"Well — because I like biscuits," Juliana said, suddenly feeling incredibly self-conscious about it. She'd given a good deal of thought to how she might explain the biscuits, actually, in case she needed to do so for the blackmailer. Since it was something that had been referenced in her original Witch Weekly article, it could easily have been something he'd sent her as a joke. Mr. Abernathy had said something about the biscuits when he'd written, too, and he certainly wasn't smitten with her.

"Do men only kiss women they're smitten with?" she pressed. "Don't they have — impulses, sometimes, just because they're men?" She had always been told so, at any rate — allegedly that was the reason it was so important for her to be chaperoned as a young woman, to save her from the impulses of lusty gentleman. Which, honestly, seemed to be the truth — she'd been unchaperoned and had fallen prey to one of those impulses she'd always been warned about.