What a disaster.
His self-righteous anger had dissipated an hour after she’d stalked out the day before, leaving chilly regret in its wake. The original plan—blackmail—looked benign by comparison. What he’d intended to propose was that he would keep quiet about what she had done, and in exchange, she’d shoulder the lion’s share of his duties. That should have been sufficient. She could have no incentive to rat him out for violating the magic-instruction law if she knew he had evidence on film that would land her in prison for a long time, too.
Instead, he’d transformed Miss Harper from a woman whose motivations clashed dangerously with his, but who probably didn’t want to do him any harm, into a perfectly obedient employee who wished him dead. If he destroyed the contract now and set her free, that wouldn’t change what she thought of him—only her ability to do something about it. He’d trapped himself as neatly as he’d trapped her.
He still couldn’t fully explain to himself why the sight of her trying to copy the top-secret report had left him so enraged. Alarmed, naturally. Upset, of course—at himself for not thinking of all the ways she might react to its contents. But his incandescent anger seemed in retrospect to be out of proportion to the crime, and all he could think was that he felt betrayed.
Even harder to explain was why in heaven’s name her body had responded to something he’d said a full mile out ofearshot. Nothing he’d read about Vows suggested those sorts of results.I wish you were here so I could beg your forgivenesswasn’t even an order.
He turned with the finished chicken sandwich, trying to work up the guts to follow through. But her expression of distaste reminded him so strongly of her mother that some of the kneejerk emotions that caused the situation returned.
“Here,” he said shortly, putting the plate down. He leaned against the counter rather than sitting at the table.
A moment later, his disquieting dream about her—aboutbeingher—came back to him in a rush.
“Miss Harper,” he said, unable to help himself. “How did your parents die?”
Distaste changed to surprise, then anger. But of course she knew that if he really wanted the answer, he would get it. “My mother developed an infection after delivering my sister. She never made it out of the hospital. My father died because he couldn’t bear life without her.”
He stared at her, struck by the coincidence that the broad-brush strokes of the dream had been correct.
“Not suicide,” she muttered. “He just lost any interest in going on.”
“No, that’s not—” He cleared his throat. He wasn’t about to admit that he’d dreamed of her. “My mother died delivering me.”
“Oh,” she said, contemplating the table. Apparently she hadn’t known, or more likely hadn’t remembered. Nothing about his “unfortunate” beginnings was a secret in Ellicott Mills.
She sounded a trifle less stony when she added, “I’m sorry about your mother. The medical establishment does not have a good record on childbirth.”
He suspected it was even worse for impoverished unwed mothers. But the Harpers had been well off then and it hadn’t protected them. So he merely said, “No. I suppose it doesn’t.”
She looked him in the eye as if taking his measure. “Did you never think of focusing your research on that problem?”
“When you opt for wizard training, you give up the freedom to choose your profession. They wanted me to become a physicist, and so I did.”
“But if you hadn’t been a wizard? What then?”
“I wouldn’t have been in a position to research anything at all.” He swallowed, trying to fight back the memory of being thirteen and seeing in his future nothing but hard labor on farms that were not his own. “I had no money to attend high school. No high school, no college.”
Miss Harper, who’d never had any reason to worry about whether she could go to the county’s high school, shook her head. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’d have gotten a scholarship.”
“Would I?” he said bitterly.
“That’s precisely why my mother helped start the scholarship foundation—so bright children could receive a high school education.” Her fond smile might have been understandable, but it made him angry just the same. “Of course, she was primarily concerned about the girls—she thought the tuition law would mean even fewer young women graduating.”
He might have been able to hold his tongue at that. But then she added, “You’d have been a shoe-in, though. You were top of our class.”
His response burst out like acid, furious words that physically hurt to say. “Your mother was less interested in my academic record than my birth certificate. She said she’d sooner quit the foundation than see a cent of its money—ofhermoney—spent on a bastard child.”
“What?” she whispered.
“Quite a woman, Mrs. Harper. Oh so interested in fair play and equal rights, except when she wasn’t.”
Her daughter rallied. “I don’t believe you.”
“What possible reason could I have to lie about that?”
“What reason do I have to take anything you say as the truth?” Her chair grated across the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard as she jumped to her feet. “You’ve robbed me of my freedom—and for what? To save yourself a bit of work? Don’t youdaretry to take away my good memories of a woman who is twenty years removed from being able to defend herself!”
