“All right. Well … I’ll get straight to the heart of it: He made Mayor Croft lay you off so you’d be stuck working for him. He tricked you into breaking the law and forced you into a Vow. He’s a manipulator, Beatrix.”
Arguments popped up like crabgrass in the garden.He’s trying to stop something bad from happening. He’s desperate. He needs help.But she wanted Ella to persuade her—and desperation did not excuse what he did.
Ella squeezed her hand. “Here’s my advice: Whenever fond feelings threaten to overcome your better judgment, think how you felt the day I found you in the forest.”
A good suggestion. Excellent, really. So when Ella left to finish grading, she thought of the first Vow. She thought of him raging at her beforehand and having so much control over her afterward that he could make her move, stop her tongue, even summon her without actually meaning to.
She thought of him lying next to her in bed, those green-flecked eyes alight with laughter, his fingers interlaced with hers.
She fell back onto her pillow, an arm over her face. Maybe Ella was right. Maybe you couldn’t reason yourself out of attraction, no matter how inappropriate. Or inexplicable.
She jerked up, throat dry.
I, Beatrix Jane Harper, swear to assist Peter William Blackwell to the best of my abilities and to do him no harm.
No harm.
Oh God—how far might that reach? Did the misery of unrequited love count?
She tried to think of a sign that she’d developed feelings for him before that second Vow, any sign at all, and came up empty-handed. The dreamed kiss and her waking reaction to it, a few hours post-Vow, were her first clues.
She ran from the house, not pausing to grab a coat, and barreled through the dark forest toward the omnimancer’s mansion.
CHAPTER 31
At first he thought it was his imagination. No one knocked on his door after five, let alone seven-forty at night. After his spell fizzled like all the other ones before it, he stuck his head into the hallway just to make sure—and found that someone really was at the door, pounding on it with what sounded like both fists.
Miss Harper.
He pulled her in and shut the door, adrenaline surging. “What’s wrong? Your sister?—?”
“She’s fine.”
Miss Harper was out of breath and agitated, face rosy from the cold. She wore nothing over her wine-colored dress, his favorite of the few she owned. Another shot of adrenaline hit as it occurred to him that she might have come simply to see him—could stand it no more than he could.
Then she looked at him, and his stomach twisted. Her eyes were cold. Furious.
“When did you first realize you wanted me?” she asked. Accusation, not come-on.
He resisted the urge to take a step backward. In this situation, in thisonesituation, he’d done nothing wrong.
“When you walked into the demarcation circle to take the replacement Vow,” he said.
“After you wrote that contract.”
“Yes. What is this about? Why does that matter?”
She glared at him. “I’m trying to figure out whether youmeantto distort the way I feel about you, or if it simply happened by accident.”
His mouth fell open. “What?”
“I didn’t want you until just after I Vowed to do you no harm. You must see this is not a coincidence.”
“Beatrix—”
“How has it felt, Omnimancer, as I’ve struggled not to act on my artificial attraction to you? Painful? Agonizing?” She made a wild gesture, tension radiating off her. “The worse you feel, the more the Vow presses on me!”
No.No, damn it!He snapped, “Has it occurred to you that we have a common childhood, a similar worldview and a shared enemy? Or that theotherthing I did the night of the replacement Vows is help you prove your sister didn’t hopelessly muck up her conference? Don’t you think it’s possible you—you, Beatrix—fell in love with me?”
