Bake This! (A 300 Moons Novella) Read Online Free PDF

lights went on to reveal the shop.
    Tess forced herself to walk right past the floor-to-ceiling shelves with hundreds of types of jellies and jams without poring over the handwritten labels. She didn’t gaze at the penny candies in their glass jars, or the huge wooden crates of fresh produce. She turned her head to avoid taking in the homey little garden signs with sayings like “Trespassers Will be Composted” and “A Dirty Hoe is a Happy Hoe.”
    No, today she was all about business. Get in, make pies, get out.
    “Ready for some baking, huh?” Will asked.
    “I’d better be,” she replied.
    “We can do this. It’ll be a little intense, but it’ll be fun,” he told her, flipping the switch that lit the stairwell to the basement.
    If the upstairs smelled good, it was nothing compared to the bakery.
    “First thing we want to do is pre-heat the oven,” he said, heading in that direction. “Grab eight pies out of the fridge to get up to room temp.”
    Tess opened the commercial refrigerator and began placing pies on the counter. There were exactly eight of them. So at least they could begin with a full oven. How long could it possibly take to bake pies? If it was half an hour they would have all two hundred done in thirteen hours if they stayed all day.
    “How long do they need to bake?” she asked.
    “An hour, or until they’re golden brown, I’d say not more than an hour and ten minutes,” Will replied, taking off his flannel.
    Oh, boy.
    Well, it wasn’t like she had anywhere better to be.
    The journey of one hundred miles begins with a single step.
    “Let’s chop some apples,” Will offered.
    She nodded and went over to the big butcher block counter and grabbed a knife while Will carried over a crate of apples.
    His muscles rippled. She tried not to stare. Goodness, he was strong.
    “So what do you do when you’re not baking pies?” Tess asked.
    “I teach karate to little kids,” he said with a smile. “And I wait tables.”
    “So one job for love and one for money?” she offered.
    He nodded.
    “Something like that, I guess. How about you?”
    Oh, I’m a witch. I used to live off the land on top of a mountain in Appalachia.
    “I’m um, still figuring that out,” Tess said.
    It was true. Now that the portal in her old town, Copper Creek, no longer required a witch to watch over it, she was basically useless.
    She was only visiting Hedda and her husband’s family at Harkness Farms for the holidays.
    Tess and her other two sisters, Anna and Elise, had moved to small town together. One without a shifter or magical population - at least not that they knew of. They were trying to start normal lives for themselves.
    Anna had practically fallen into a job working at a small independent book store. She always had her nose in a book anyway, and the owner had taken a liking to her uncanny ability to match the customer to the right book. Though it was hardly a high paying job, Anna was as happy as if she had been elected president, and they lived so simply she didn’t want for more.
    Elise ended up working around the corner at a florist’s shop. She swore she didn’t use her plant and nature magic on the job, but the women who ran the place couldn’t get over how good she was at coaxing the flowers into a longer life with her careful arrangements and sponge-work.
    Tess had always liked to work with her hands, but using her spells for that work was not possible in a human setting, especially given the price of her magic. So while her sisters enjoyed their new lives, Tess applied for jobs at hardware stores and as an assistant to a few handymen, and even pondered going to trade school. It seemed a waste when she could already do so much without an expensive education. But it was a man’s world after all. There was no place for her magic.
    “Good for you,” Will said.
    She looked up in surprise.
    “Too many people out there are trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. It’s good you’re