“Ow!” she snapped, wrenching her hand away and rubbing it. “Did you do that on purpose? What the heck!”
His wide-eyed look gave her the momentary impression of surprise. Then he got up and glared down at her. “Look, you ungrateful pillock—”
“Ungrateful … what?”
“I’m doing you a tremendous favor, and allyoudo is complain. You’re not even trying!”
“Hey,” she murmured, hurt.
“It’s a wonder you ever managed to earn a PhD or complete anything because the minute something requires a bit of hard work, you give up—”
“Hey,” she said, annoyed.
“—and if you ever question my teaching methods again, I’ll sit in on your classes andloudlycritique every foolish decision you make!”
She was trying to think of a reply that sufficiently conveyed what an utter jerk he was when he thrust both hands around hers. An instant of contact on par with the other awful times he’d touched her fully charged.
He let go with a whoop. “Hah! I’m brilliant!”
“Get out,” she spat, stuffing her abused hands into her pockets.
“Wait, calm down—”
“Calm down? Calmdown?”
“I wanted to make you angry, Daggett,” he said in a tone of voice that suggested this was a perfectly reasonable point.
“Well,Iwant to kick one or both of your shins—” And then it clicked. She gaped at him. “Are you saying it wasn’t—you weren’t—”
“Exactly. I didn’t add more magic to my aura just now. That reaction was entirely your anti-magic at work.”
She rubbed her temples because what this suggested made her head hurt. “Are you telling me that my body pumps out more of it when I’m mad?”
“Apparently.”
She groaned. What a stupid, stupid power.
“This is a breakthrough, you know.” He held out a hand. “May I?”
Steeling herself for more unpleasantness, she took it. And let out a breath when touching him brought onnothing worse than the sensation of having clapped her hands too long and hard.
“Ah, that’s already much better,” he said. “Either anti-magic quickly becomes inactive, or it’s not staying put in your aura ... There, can you feel that?”
She could. The sharp stinging gave way to itching. Then tingling.
She let go, the better to think. Touching him was distracting.
“I don’t know that it’s only anger,” she said. “That time you’d just told me I was anti-magic, I was more upset than mad.”
“Anti-magic production could be sped up by adrenaline, then. It’s not that way with magic, I’m sure of it.”
He strode around her office for a moment, an air of suppressed excitement about him. But in the end he merely offered up the blazingly obvious.
“Well—let’s see what difference it makes if you’re absolutely calm.”
“I think this would be one of those cases in which the scientist’s presence ruins the experiment,” she muttered, falling back on the couch. She shouldn’t care about his opinion of her—as long as it didn’t stop him from helping with her anti-magic—and it annoyed her that she apparently did.
He slipped his hand around hers, the itchy bite of that skin-to-skin contact sending goosebumps up her arm. “The scientist would like to point out that he didn’t mean any of that nonsense he said,” Hartgrave murmured.
