Prologue
The first skirmish happened over a sugar packet. Not a dramatic, life-altering event, but then, nothing truly dramatic ever happened between Anya Bellwether and Caleb Thorne. Their battles were always fought on the home front, in the trenches of domesticity, over the most ridiculously mundane things.
Anya, all of twenty-four, with a riot of copper curls and an air of perpetual indignation, had snagged the last sugar packet for her emergency triple espresso. Caleb, twenty-six and radiating a severe, unyielding aura even at seven in the morning, had been moments too late, spoon poised over his own monstrously black coffee.
"Seriously, Anya?" His voice, deep and gravelly even then, had been laced with a familiar exasperation. "Did you actually need both?"
Anya had merely arched a perfectly sculpted brow, a defiant glint in her hazel eyes. "It's a free country, Caleb. And this is my kitchen." Technically, it was her mother’s kitchen, but Anya was operating under squatter's rights for the summer.
He'd sighed, a long-suffering sound that could curdle milk. "Of course. Anything to inconvenience someone else."
That was eight years ago, and little had changed. Except maybe the inconvenient truth that every spat, every eye-roll, every heated glance across a crowded room, only made the air between them thick with something far more volatile than mere annoyance. Something that prickled on her skin and made his jaw clench in a way that Anya was beginning to find, disturbingly, intriguing.
Their arguments were the soundtrack to family gatherings, the background static to Liam’s oblivious life. And Eleanor Bellwether, Anya’s mother, would simply sip her tea, a knowing, almost mischievous smile playing on her lips. She understood the language of these two, a dialect of exasperation and unspoken longing that only a truly smart mother could decipher.
Yes, a sugar packet. A small, insignificant spark. But sometimes, that’s all it takes to ignite a wildfire.
