Page 11 of A Heart of Winter (Fairy Tale Retellings #4)

Language Lessons

I bought both of the blankets.

What? I could take the rose and sage one home with me when I left, and leave the red and black for Morwenna. It was the least I could do, since she’d given me the run of her cabin for as long as I needed.

I hadn’t had another incident freezing random things, so maybe it was getting better.

Of course, no sooner had I thought the words than it started snowing. It wasn’t too bad, though. Maybe it was just flurries. Nothing to worry about.

It would be fine.

I was biting my lip, decidedly staring at the ground before me instead of the falling snow, when I almost ran into a man’s back.

I jerked away, not having noticed him standing there in the middle of the sidewalk as he droned something about—“always have an open office for you if you want to come home, you know.”

Glancing ahead of him, I realized he wasn’t on the phone, but talking to an actual person. To Kai. Who was watching me over his shoulder, the usual twinkle in his eye.

Of course he’d seen me almost run into a person because I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.

“Good morning, Johannes,” he said to me, interrupting the man who was—oh, who was telling him they had an office for him. Someone else who wanted him to move to Minnesota.

I glanced over at the man, who was peering at me over a set of old fashioned pince-nez glasses, and looked like some strange combination of Father Christmas and Ebenezer Scrooge.

A large, jolly faced man with a red nose, dressed in all black expensive-looking clothing.

Maybe even hand tailored. A lawyer for Minnesota if ever there had been one, I thought.

I wondered if his overcoat was made of local wool, like my blankets.

“Good morning, Kai,” I answered. “How did your meeting go?”

“Perfectly, thank you. They’re coming out next week to take the things into Minneapolis for auction.

” There was some sadness in his tone, but that was no surprise.

As much as he didn’t need his parents furniture, letting go of things with memories attached was always painful.

He shook off the expression and turned back to the man.

“Mr. Jones, this is Johannes Lind. He’s staying up at the old Malone property.

Apparently it didn’t just go to the government after he passed, or maybe they sold it, and a friend of his owns it. ”

The man looked me over like I was a lab specimen, and offered a hesitant nod.

“Mr. Lind.” He looked back to Kai, an expression that questioned whether I really belonged—on the sidewalk?

In town at all? I couldn’t have said. It seemed that Gerda’s mother wasn’t alone in her wish for Kai to return and be a small town lawyer, though.

Kai didn’t even notice the look, his eyes only on me. He held out a hand to me. “Did you do the shopping you wanted to?”

“I did,” I agreed, holding up my bag even as I took his offered hand with my free one. “Two wool blankets, just what the doctor ordered for another snowy night.”

The man watched as we held hands, right there in the middle of the street, one eyebrow lifted in clear disapproval, whether of men dating each other or of me in particular, I couldn’t have said.

Kai laughed, the sound a little awkward and fake, but still beautiful.

“I don’t know about the doctor. I mean, I suppose technically I have a doctorate, but it hardly counts when it’s in law.

” He pulled me in toward him, wrapping the arm around my waist instead of just holding my hand.

“Now, Johannes and I are off to lunch at the Lark, if you’ll excuse us, Mr. Jones.

Thank you again for the kindness, it’s appreciated, but I don’t plan to stay in Minnesota at the moment.

I’m only here long enough to get Mom and Dad’s affairs finished. ”

And with that, he turned us and led me down the street.

“Lunch at the Lark?” I asked, when I was sure we were out of earshot.

He winced. “Sorry. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, it was a spur of the moment thing. Mr. Jones is . . . a lot. Lunch plans at the closest thing we have to local fine dining seemed like a good excuse to get away.”

“He wants you to stay in town. Like Gerda’s mother.” I swallowed hard and tried not to picture the older woman’s red face and screeching voice. “I, um, ran into her at the shop.”

He cringed and turned to look at me. “Awful?”

“She was, a little, yes. Gerda is something else, though. I like her.”

At that, his face lit up. “Isn’t she? She’s been talking about coming down to stay with me in San Diego, trying to start a life there.

She always wanted out of Minnesota, she just didn’t have a specific plan.

She didn’t fit well in the formal education system, and—I know, it sounds bad, but she’s really amazing.

She just hasn’t figured out what to do with herself yet.

It’s not like she hasn’t been looking?—”

“You don’t have to defend her. I completely understand. I have . . . I have a friend she should talk to. My own Gerda, so to speak. I think they’d get along, and Morwenna might offer her a path she’d like.” I leaned into him, trying to be comforting without saying outright what I was thinking.

It wasn’t uncommon for particularly magical people to feel out of place in society. They knew there was something they should be doing. Knew they had a purpose. It simply didn’t fit into any of the boxes they’d been offered, so society as a whole felt wrong.

“Morwenna, the one who owns the cabin?”

“The one and only.” We arrived at the restaurant, which looked a little like a repurposed family home, and the inside carried that impression through, with a foyer where the host stand was, and the dining area split into a bunch of smaller rooms with a handful of tables each.

It was cozy, and the menu was mostly German food, interestingly enough. Fortunately, I was right at home with that, and it seemed that Kai was as well, ordering rouladen with dumplings as though he spoke German. Hells, maybe he did.

When he saw how I was looking at him after the waiter left us, he ducked his head.

“You grow up in the Midwest, it doesn’t matter how Japanese your family is, you learn German food.

For community potlucks and restaurants if nothing else, but I took the language in high school too. Then Spanish in college.”

“Are you telling me you speak four languages?” I blinked at the very thought. Most people I knew were lucky to manage with one, in this day and age. I still technically spoke a handful, but I’d had hundreds of years to learn them.

And honestly, my Swedish was probably mostly gone, since I hadn’t lived there in hundreds of years. I was better with Latin and Gaelic, which weren’t that helpful in the modern world, unless reading ancient magical texts was the goal.

He waggled his hand back and forth in the air. “High school language classes aren’t exactly thorough. I might be able to ask where the restroom is if I visited Germany, but that’s probably about it.”

I shrugged and waved off his embarrassment. “I was born in Sweden, and I’d probably be the same there. Regular use is important for language skills.”

We spent the rest of lunch trying out our dubious Swedish and German on each other, to the point that the owner of the restaurant came out to deliver our dessert and joked to him that his German wasn’t so bad, if he was going to be in grade school in the coming year.

It was that moment that I saw him.

Saw who Kai Mori really, truly was.

“Maybe they’d let me start over,” he said to her, his smile wide and genuine. “I could shove myself into one of those tiny little kid desks and start from kindergarten. They have kindergarten in Germany?”

“They call it something else, but all children have to start somewhere,” she agreed. “At least then you wouldn’t be a lawyer.”

And he laughed.

No hesitation, no puffed up pride, no annoyance at his career being mocked. Just sheer joy, head thrown back and shoulders shaking with it.

Oh yes. I could definitely date the hell out of this man, even if I had to fly across the country constantly to do it.