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“I don’t have curves.”

“I’ve found plenty of them,” I flirt. “Not that I’m complaining about your current outfit, but I’ve been eager to see your tush in those cruel new leggings.” While Juniper shakes her head in amusement, my nose twitches in a belated reaction to the overdose of butter and spices wafting from the kitchen. If it weren’t so difficult to concentrate on more than one thing at a time around her, I would have noticed the aroma while shushing the kettle. “What’s that smell?”

“Apple pie.”

“You dared to bake without me?”

“It’s for Cypress.”

That’s…nice of her. I quirk an eyebrow, a fresh batch of warmth sloshing through my stomach. “Such plentiful kindness. What’s the merry occasion?”

She hesitates, her attention flicking to Cypress’s painting behind me. Some remote, confidential emotion softens her features. She and my best friend have gotten chummy, but that look goes beyond, as if she knows something I don’t. Something fragile—a word I’d never associate with Cypress.

In fact, the look resembles empathy. How peculiar.

Why do I get the feeling she’ll clam up if I ask more?

Case in point, she just answers, “It’s comfort food.”

Ah. I’d expected it was something like that. Cypress has recovered from his battle wound, but the pastry must be a sympathetic gesture. Very human, indeed.

I sniff the air. “You used too much cinnamon.”

Her eyes thin, her chin jutting like a stubborn fist. “I have not.”

“Did you add—”

“Lemon? Yes.” Juniper scoots into the cushions, making room as if there weren’t miles of couch leftover. She cradles the book to her chest like a secret while curling her limbs beneath her. It’s such an endearing, fetching pose. “I’ve been thinking,” she begins.

“Indeed?” I recline across from the huntress. “Let’s hear it.”

She rethinks her posture, discards the notebook on the table, and sweeps a throw blanket over her lap. Then she rests her feet on my hooves and tucks a lock of hair behind one of those cute ears.

It isn’t like her to fidget. Is this about her father? She and Lark are planning to see him, and I know she’s antsy over that. The closer that reunion looms, the more shelves and cupboards she reorganizes. She’d started with the bookcase, her default coping mechanism.

I think my hunch is right, albeit with a twist. When she still doesn’t answer, I lean forward, cup her knee, and croon, “Yesssss?”

Junipers quits twiddling and lifts her chin as though she’s about to negotiate a pact. “I want you to come with me.”

I blink. “What?”

“In The Seeds that Give, you said you wished to see where I come from. After Lark and I visit our papa alone, I want you to join me for the next trip. I want you to meet my father, and I want him to meet you.”

I…don’t know what to say. My throat does something rickety, fear and awkwardness contorting there. She wants her father to meet me. She wants to show me her home. Every corrupt decision and foible I’ve ever been responsible for flashes before my eyes like an omnibus of monster stories and cautionary folktales. Her father will rip my fucking head off. He’ll despise the shit out of me, which will hurt Juniper.

He’ll say what I’ve known since I met her. She’s too perfect for me. She deserves better. She deserves a human with human legs and a human heart, not a riffraff Fae who’s done more damage than not.

Juniper interprets my silence and whatever expression warps my face, and she gives me a terse look. “Don’t you dare, Puck. He knows me better than that, and so do you.”

“Bloody true,” I remark in a daze.

Fables know why, but Juniper will disagree with her father about me. She knows her own mind and owns it fully, with grit and tenacity. It’s one of the many traits that had initially attracted me to her.

I remember her standing in the rain, asking me to translate three pivotal mortal words into Faeish, the request squeezing my heart and then releasing it, letting the blood rush back in. I’d just about passed out from the impact.

This huntress knows the good and bad of me, the shards of redemption and surplus of viciousness. Yet she’s still here.

My heart clenches, an extraordinary sensation dominating that pounding slab of arteries and tissue. I’ve felt this every day since Juniper stepped into this forest, except I hadn’t been able to name it until our kiss in the rain, until I’d spoken to her in my language.