Page 24 of Season of the Witch (Toil and Trouble #3)

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Tia knew she was close to sulking. “It looks funny.”

Henry glanced up from where he squatted on the snow. “We’re not finished yet.” He continued his task, gloved hands making short work of rolling snow into a ball. He hefted it with a grin. “It’s all in the details.”

Tia arched her eyebrows, doubtful. She examined their snowman, a classic structure of two balls, waiting for the third.

Then she looked at Mina’s. The inventor had lived up to her name and found a way to magically harden the snow so it could be carved into a reindeer. She was now delicately chiseling a space to add the red bauble for its nose. Kiss-ass.

“I could tell her where she could stick that bauble,” she muttered, smoothing the snow on their top ball for the head.

Her words lacked any real bite. Yeah, they were in competition, but Mina was pretty cool. She’d had Tia in stitches the couple hours they’d been in Westhollow, self-deprecating and sarcastic as they’d wandered the cute stores with a quieter Annaliese, who was still funny in her own way.

When they’d invited her, Tia had initially gone to suss out the competition, but she’d ended up having a good time. Pretty useless recon, though. She’d learned how Mina took her coffee and what season Annaliese considered herself but nothing about their game plans or skills.

Like the fact that both could fucking sculpt snow like Italian masters with stone.

“How fair is this?” she grumbled. “You have fire magic and I’m good with alchemy, both hopeless here.

We’ve got an inventor over there with freaking Rudolph, and Annaliese, a walking Grimoire who can spit out any spell.

And look, three ? I mean, come on.” She moved back as Henry placed the ball of snow in position, casting a sour look at Annaliese’s three ice elves.

“And Griffith volunteering to have tea with Lady Siddeley is such crap. That warlock’s up to something.

And if he wasn’t, at least he’d be crap at this as well. ”

“You’re going to melt our snowman.”

“Huh?”

“All that hot air.”

She rolled her eyes. “Can you focus?”

“Can you?” He waved a hand at their structure. “Ours has personality.”

The head listed to the side as he spoke.

She lifted her eyebrows. “The personality of a drunk.”

“Well, the holidays can be hard.”

She wouldn’t laugh. “You’re an idiot.”

“I’m not the one taking a snowman-building competition so seriously.”

Tia glowered, folding her arms.

“Just watch the master work.” Concentration lines dug into his forehead as he focused on his finger. A small tip of fire appeared, and with care he marked out a face.

“You’re coming along,” she said, quietly in case anyone was listening. That was, if they could hear anything besides the nonstop Christmas music blaring around the field they’d set up in an hour earlier. If she never heard “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” again, she’d die happy.

“Thanks to you.” He added two holes for eyes, the tip of his tongue caught between his teeth as he concentrated. “Maybe I’ll even be able to give Lady Siddeley her demo.”

“Let’s put that off as long as possible.”

Due to a sudden problem with one of his investments, Siddeley had been AWOL the past couple of days.

They’d wasted no time in sneaking off to a remote part of the estate, Tia casting a barrier between them and any snooping witch, and they’d got to work on Henry’s magic.

He could now call fire and conduct small displays, but he hadn’t mastered anything close to what he was capable of.

Still, the sessions had been weirdly…fun. As much as he wanted to learn, Henry wasn’t a serious student. He flirted shamelessly the whole time, using every opportunity to touch her while encouraging her to correct his position by putting her arms around him.

She’d like to say her willpower had held up, but she’d buckled like a cheap cauldron.

It was just so much like before. When she’d first shown him how to mold his fire, when he’d teased her and made her squeal, when the tension between their young bodies had made the air electric.

Then. And now.

A very loud, very insistent part of her wondered what the hell she was doing. How she could be weak enough to fall into this again.

The rest of her was deaf and blind to it—and yes, weak, sliding into familiar patterns with the shaky relief of a hot bath easing past aches and pains.

Maybe she should’ve known this would happen, that it was inevitable they’d revert back to old habits.

Things had never been settled, the past never put to bed.

She’d ignored it, drowned it, coated it with anger, but she could never cut him out completely.

And if she was honest, she knew the same was true for him. Even before this.

She’d seen it every time he’d looked at her from across their desks. Felt it in the spaces between their insults, the weight of his gaze cut with frustration and a deep and bitter longing she also struggled with.

She hated herself for it, even as her mind wandered to the same fact, again and again.

His kiss was the same.

