“Ellie!”
She barely heard Gabriel’s alarmed shout as blood and enchanted wind thundered in her ears. He grabbed her legs, wrapping his arms around them and digging his heels into the ground so as to anchor her. But magic buffeted them both, howling, wrenching, and even Gabriel’s arrogant, determined strength failed. He stumbled, cursing vehemently. And then he too was being pulled into the danger zone.
“Let go!” Elodie yelled.
“No!” With the power of desperation, he managed a step backward, and then another, hauling them into retreat.You’re mine,he’d said, and Elodie was beginning to believe that he actually meant it. And she thought that maybe, incredibly, he would be able to defy the force of an entire fey line in cascade.
But the ground ripped open beneath his feet, emitting gusts of pure, feral magic that shoved him off-balance, and immediately he was sucked into the air. Using what Elodie could only suppose was the might of stubbornness, he managed to keep hold of her, and together they were dragged toward the raging magic that crashed and crashed against the shuddering barricade.
Now Elodie was angry. No stupid, zappy rock was going totake her Gabriel! Grasping the wedding ring, she tried to pull it free. But since the moment Gabriel had placed the band on her finger, she’d never removed it, and now it would not budge past her knuckle. She tugged and twisted it desperately, thinking that her finger might break in the effort. That was the least of her problems, of course; indeed, if she could deliberately break the finger, and so get the ring off, she would do so without hesitation. But with no way of achieving that, she resorted to placing it in her mouth and sucking. After all, as she’d said to Gabriel, dignity was not a priority in a disaster.
The tactic worked: with its path thus lubricated, the ring at last came free. Elodie held it out like an offering, and the magic grabbed it away.
As if a thread snapped, she and Gabriel dropped to the ground only one yard’s distance from where the cascade rioted against the barricade.
BOOM.
A shock wave smashed into them. Elodie clung to the shuddering earth and Gabriel clung to her, and if she feared that he was going to restrict the blood flow to her feet, this seemed an inopportune moment to complain. The world screamed in agony. Then abruptly—
Silence.
Elodie held still for a moment, just in case the magic turned around and said,Fooled you!before exploding over her. But the stark, blank silence eased into a gentle quiet, and finally she knew she was safe. Her breath staggered out of her lungs and collapsed dramatically with exhaustion and relief.
Gabriel dragged himself up next to her. “Are you all right?” he asked, brushing the hair away from her face. Elodie turned on her side, smiling weakly at him.
“I’m fine,” she said. “But only in the British sense. Every fiber of me hurts.”
“Poor girl,” he murmured, still stroking her hair.
“And you?”
“Fine,” he said. And when she looked dubious—“I’m not caught in the center of a cascading fey line; anything else is absolutely fine.”
“Good point. Is it done?”
They both tilted their heads to see…nothing. A field of grass bathed in late afternoon sunlight. A somnolent woodland thick with shadows against the tranquil western horizon. From somewhere nearby, small birds of the meadow recommencing a cheerful melody.
“I knew it would work!” Elodie said triumphantly. Gabriel scoffed, and she smacked his arm without looking. “Gentlemen don’t point out ladies’ little exaggerations.”
“Ladies don’t call bald-faced lies ‘exaggerations,’ ” he answered, but humor tinged his voice, making Elodie think for a brief, mad moment that she had been more affected by the magic than she appreciated and was now experiencing auditory hallucinations.
They waited for half a minute to be sure no further eruptions were likely to occur, then went back to more important matters: each propping their head up on a hand, they gazed at the other, watching mesmerized as emotions burgeoned in their eyes.
“Say it again,” Gabriel commanded, his words a dark, hoarse whisper.
“I knew it would work,” Elodie repeated.
“No, the other thing.”
He stroked gentle fingers across her cheek, which was verynice but also distracted her from clear thinking. “What other thing?”
“You know.”
Oh.Thatthing. She grinned. “I love you.”
He lowered his eyelashes, blushing sweetly, but she hadn’t finished. “I’ve loved you from the very start, Gabriel Tarrant. The first time I saw you, I wanted you so much I tripped over my own feet and made a mess of everything.”
He contemplated her for a long, thoughtful moment, then suddenly rose to his feet. Elodie did not have enough time to feel bereft before he was reaching down and taking hold of her hands, pulling her up in one strong, easy motion. She swayed, hair tumbling around her, heart not sure which way was up. Still holding her hands, Gabriel stepped closer, as if he thought she might suddenly make a run for it. And, Elodie had to admit, as her pulse thundered and her eyes grew wide, he wasn’t entirely wrong. So much of her life had been about escaping, in dreams and books and out of windows, that she didn’t quite know how to stay.
