willing to wilt herself into a delicate flower for their comfort.

I’d followed in my brother’s footsteps. But whereas he had been patted on the back and lauded for his business acumen, I’d been labeled difficult to work with and eventually cursed to a small-town manor.

Hawk shrugged, but underneath it, I didn’t feel annoyance. Instead, something warm and clear—she is so much—but it wasn’t a complaint. It was the tone you’d use to describe a good song. Like he wanted more of me, not less.

Heat flooded my cheeks, and I turned away fast. “Parlor, Hawk.”

“After you, boss.”

Inside the parlor, the task was more daunting than I’d planned on. Years of notes and graphs, translations from a dozen different sources, meticulous records on the horticulture of rare flowers. All of it organized, but analog and not very portable.

“Ugh, I’ve been putting this off, but I guess it’s time.”

Hawk cocked one of his antennae at me, and I motioned for him to take a step back, which he obeyed immediately.

From beneath a pile of black-and-white photos of old ruins, I pulled out my silver laptop. I set it in the middle of the parlor, then whispered to the pothos growing in the corner. Its green-and-yellow leaves twirled gently as the vines grew rapidly, creating a makeshift casting circle around the laptop. I whispered a spell in Latin, then walked over and picked up a pile of notes. I let them drop over the laptop, and they floated down like oak leaves before shrinking and disappearing into the screen.

“Whoa.” Amazement shot through Hawk, and it definitely did something for my ego. “Never seen magic do that.”

“What, you thought STEM just stood for Sorcery, Tarot, Enchantments, and Magic?” I grinned, and he laughed.

The sound resonated in his chest and in mine, a foreign feeling I hadn’t had for years. It wasn’t barbed or strangling. It was easy and soft, and like a man drowning at sea, I wanted to cling to it.

No matter the cost.

Dangerous thinking, Lucia. You can’t keep him.

Without asking, he started gathering more documents and dropping them in. Together, we moved quickly, and a task that would have likely taken me all day—partially because of my tendency to get distracted by a new discovery or translation instead of the task at hand—took less than twenty minutes.

The vines pulled back and wound up the doorframe, and I grabbed my laptop, now humming as it tried not to overheat. It felt good in my hands as we walked into the crisp night air and toward the greenhouse, which seemed in greater disarray than I remembered.

Glass lay scattered everywhere, along with various shattered pots and the broken candles from the night before. The east wall, where he had crashed through, had several bent supports that were putting strain on the windows that hadn’t broken.

Hawk eyed the broken wall and the floor. “I can start on that while you work on the translation.”