Bright Familiar by Jeffe Kennedy
~ 2 ~
Gabriel watched Nic read her father’s letter—and as her dusky skin paled to the point of having a greenish tinge. The missive hadn’t seemed all that terrible to him, but families had a way of slicing to the bone so subtly that those not in the know wouldn’t even see the blade.
“Maman,” Nic said, almost soundlessly, slowly lowering the letter to her lap.
“She sends her love, yes?” Gabriel asked. “That’s good.”
Nic lifted her gaze to his, the deep emerald green swimming with tears. Mutely, she shook her head, the rioting curls bobbing unevenly. He’d done a poor job of cutting off the long tail of her glorious hair. Not that he’d have expected differently using an athame in the middle of an overwhelmingly potent magic ritual. Still, he regretted not doing better by her.
On so many levels.
Getting up, he went around to Nic’s side of the table, easing the missive away and setting it aside. Crouching down, he took her clammy hands in his. “Tell me,” he urged.
Nic turned a look of profound misery on him, the tears spilling over to run down her cheeks. “Maman would have written her own note. She always did when I was at Convocation Academy. There’s only one reason that she wouldn’t have penned her own message.”
Gabriel closed his eyes briefly, unable to bear the pain in hers—and to hide his revulsion from her. He’d been in Lord Elal’s study when the wizard had forced Nic’s mother to take her alternate form. Lady Elal had begged to be allowed to have a voice in the conversation, but her husband had exercised his authority over his familiar and compelled her to change into a cat. The casual display of tyranny had repelled Gabriel then, and if anything, affected him even more now. “She’s still in feline form,” Gabriel said quietly, ordering himself to meet Nic’s gaze.
She nodded. “And he wants me to know it. Punishment for us both.” Pulling her hands away, she scrubbed furiously at her tears, then lightly slapped her cheeks. “Do you know, I never saw Maman weep? Not until the day I tried on my wedding dress—and Papa made her cry in front of me.”
Aghast, Gabriel swallowed against his dry throat. The image of Nic in the wedding dress she would’ve worn to marry him if she hadn’t escaped nearly crowded out his other thoughts, and he had to sternly order himself to focus. “Why do you think he did that?”
Canting her head, jaw firm, Nic gave him a hard look. “To remind me that a familiar is subject to their wizard master’s rule. Maman had raised the concern that you might not be able to restore House Phel, that I’d belong to a no-tier house with little fortune and meager prospects.”
“A valid concern,” Gabriel admitted, folding himself to sit cross-legged on the floor, keenly aware of the warped boards beneath the antique rug.
“I told you before, I don’t care about that. Besides, with me on the finances, House Phel won’t be impoverished for long.” She smiled thinly, and he took heart to see her fiery nature reemerging. “But the implication that I might try to evade being tied to you made Papa angry. Remember, I told you before that Papa likes you.”
“It didn’t seem that way to me at our single”—and singular—“meeting.”
Nic looked sympathetic. “He was in a rage, no doubt.” Her gaze strayed to the discarded letter. “He still is.”
As worry clouded her gaze again, Gabriel sought to distract her attention. “What did he say about me to make you think he liked me?”
“Fishing for praise?” she asked, clearly amused.
“I’ll take any I can get from you,” he replied lightly, abruptly aware of how much he craved that assurance of her regard. He had no illusions about their relationship, not with how he’d taken away her one chance for freedom. He also understood that she didn’t love him, possibly never would—and he frankly didn’t blame her—and that the Fascination would always complicate her feelings for him. Still, from their first meeting, he’d discovered the uncomfortable sensation that her good opinion mattered to him. He wanted to be worthy of her admiration, for himself, not because the magic demanded it.
“When he first approved your application for the Betrothal Trials,” she replied, “Papa told me that you deserved a chance to rebuild your house, same as any other man, and more than the soft, indulged, barely talented scions of established houses.” Her smile deepened. “He said you had balls even trying for me.”
