Trinket (Reverse Harem)

True Love Will Find A Way

"You've got flour in your hair."

"What?" I asked. I batted at my hair. A puff of white came with it. "Hell. I fell into some half-open flour sacks."

Lucretia gave me a knowing look. "Fell or got pushed?"

I shrugged. "The kitchen's busy and crowded. Stuff happens."

Lucretia twirled her hair around one finger. "Sounds like you got pushed. So was it one of the staff or one of the upstairs maids?"

I grimaced. "One of the maids."

"They so have it out for you."

"I don't know why," I protested. I took my hair out of its braid and shook out the flour, then patted down my clothes. Today it was flour. Better than the days when I'd been splashed with oil. I touched my face, feeling the scars on my cheek.

Lucretia drew a curl of hair over my scarred up cheek. "Come on, Theia, are you really that dense? You know why they hate you down there."

I sighed, gathered up my hair, and braided it back away from my face. "They don't hate me. Well, the upstairs maids do, but it was just a shove into some flour. It's not like that's going to hurt me. And I know it's about Tynne."

She clucked her tongue. I ignored her. She didn't understand—she didn't work in a kitchen. She worked in the local apothecary dispensing medicines mixed by the old man who hated talking to people and knew a pretty young woman with a sweet smile and graceful demeanor helped business. She also was well-raised enough to never let slip who the customers were or what they bought.

I was a kitchen maid at the most noble house in our enclave, which was an improvement over the first few kitchens I'd been in. But kitchens were kitchens, and in noble houses, there was a lot of henpecking between the upstairs servants and maids who got to lord it over the kitchen and field staff. The maids, especially, were a snooty bunch, given they were all young and beautiful and panting after the oldest son of the house, Tynne. Which was exactly what his mother had hired them to do: tempt him away from me.

The house had a huge collection of pretty maids. They didn't seem to last too long, and now they were coming from other enclaves. Tynne's mother trying to tempt her son away from me with a parade of beauties.

My insides warmed thinking of him, and the day he'd noticed me. It'd been something out of a story: I'd been plucking raspberries out of the thorny bushes on the edge of the house's estate, because nobody cared if my skin got even more scarred up. I'd been bleeding from a dozen little nicks on my hands and arms, and he'd trotted by in wolf-form with some other wolf-shifters, caught the scent of blood, and come to check on me.

He'd been so kind it still made me tingle two years later. Didn't hurt he was so handsome either. His parents didn't approve, the enclave gave us all sideways looks, but he'd made it clear: he loved me, and he wasn't giving me up even if I was the lowest born of the low-born and human. Two years on and the maids were still jealous and his parents were still salty.

But Luci was wrong: nobody in the kitchen had it out for me. Not anymore than they had had before Tynne had noticed my existence. And if Luci thought I was going to run to Tynne and bleat like a scared sheep every time someone pushed me into a flour sack or spilled some oil so I'd slip on it, she was the silly one. That sort of thing would get you shoved into a flour sack and taken for a long ride over the back of a bouncy horse one night.

"Sometimes I think you're just too naïve." Lucreita sighed. "I swear, Theia, you're a damn foundling and you seem so... pure...sometime. Like a bad thought never crosses your head."