“You avoid me at every turn.”
She sighs and pulls out of my grasp. I let her go but feel the loss immediately.
“I’ve seen you since I was a child.” She glances my way again. “I even knew your name. It confused and scared the hell out of me. And then, when Miss Sophia invited me to the Samhain ritual when I was seventeen and I saw you standing in that circle under the moon…it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was terrified. I recognized you, and I didn’t know what to think.”
“Why didn’t you ask?” I brush a lock of her hair off her cheek.
“When it first started, I once tried to ask my mother about it, and she beat me with a wooden spoon until I had bloody welts on the backs of my legs.”
The rage I feel is swift and encompassing.
“So I’ve been careful with my questions. Until I met Miss Sophia, who is always happy to answer them.”
“I’m happy to answer them, too,” I reply softly. “Anytime.”
“Good. Because I have a feeling I’m going to have a lot of them. But the first one is pretty simple.”
“Okay.”
“Do you feel like lasagna for dinner?”
Chapter Four
Millie
Lucien is sitting at my kitchen island, and I’m bustling about, making us both dinner. I never thought I’d see the day.
Also, the longer I’m near him, the more I feel the chemistry between us. I know we’ve known each other over the course of many lifetimes, but I wonder if we were lovers in those lives, as well?
If the way he looks at me is anything to go by, or how it feels when he touches me, I’d say it’s likely.
He makes me damn nervous. Which means, I can’t stop talking.
“Esme asked for the entire week of Halloween off today,” I say as I brown the meat in a skillet and add in some herbs and spices, along with a little something extra here and there. The noodles are already in the boiling water. “I couldn’t believe it. The whole week, as if I don’t have a festival and our coven ritual that week. Which she should also be at. When I asked her why she needed the whole week off, she said it’s because she wants to take the week for spiritual cleansing.”
I shake my head as I dump jars of marinara into the skillet and give it a good stir.
“I would usually make my own marinara, but I’m hungry, and that’s a two-day process.”
“This smells fantastic,” Lucien assures me. “Can you tell Esme no?”
“I did tell her no,” I reply as I get to work building the lasagna in a pan. “I’m giving her a couple of days off that week, but I couldn’t give her the whole week. She wasn’t thrilled, but she said she understood.”
“She’s young,” Lucien says.
“She’s twenty-five,” I disagree. “She’s the age I was when I opened that shop. She’s a grown woman, and she knows better.”
“You’re right,” he replies with a nod. “Maybe she just seems younger to me. But you’re right. Aside from that, how are things going at the café?”
“Really well,” I reply as I sprinkle something extra-special over the lasagna’s top layer before popping it into the oven. “We’re consistently busy. I extended our hours on the weekends, so rather than closing at three in the afternoon, we’re staying open until six. But Sunday through Thursday, we’re still closing at three.”
“What was that you just sprinkled on?” he asks. “Eye of newt?”
I roll my eyes and laugh as I set the pan in the hot oven. “We don’t use eye of newt anymore, Lucien. Well, not much anyway.”
He raises a brow, which only makes me laugh. But now that I don’t have anything to keep my hands busy with over the next forty-five minutes, I’m nervous all over again.
Bread! I can get the bread ready for the oven.
I reach for a knife and keep talking.
“How old were you when you knew you were a kitchen witch?” he asks before I can say anything else.
“I didn’t know I was a witch at all until I met Miss Sophia,” I reply. “Not really, anyway. I had a hunch. All I knew for sure when I was young was that I could read spirits, I saw things, and I had to learn how to build defenses around my mind so I didn’t climb into random people’s psyches. Reading minds is exhausting for one, and the thoughts that people have are disturbing. Not to mention, my father tormented me for over a decade after he died, and I had to escape him.”
Lucien’s blue eyes narrow on me. “How did he taunt you?”
“He stayed in that horrible house with us,” I continue. “He tormented all of us, not just me. He liked to spook us, touch us. He was a horrible man. Mama was just as bad, but she was alive, so we had it coming at us from both sides.”
“When did you leave?” he asks.
“Brielle turned eighteen and filed for custody of us. Mama didn’t fight it, so we went to live with Bri. I was sixteen, and Daphne was fourteen.”
“That’s a long time to live in a house like that,” Lucien replies. His jaw is clenched, and his hand is balled into a fist on the countertop.
“It felt like an eternity,” I murmur and then set the knife aside so I can pace the kitchen as I talk. “Once we moved out, and I could freely talk with others and learn, I started to do some research. My grandmother had given me her grimoire before she died, and I was so diligent at keeping it hidden from Mama and only reading it at night after she’d gone to bed.
“But one night, she found me reading it and took it away. I didn’t get it back until last year. But I’d read enough to know that I gravitated to the recipes. I loved to cook, even then, and it’s a good thing I did because if I hadn’t, my sisters and I would have starved. Mama didn’t care enough about us to feed us much.”
“Lovely woman,” he says with a sigh.
“Actually, after everything that happened last year, I wonder if Horace didn’t put a spell on her. She was certainly possessed by something, but we didn’t know until last year. She’s been at the Psychiatric Pavilion here in New Orleans ever since. She has good days and bad ones, but it’s better than living in that horrible house in the bayou.”
I shake my head, thinking of my mother.
“Anyway, I’d written down many of the recipes from memory and went searching for a coven as soon as I could. That’s when I found Miss Sophia. It was as if it was always meant to be.”
“Because it was,” he replies with a soft smile. “And when I saw you walk into our circle during that Samhain ritual you spoke of earlier, it was as if the final piece of a puzzle snapped into place. I knew you immediately. But it didn’t scare me at all.”
“Lucky,” I murmur. “I’ve been scared literally all of my life, Lucien. It’s exhausting.”
“I hate that for you.”
I don’t know what to say to that, so I reach for the knife and continue slicing the bread. Suddenly, Lucien covers my hand with his.
“Why are you so nervous around me, Millicent?”
I frown, ready to deny the statement, but then I change my mind.