Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Marina was developing a problem.
The problem had dark hair, a Breitling watch he never took off, and a habit of making coffee exactly the way she liked it before she was even awake enough to ask.
“Cream’s in the fridge,” Alessandro said without looking up from his laptop. He’d claimed one corner of her kitchen table as his office, surrounded by papers and legal documents that made Marina’s head spin when she glanced at them. “You were running low, so I picked some up yesterday.”
She stared at the fresh carton. “You went shopping.”
“I went to the market for eggs. The cream was incidental.”
“You remembered I was almost out.”
“You complained about it three times yesterday.” He still hadn’t looked up. “Loudly.”
Marina poured her coffee and added the cream.
This is temporary, she reminded herself. Twenty days left. He’s just being practical.
But practical didn’t explain why she was smiling.
She’d developed a routine. They both had, despite themselves.
She woke at four, shuffled to the shower, emerged to find coffee waiting.
He worked at the table while she baked, occasionally helping with tasks that didn’t require finesse.
They ate breakfast together, actual sit-down breakfast, at six-thirty, before she opened the shop.
It was disturbingly domestic.
“The Hendersons called,” she said, pulling out mixing bowls. “They need a cake for their daughter’s engagement party. Three tiers, fondant flowers, the works.”
“When?”
“Saturday.”
Alessandro’s typing paused. “That’s ambitious.”
“That’s my job.” She measured flour, each scoop level and precise. “I’ve done bigger orders on shorter notice.”
“Have you done them while magically tethered to a demanding houseguest?”
“You’re not that demanding.”
“I required you to explain the coffee maker three separate times.”
“It’s a complicated coffee maker.”
“It has two buttons.”
She laughed before she could stop herself.
His satisfaction at having caused it reached her like a warm pulse—and there he goes, she thought, the smuggest dragon on the Eastern Seaboard, taking a victory lap over a coffee-maker joke.
She fumbled her measuring cup and resented every degree of that warmth.
This was the problem. The ease of it. The way they’d slipped into a rhythm without meaning to.
The bell over the door chimed, and Marina’s stomach dropped as she recognized the purple hair and knowing grin.
“Good morning, lovebirds!”
Bea swept into the bakery like a force of nature, her arms full of crystals and sage bundles and what appeared to be a small ceremonial dagger.
“We’re not…” Marina started.
“Save it, babe. Your aura’s been pink for three days.” Bea dropped her supplies on the counter and turned to Alessandro with an appraising look. “You’re doing something right, dragon boy. She’s practically glowing.”
Alessandro looked up from his laptop with an expression of polite confusion. His genuine bewilderment at Bea’s assessment bled into Marina, and underneath it, a flicker of hope that she desperately pretended not to notice.
“Her aura is always pink,” he said carefully.
“No, her aura is usually blue. Calm. Reserved. Very ‘please don’t look at me too closely.’” Bea circled behind the counter to peer at Marina’s face. “Now it’s pink. With silver sparkles. That’s new.”
“I don’t have silver sparkles.”
“You absolutely do. Estelle noticed too. She’s been texting me every hour for updates.”
“There’s nothing to update. We’re just…” Marina gestured vaguely at Alessandro. “Coexisting.”
“Is that what we’re calling it?” Bea’s smile was insufferable. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you’re playing house with a hot dragon and pretending it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It doesn’t mean anything. This is temporary. Twenty days, and then he goes back to Manhattan and I go back to my life.”
“Uh-huh.” Bea didn’t sound convinced. “Tell that to your silver sparkles.”
Alessandro’s phone rang, saving Marina from having to respond. He stepped into the kitchen to take it, and Bea immediately pounced.
“You’re falling for him.”
“I’m magically tethered to him,” Marina said. “There’s a difference. You’d sparkle too if you couldn’t stand more than fifty feet from a man who has strong feelings about the way you store your spatulas.”
“Your aura literally sparkles when he laughs.”
“That’s the tether. It borrows his feelings and files them under mine. Don’t blame me for the filing system.”
“No, but it doesn’t lie either.” Bea’s expression softened. “Marina. It’s okay to like him. You’re allowed to have feelings.”
“He’s arrogant. He thinks he’s better than everyone. He complained about my coffee maker for fifteen minutes yesterday.”
“And yet you’re blushing.”
Marina turned back to her mixing bowls with more force than necessary. “I’m not having this conversation.”
