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Chapter 5
“What do you think?” I asked, holding out a spoonful of a stew I’d prepared and had bubbling over the hearth.
Shadow leaned in and opened his mouth.
Having him so close was testing my limits but was intoxicating at the same time. I could barely think past his jaw or those prominent cheekbones. What was he doing to me? Hands shaking, I almost dropped the spoon’s contents all over his chin. Burning him wouldn’t help any with the questionable first impression I’d made on him.
He sipped my concoction, and his face scrunched up. “Panther Goddess! What is in that? Stinging nettle with wild herbs?”
Okay. So the combination was bitter. But it was a great first effort from me. Still, I deflated like a sail that had lost all its wind. My cheeks blazed hotter than a bonfire.
“It’s disgusting, isn’t it?” I tossed the spoon back into the pot, and a little mixture splashed into the hearth and hissed. “I warned you.”
Sea God! Cooking did not live in my blood the way farming, planting saplings, watering, and nurturing trees did.
“You didn’t tell me you werethisterrible.” His voice held a soft and joking edge as he picked up a sack of potatoes and tossed it onto the counter.
Smiling, I nudged him with my elbow, and then immediately wondered what had gotten into me. I was surprised at how comfortable I felt around him. At how he distracted me from my past.
“Don’t give up your day job, whatever that is, mysterious beauty.” He kept using that nickname instead of the one I’d given.
With a smile that stole my breath, he took my hand, as if trying to console me. A spark lit in my breast and circled inside my chest. Green flared in his eyes for a second, as if he felt it, too. My attraction to this stranger—and his touch—frightened me, and I shrank away. Immediately, I regretted the loss of his touch. It was warm, soothing, and strangely familiar.
“Was I too forward?” Concern streaked his golden forehead.
“No,” I said, picking at the imaginary dirt underneath my fingernails, struggling to calm my wildly beating heart. My throat froze at the idea of telling him why I couldn’t handle his touch, but that I wanted to feel it again.
Shadow picked up a carrot and sliced it. “We had better start again.”
As I watched him, the old Snow imagined ways to get closer to him, for our hands to brush. By the time I shook out of her daydream, he’d chopped several carrots and had moved on to a potato. How lucky she was to not be weighed down by all the memories haunting me.
“How many people do you employ?” I asked him, taking another knife to cut up an onion.
“Around fifty of the local villagers,” he said, chopping up his second potato. “Twenty from farther away who stay here during the week and travel home on the weekends to spend time with their families.”
Weekends. Wow. Few employers granted their workers time off. Back in Tritonia, everyone had wanted to work for my father because he’d granted all his employees the weekends off to visit family, as well as two weeks’ paid leave per year during winter solstice. From this small detail, I could tell Shadow and his father were just as generous as my father had been.
“Do you cook for everyone?” I asked him, fighting the onion burn in my eyes and wiping away the tears.
“No.” He left the counter to move three sacks of flour from the pantry to the bench behind us.
Surreptitiously, I watched his muscles flex with the effort of lifting the heavy bags. Sea God, he was so strong. Each sack must have weighed at least forty pounds.
“I sent the cook home,” he explained. “Her daughter was ill.”
I couldn’t keep the smile from my face. From what little I’d gleaned of him already, Shadow seemed like an extremely caring man who valued family, much like my father had done. It made me wonder if he had a family of his own. Judging by his earlier question about being too forward by grabbing my hand, he probably had no wife or children. The old Snow hoped not.
Something deep inside me yearned to know this man better too. Each time I lied to him, it killed me inside, and I was bursting to tell him everything. For him to honor his promise to protect me.
By late afternoon, all the vegetables had been cooked in the stew, along with some chicken.
The front door rattled as it slammed closed, and I glanced up. One of the workers poked his head in the kitchen.
“Welcome, Prithni,” Shadow said, waving the man inside before shoving another tray of bread into the mudbrick oven.
The man took off his hat to wipe sweat from his forehead. “We reached the target early today, boss. We hit fifty pounds over.”
“Perfect,” said Shadow, using a rod with a hood on the end to drag a baked loaf from the oven.
