Her reaction was not so much relief as a different sort of tension. She was waiting for the other shoe.
Fine, then. He delivered one.
“You may spend your own time with whomever you please, but you are mine from eight until five for the next three years. And if Wizard Garrett asks you why, you willtell him you’re doing it of your own volition. You did, after all, choose to sign that contract.”
“I’m not my mother,” she whispered. “I would never have done what she did.”
He was thrown by the change of topic. He took a calming breath and said, “I know.”
“Don’t you think it’s unjust to punish me for her sins?”
Ah. Not a change of topic at all. “That has nothing to do with it,” he said.
“Oh? My ancestry hadnothingto do with your decision to drag me kicking and screaming from the general store after you learned who I was?”
“I wanted someone smart, someone capable, someone so driven to do magic that she pretended to be a boy to get into the wizardry exam.” He looked straight into her widening eyes. “Beatrix Harper, I wantedyou.”
He’d rendered her speechless a second time.
“Now you may leave,” he muttered, and he exited the room without waiting for a reply.
CHAPTER 19
Beatrix Harper, I wanted you.
She couldn’t stop thinking of that. It echoed in her head as Theo walked her home, the remembered words louder than his. It grabbed at her the next day when she did something smart, something capable, something with magic. Ithauntedher.
There was nothing romantic about it at all, and yet it made Theo’s declaration look weak and thin by comparison. When had he ever said he wanted her for everything she was? He’d said he wanted her for what she wasnot. Now she was unable to see that as anything but insufficient.
“You’re very quiet today,” Theo said after work, the late-afternoon light filtering down on him through the trees. “Troubles or deep thoughts?”
“Both,” she admitted.
“Tell me.”
She couldn’t very well ask him why he cared for her—did anyone get good results from that loaded question? But troubles weren’t in short supply. She reached for a different one.
“Just wishing women would be treated equally now, when it might do me some good.”
“Why—what would you do?”
“Get a grant to go to college.”
“There are grants already. Though I suppose,” he added, frowning, “they all have age limits.”
“Yes. For ‘young ladies, seventeen to twenty.’ Becauseof courseall ladies are married shortly thereafter and would never again be in a position to want or need work,” she said, trying for an ironic smile rather than a bitter one. “But it’s not simply that. Those grants are only for training teachers and nurses, and I …”
She tried to think of the words to explain it to him. Into the pause, he said, “You want to go to Hazelhurst.” As if he thought it perfectly natural.
She let out a breath. “You understand.”
He squeezed the hand she’d rested on his arm and the tight feeling in her chest eased. Surely he’d meant he was drawn to her forallthe ways she was not like D.C. socialites. Surely he wouldn’t be bothering with her—thirty-three and not especially pretty—if he didn’t sense real affinity between them.
“Really, any capable woman should be able to get a college education,” she said. “Society would benefit.”
“I agree,” he said.
She replayed the conversation in her head so many times, she dreamt of it that night. The next afternoon, as she chopped parsnips for a concoction that required Blackwell’s assistance, he said out of the clear blue: “What, in your ideal world of gender equality, would all the very well-educated women do, Miss Harper?”
