Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Knots & Thorns

"My Lord," Cook stammered. "What are you doing down here?"

"I can't come down to my own kitchen?" Even among the noise and heat of the kitchen Tynne's voice carried.

I peeked around the wall. What was Tynne doing down in the kitchens? My hands froze, finger-deep in sticky dough. A few of my fellow dough-maids shot me looks.

"It's just not the usual, young lord," Cook said, then he shrugged and gestured to the kitchens with his ladle. "I can imagine why you're here, though. She's over there."

"Keep a civil tongue in your head," Tynne growled. Some of the kitchen staff quailed, and Cook went as pale as the squishy dough under my fingers.

Tynne didn't wait for anyone to reply and instead strode over to my table. His hair had just been cut, cropped close, and he was wearing human-form hunting attire. But his eyes were the glossy, molten amber of the strongest wolf shifters, and they warmed when he smiled at me. There was a possessive glint in them that always made me tingle. He was dangerous... but not to me.

He looped one big arm around my waist and practically scooped me off my feet. I squeaked. He leaned close. "Come outside."

"Tynne, I'm working," I whispered, holding my doughy-fingers up and away from his nice clean shirt. I glanced around the kitchen, blushing as hot as if I'd been working the oil pot.

"Come on." He hefted me against his hip and carried me out the back door of the kitchen into the small cobblestone square lined with all of Cook's and the Gardenerer's carefully grown herbs.

"Tynne!" I hissed. "I'm working! What's going on? Put me down!"

He deposited me on the ground. I flicked my hands. Ug, I was covered in dough. I toweled my fingers off one by one on my battered, floury apron. Some of the kitchen crew watched us from the door. I tried to ignore them. After being in the stifling kitchen all day, the summer air felt amazing.

"I had to sneak down into the kitchens," Tynne told me. "So Mother wouldn't catch me. She'll never look for me there."

"It'll get back to her that you were down there," I said.

He smirked. "She can yell at me then."

He grabbed one of my hands as soon as it was clean and tugged me deeper into the garden. We weren't supposed to be out here. The head gardener would have a snit. The herbs and delicate fruits that grew out here were well... worth more than I was, easily. Not much grew in the contaminated soil of the world, and the head gardener was very careful to source and find soil that was as clean and pure as possible for the herbs, and to bring in the best water.

Water was hard to come by. It almost never rained, and the water that came up out of the ground was fouled, and sometimes undrinkable, even for plants and pigs. The herbs were delicate, so to preserve their flavor, the gardeners brought in water from a pond miles outside the enclave that was a little more pure than the local water supplies.

"Where are we going?" I asked as he kept pushing deeper into the garden until we got to the old iron gate that was twisted with a raspberry brambles. Raspberries were about the only berry that grew around here, and they grew like weeds. The obnoxious briars covered the other side of the wall and crawled over top of it, and twisted through the gate. It did a pretty good job deterring wandering tomcats of all species. Back here out in this overgrown corner nobody could see us.

"Just here," he said, gripping both of my wrists in his hands and tugging me against his strong body. "It's not where we met, but it's pretty close, isn't it?"

"Not even," I laughed. We'd met out beyond the enclave where there was a tumble of wild raspberry bushes taller than I was. I'd been sent out to pluck berries and had to go deep into the brambles to get what the crows hadn't gotten. This slightly tame tumble that the gardener kept butchered back with generous applications of his machete was no comparison.