“You never do.” Bea sighed. “But eventually, babe, you’re going to have to admit that the grumpy dragon has gotten under your skin. And when that happens, I’ll be here with wine and ‘I told you so.’”
The morning rush brought the usual crowd: Mrs. Whitmore for her morning scone, Mr. Callahan for coffee and gossip, a steady stream of locals who’d known Marina since childhood.
Alessandro had retreated to his corner, trying valiantly to maintain his NYC work schedule despite constant interruptions.
A nixie asked him about stock market predictions.
A brownie wanted to know if dragons really slept on gold.
A pair of twin witches debated whether dragon fire could be used in potion-making while he sat right there, increasingly tense.
Frustration radiated from him, his genuine effort to keep it contained visible in every careful nod. He’d learned from the Mrs. Thornberry incident. He nodded politely, answered briefly, didn’t snap at anyone.
Progress.
Around ten, the bell chimed and a small werewolf pup barreled through the door, followed by his exhausted-looking mother.
“Mrs. Sullivan!” Marina called, then stopped. The little boy, Jamie, she remembered, all of five years old, had frozen in the doorway. His eyes were fixed on Alessandro with an expression of pure terror.
“Mama,” he whispered, too loud to be a whisper. “There’s a dragon.”
His mother looked mortified. “Jamie, we talked about this. Dragons are people too…”
“But he’s so BIG.” Jamie pressed against his mother’s legs, still staring. “He probably eats little kids.”
Alessandro’s discomfort prickled at the back of her neck, then, surprisingly, genuine distress at having frightened a child. He set down his laptop and turned slowly.
“I don’t eat children,” he said, his voice carefully modulated to something he probably thought was reassuring. It came out sounding like a hostage negotiator, but Marina appreciated the effort. “Too stringy.”
Jamie’s eyes went even wider. His mother looked like she wanted to sink into the floor.
“That was a joke,” Alessandro added quickly. “I don’t eat anyone. I eat… pastries. Like everyone else here.”
The little boy peered at him suspiciously. “You eat cookies?”
“Sometimes.”
“What’s your favorite?”
Alessandro glanced at Marina, clearly out of his depth. His silent plea was written all over his face, and she bit back a smile.
“He likes the chocolate ones with sea salt,” she offered.
“Those are MY favorite!” Jamie’s fear transformed instantly into delight. “Mama, the dragon likes MY cookies!”
“Imagine that,” his mother said dryly.
Jamie released his mother’s legs and took a tentative step toward Alessandro. “Can you breathe fire?”
“I can.”
“Can you show me?”
“I probably shouldn’t…”
“Please? Just a little fire? I’ll be really careful, I promise.”
Alessandro looked at Marina again. She shrugged; her shop, but his choice.
Alessandro exhaled a tiny flame, slow and deliberate, the way someone might tip a single drop from a full pitcher. It flickered above his palm, no bigger than a candle’s: golden and warm and not remotely threatening.
Jamie’s face lit up brighter than the flame. “COOL!”
“It’s not cool. It’s approximately 800 degrees…”
“That’s the COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN!”
By the time Jamie and his mother left (with extra cookies, on the house, plus a small bag of dragon-shaped shortbreads that Marina had made for a birthday order and now couldn’t possibly sell), the little werewolf had decided that Alessandro was his new favorite person.
He’d made Alessandro promise to show him “more fire stuff” next time, had asked approximately forty-three questions about dragon scales (Alessandro didn’t have scales in human form, but Jamie refused to accept this), and had declared that he wanted to be a dragon when he grew up.
“You can’t become a dragon,” Alessandro had said, with the patient tone of someone who’d explained this multiple times. “It’s a hereditary condition.”
“Then I’ll be a werewolf who’s FRIENDS with a dragon! That’s almost as good!” Jamie had high-fived Alessandro’s kneecap, the highest point he could reach, and bounded out the door still chattering about fire and scales and how his friends were going to be SO jealous.
Marina watched Alessandro watch Jamie leave. Something soft and surprised surfaced in his expression, pleasure he didn’t quite know what to do with.
“You did well.”
“I terrified him initially.”
“And then you showed him fire and made a friend for life.” She handed him a chocolate sea salt cookie. “Jamie’s going to tell everyone at school about his dragon friend. You’re going to be the most popular supernatural in the under-eight crowd.”
He took the cookie. “It was nothing.”
