Chapter 18

Alden

AURORA GETS HOME JUST AS evening is starting to creep in. When the door handle lets out a gentle squeak, I push up off the floor from where I just finished lighting a fire in the parlor hearth; I lit the one in the bedroom earlier, and Harrison has been in front of it ever since. I step toward the doorway, and there she is, her long green hair tied back at her neck so I can see a crescent moon of pale skin just above the collar of her clean brown dress.

She turns, and the moment her eyes meet mine, a smile stretches across her pink lips.

I don't think I could ever grow bored of that smile. It makes everything inside me warm.

"Welcome home," I say, then laugh when her cheeks flush. "Get everything you need?"

"Yeah. Plus a little extra." Reaching into her basket, she pulls out a little bundle of chocolate and offers it to me. "To show my appreciation," she says softly .

I'll never turn down chocolate, especially if she's the one giving it to me.

"Did you put a love spell on these?" I ask as I loosen the drawstring on the pouch and pluck a chocolate from the bundle. Holding it up in the rapidly fading light, I arch a brow.

Aurora props a hand on her hip and smirks at me. "As if I'd need a love spell. Your sister told me you're smitten ."

Now it's my turn for my cheeks to heat up.

Aurora laughs, gracing me with that beautiful twinkling sound, and then lifts onto her toes to press a kiss to my cheek. "How'd the cleaning go?"

Before I can answer her, she sweeps toward the kitchen doorway.

And freezes.

Green eyes wide and mouth open, she turns to look at me. "Alden..."

Smiling, I pop the chocolate into my mouth. "What?"

"It looks amazing ," she whispers.

I follow her into the kitchen, where she sets her basket on the kitchen table. As if only just realizing it'll wobble, she reaches out to grab the basket from falling, but her brows rise when the table doesn't budge.

"You didn't," she says, stooping to look at the table legs. With a gasp, she jumps up and whirls to face me. "Did you fix the table?"

Again, I just select another chocolate from the pouch and smile. But the next thing I know, Aurora is throwing herself at me and wrapping her arms around my waist. The impact sends me back against the doorframe, and I laugh as she presses her cheek into the fabric of my tunic .

"It's not a big deal," I say. "One of the legs was just a bit short. I used some wood I found in the shed. Hope you don't mind."

"Mind?" Aurora says, looking up at me with her arms still wrapped around my waist. "It's perfect."

I smile at her. Seems I've been doing that a lot lately. "Does that mean I'll get another one of these?" Lifting the pouch of chocolate, I give it a little shake.

"Oh, you'll get more than that." Her hand drifts down my side and across the front of my trousers. Before I can get too carried away with what she's referring to, though, she smiles. "But that'll have to wait. We have baking to do."

Flashing me a sly little smirk, she whirls away to fetch her apron from where I hung it on a hook beside the back door. After slipping it over her head, she turns to face me.

"Have you ever baked before?"

"Does reheating Lydia's cranberry crumble count?"

Her lips quirk up on one side. "No. But don't worry, I'm a good teacher. And I don't mean that in a dirty way, so don't even think about it."

"Oh, I'm thinking about it." Quickly crossing the kitchen, I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her neck. She smells like spring air, sage, and pine, and it makes me want to get lost in her.

"Alden," she says with a giggle. "How about this? For every bread loaf you help me make, I'll give you a kiss."

"Do I get to decide where the kisses go?" I ask against her neck.

"Hmm." Wiggling around to face me, she wraps her arms around my neck. "I suppose I could agree to that. "

With a smile, I quickly steal a kiss from her pink lips, then step away. "All right, little witch. Tell me what to do. I've got kisses to earn."

Turns out baking is way harder than Aurora makes it look. I keep kneading the bread too hard, crushing it down into a gooey mess, but instead of getting upset, Aurora just laughs, dusts my hands with more flour, and demonstrates yet again how I'm supposed to do it.

Meanwhile, she sifts and stirs and kneads with a level of focus that leaves a wrinkle in her brow and a pucker to her lips. She's already finished shaping and scoring five loaves by the time I finish my first one—if I can even call it a bread loaf. It looks more like a sticky lumpy mess. But she doesn't say so, just offers me a kiss before adding it to a baking sheet to await its turn in the fire.

Harrison joins us, and he sits in the kitchen window while the sun disappears and the cottage starts to glow with firelight. He didn't help me with any of the cleaning while Aurora was gone, but he did lurk in my peripherals, and I even noticed him trotting along behind me when I went to the shed to fetch wood to fix Aurora's table. Maybe he's not such an odd little bastard after all. I kinda like the guy.

When all is said and done, I've made two loaves, and Aurora's made eight. We took a brief break to drink tea and eat a few slices of cinnamon apple cake Aurora made a couple days ago. And I might have used up more kisses than I'd earned when I pressed Aurora against the kitchen wall and covered her mouth with mine .

We're both drooping with exhaustion by the time the last loaf comes out of the coals.

"I can't knead anymore," Aurora says. "I'm too tired."

"That's half done," I say, stretching my arms overhead with a yawn. "Only ten more to go."

"Let's make them tomorrow." She takes off her apron and hangs it up, then holds her arms out to me. "I don't think I can make it up the stairs."

There's barely enough time for me to register what she said before she's collapsing into my arms with a little laugh, making me carry her like a princess through the narrow kitchen doorway and up the creaking stairs to the bedroom, her hair draping across my arm like a veil. Harrison follows along behind us, and when I step into the bedroom, he hops up onto Aurora's side of the bed.

Aurora gives me a sleepy smile as I bend to place her softly on the bed. The fire I lit earlier has almost died, and while Aurora wiggles into the pillows and Harrison curls up beside her, I go toss a few more logs onto the fire.

By the time I turn around, she's already breathing deeply, a strand of green hair fluttering with every exhale. And she's so beautiful, I wish I could capture this moment in an image and hang it on my wall to see every day.

I'm not quite sure how I got here, to the point where I spend as many nights in Aurora's bed as I do in mine. But as I peel off my tunic and climb into bed beside the witch and her snow-white cat, I can't help but hope I get to stay like this for a long, long time.