Days later, the memory still had shivers dancing down her spine, curling her toes and sending a pulse right through her core. His taste, the grip of his hands, the feel of his strong body under her fingertips. It had felt so good, it hurt.

She wondered if everything would feel as good.

Siddeley’s voice boomed and she startled, glancing over her shoulder as he approached.

All she could see was his eyes and nose above his thick red scarf. A matching cap covered his head as he nodded in greeting. “What a fine-looking snowman, Lady Tia and Lord Henry! Very, ah, distinguished.”

Tia caught her expression before it curdled. “Thanks. We went with an homage to the classic snowman.”

Henry snorted as he finished with the face. Tia glared at him in warning.

“Capital!” Siddeley said happily, hands on his hips as he surveyed the field. “I do so love a competition. It brings out everyone’s best side. Why, look at Lady Mina’s!” He laughed. “The spitting image of Rudy’s namesake.”

The Old English sheepdog woofed from beside him, trotting forward to sniff Tia’s snowman. She didn’t even shoo him away. At this point, adding a yellow tinge could only improve it.

She bared her teeth. “Yes, Lady Mina’s is excellent. But don’t write us off yet. We’ve still got a lot of details to add.”

“That’s the spirit!” Siddeley clapped her on the shoulder, making her stagger. He moved away, Rudy following, to Chrichton and Sawyer, who’d teamed up and built a similar “classic” snowman that, somehow, still looked better than theirs.

“This is stupid,” she said to Henry. “How is making a snowman fun?”

“The problem,” Henry said, wrapping his own scarf around their monstrosity, whose head was at even more of a slant now, “is you.”

“Now you sound like your old self.”

He bent to the ground and gathered more snow. “You’re not getting your hands dirty.”

“I see myself in more of a supervisory capacity. Giving orders.”

His eyes flicked up, green against all the white. “You’ll give a man ideas, Lady Tia.” He gave her a lazy grin that shorted some circuits. “But,” he continued as she stared at him, “the task is to have fun, remember? You’re treating this as win or lose.”

“Um…because it is?”

“And it really matters that you win here?”

“Duh. Yes.”

He shook his head, laughing softly. “Why? Siddeley isn’t going to choose his investment because of this.”

“You don’t know that,” she argued.

“Any man who picks his investments based on snowman-building competitions wouldn’t be as successful as he is.”

“He’s wearing a snowman sweater,” she reminded him in a low voice. She gestured. “It sings if you press the snowman’s nose. He showed me.”

“Let the man have some fun. You could use some, too.”

“I am fun. With a capital F.”

He nodded seriously, hands smoothing over the ball he held. “Okay.”

Then, faster than she could track, his wrist flicked and the ball—the fucking snowball —exploded on her chest. It drove a breath from her, more from shock and cold than anything else.

She gaped down at her sweater, ice-blue now covered in actual ice. Muddy ice. “Okay,” she gasped, “that capital F stands for something else now. The other word being you .”

He laughed, gathering more snow.

She took a step back. “Don’t you dare.”

His eyebrows rose.

“I mean it. You don’t want to start something.”

“I really think I do.”

“Hen ry …” His name ended on a squeak as he flung another snowball at her. She threw up a hand and used telekinesis to toss it right back. In his face.

She hooted as he spluttered through the snow. “And everyone said I was the ice queen,” she taunted.

His smile was dangerous. “Game on, Celestia.”

“Bring it, Henry Charles.”

Something sparked in his eyes, distracting her in the seconds before he lobbed a snowball he’d been hiding behind his back.

* * *

“Okay,” Annaliese said, squatting back down from her scouting mission.

The witch—whom Tia would’ve pegged as not saying boo to a ghost—took a stick and marked out the battlefield as seriously as if this was war.

“The men are here, behind a trench Siddeley dug out with his magic. As far as I could see with my field glasses spell, all of them, except Lord Henry, are there.”

Tia looked up, alarmed. “Why, where is Henry?”

Annaliese leaned on her stick. “Probably trying to sneak up on us.”

“Agreed,” Mina said, dusting off her gloves. “Is he good at that?” she directed to Tia.

The Henry she’d known the past few years? The stick up his butt wouldn’t have let him.

The Henry she’d fallen for when they’d been young? AKA the Henry he currently, for all intents and purposes, was?

She nodded grimly. “We need a distraction.”

The witches looked at each other and then sent wild grins her way.

Five minutes later, Tia cursed herself for choosing heeled boots as she picked her way through the woods.