The special order from the Hendersons required a recipe Marina hadn’t made in two years.
She stood in front of her grandmother’s recipe book, hesitating. It had been sitting on the shelf since the funeral, gathering dust alongside Nana’s other things: the pearl earrings, the embroidered apron, the collection of supernatural romance novels she’d thought Marina didn’t know about.
Opening it felt like visiting a grave.
“What’s wrong?”
Alessandro appeared in the kitchen doorway, drawn by whatever shift he’d sensed in her. Marina’s hand rested on the book’s leather cover, trembling slightly.
“I need a recipe. The Hendersons want my grandmother’s lemon cake, the one she was famous for.” She swallowed. “I haven’t opened this since she died.”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer advice or solutions. He just stood there, present and patient, while she worked up the courage to open the book.
The smell hit her first. Old paper and dried lavender and something that was just Nana: flour and sugar and years of love baked into every page. Marina’s eyes blurred.
“She used to let me help,” she said, her voice thick. “When I was little. She’d stand me on a stool and let me stir the batter. Always said I had a baker’s hands.”
“You do.”
She looked up. Alessandro was watching her with an intensity that made her pulse quicken.
“She would have liked you,” Marina said, and was surprised to find she meant it. “She would have called you ‘that stubborn dragon boy’ and tried to fatten you up and told you off for not sleeping enough.”
“She sounds like Bea.”
“Bea learned from the best.” Marina turned a page, finding the lemon cake recipe in Nana’s familiar handwriting. “I miss her every day. It’s been two years, and I still wake up sometimes expecting to hear her singing in the kitchen.”
“That doesn’t go away.” He leaned against the doorframe. “The missing. It just becomes… part of you. Like a scar you learn to carry.”
She looked at him, really looked, and saw his own losses reflected back. His grandfather. His family’s curse. All the years spent searching for answers alone.
“Thank you,” she said. “For listening.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t try to fix it. That’s something.”
He held her gaze for a moment longer than necessary. A pulse of tenderness reached her, tentative and cautious and very, very dangerous.
Then he cleared his throat. “Would you teach me to make the lemon cake? If you need extra hands.”
She shouldn’t say yes. Getting closer was a terrible idea. The bond was temporary. This was all temporary.
“Get the butter from the fridge,” she said. “And prepare to fail spectacularly at zesting.”
Three hours later, the kitchen was covered in flour and Alessandro’s attempt at rolling fondant had produced something that looked less like cake decoration and more like abstract art.
“This is impossible,” he announced, staring at his latest failure. “The recipe says ‘roll evenly.’ I’ve rolled evenly. The fondant disagrees.”
Marina bit her lip, trying not to laugh. His forearms were dusted with powdered sugar, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, and there was a streak of lemon zest in his hair that he didn’t seem to have noticed.
“You’re putting too much pressure on the edges. Here…” She reached over to adjust his grip on the rolling pin, and her fingers brushed his wrist.
The bond flared.
She was hyperconscious of the heat radiating from his skin, the flex of muscle beneath her fingers, the catch in his breath.
She dropped her hand. “Like that.”
“Like that,” he repeated, not quite looking at her.
He rolled the fondant. It came out lopsided.
Marina laughed—really laughed, the kind that made her eyes water and her stomach ache. She couldn’t help it. His expression of offended dignity, the powdered sugar, the three hours of increasingly frustrated attempts at baking…
His attraction spiked through the bond—her stomach flipped and her skin went warm in places that had nothing to do with the oven.
She felt him feel her notice.
Neither of them moved.
“The fondant,” she managed, her voice unsteady. “It’s fine. We can fix it.”
“Of course we can.” He didn’t look away. “It’s just cake.”
But they both knew it wasn’t just cake. Not anymore.
That night, Marina lay awake in her bed, staring at the ceiling.
The wall between her bedroom and the living room was thin. She could hear Alessandro shift on the couch, his breathing too uneven for sleep.
His awareness pressed against hers: the same restless, electric tension she was trying to ignore. They were both awake. Both knowing the other was awake. Both pretending otherwise.
Nineteen days, she thought. Nineteen more days, and this ends.
But the thought didn’t bring relief anymore. It brought dread.
On the other side of the wall, she felt Alessandro think the same thing.
The man had picked up half-and-half on his way back from the market without being asked. Nineteen days, and she was supposed to unlearn that.
God help her.