Nobody Told Me Witches Follow Recipes

Elara Hawthorne's magic is a hazard to herself and anyone within a five-foot radius.She cannot boil an egg without summoning a fire elemental. She cannot steep tea without turning the kettle into a sentient creature. After her seventh kitchen fire in six months, the Culinary Arcanum delivers an ultimatum: apprentice under the notoriously rigid potion master Cassian Voss at his celebrated atelier, Aethelgard, or lose her magical license forever.Cassian Voss does not believe in intuition. He believes in grams, milliseconds, and triple-verified incantations. His kitchen runs like a Swiss chronometer, and he has no patience for chaos masquerading as talent. He agrees to take Elara on only because High Priestess Hester Croft holds the deed to his ancestral recipe vault, and he will do anything to reclaim it.But magic does not care about ultimatums or legal documents.When Elara accidentally knocks moonflower essence into his immaculate stockpot, the liquid pulses with a golden shimmer that syncs to both their heartbeats. Cassian knows that shimmer. It is the resonance of a fated bond, a mate-pairing so rare and volatile that it can destroy the weaker of the two.He has spent fifteen years building walls to avoid exactly this kind of vulnerability.Now he is trapped in a kitchen with a woman who stirs widdershins, burns caramel, and makes his carefully ordered world feel like a recipe he forgot how to read.Then the Arcanum announces the Soul's Feast Gala, a nine-course magical tasting competition. The prize is the Amber Chalice, the only artifact capable of stabilizing volatile magic. For Elara, it could save her magical future. For Cassian, it could finally give him access to the vault he has been chasing for a decade.They agree to work together.They agree to ignore the bond.They agree to keep their hands to themselves.They agree to a lot of things they have no intention of keeping.Because when a chaos witch and a potion master collide, the only thing more dangerous than their magic is the heat building between them. And when betrayal scorches hotter than any stove, Elara must decide whether she can trust the one man who can either save her magic or shatter her heart.