Wasn’t that the truth? More than once, Gabriel regretted the ambition that drove him to try for a wife and familiar as talented and high ranking as Nic. Before he knew her, and before he understood how the wizard–familiar dynamic worked, he’d been sanguine about the gambit. Why not go for the very best? All of it had been a risk—and a lot of it had felt like a game. He hadn’t had much to lose. Yes, the fate and fortune of House Phel had rested on him, but in the end, the worst that could happen was they’d let the rotting structure sink into the marshes again, and his family and people would return to the living they’d been scraping out before that.
Now he knew better. He’d seen how the people of the Convocation lived, which was leaps and bounds ahead of even the easier life they enjoyed at House Phel since his wizardry took him by violent storm.
But Nic… Without realizing it, he’d ruined her life by tying her fate to his.
If he’d known, he’d go back and change it. At least, he liked to tell himself that. In the darkest corners of his heart, however, the knowledge lurked that he was savagely glad he couldn’t change the past. Nic was his now, and he wouldn’t let her go. It’s in a wizard’s nature to be commanding, Nic had said, only half because she liked to tease him. Before this, he’d have said it wasn’t in his nature to be dominating, but Nic changed everything. Her magic called to his with a siren song, seductive, sweetly tempting, and part of him hungered for her with an unslakable need. Even now, that silver bed in the arcanium, with its chains and whispers of erotic anguish, called to him. Monster…
Thrusting that image away, he shook his head, bewildered that he could feel such tender affection for her, could want to protect her with every fiber of his being, and also brew such dark sexual fantasies.
“You don’t agree?” Nic asked, canny green eyes studying him with alert interest. He had to think back to what they’d been discussing before his thoughts took him down such dark, twisting paths.
“That I had balls to try for you?” he asked, going for a lighter tone. “I suspect it was more the bliss of ignorance. You, more than anyone, are aware of how little I understood—and still fail to understand—about the Convocation. You called my applying for you in the Betrothal Trials a fool’s gambit, and you are likely correct.”
“We agreed last night: no regrets.”
He weighed arguing that, knowing full well how bitter and heavy her many regrets were. With her shadowed side of the coin, it would be beyond callous to express how profoundly he relished his success, how much he savored having her here with him, how very much he… well, that he loved her. He hadn’t admitted that to her, even when she’d baldly asked if he was in love with her. He’d equivocated, saying that he thought he could be, and then took refuge in honesty, trying to explain how wrong it felt to love someone the Convocation regarded as his possession. How could he love her when she had no choice but to be with him, when she was forced to be dependent on him in every way? Even his horse, Vale, had more autonomy, the ability to leave him if Vale didn’t like how he was treated. Nic, eternally bonded to him—chained to him by her own nature, by the magical force of the Fascination—had no freedom to walk away, no matter how he made her suffer.
He scrubbed his hands over his face, feeling supremely unable to rise to this challenge.
Nic slid off the chair and onto the floor before him, the robe he’d bought her in Ophiel billowing in bronze velvet folds. It should be comfortable for her while the morning air remained cool, but he should get her something lighter. As spring waxed into summer, it would be far too heavy.
“Gabriel.” Nic cupped his face in her hands, nails scratching lightly over the beard stubble he had yet to shave that morning. “You must banish this guilt. You’ve done nothing any Convocation wizard wouldn’t have done, and—”
“That’s not exactly a high standard,” he pointed out wryly.
“And you’ve dealt with me far more kindly than any of them would.” She kissed him lingeringly, the taste of fresh oranges bright on her lush lips. The craving in him leapt to the touch and taste of her, wanting to seize her and push her to her back, spread her slim thighs and plunder her luscious sex.
He groaned into her mouth, viciously restraining himself even as his cock rose, hard with greedy desire. “Again, not a high standard,” he ground out.
Breathing a laugh, she pressed light kisses over his face while he kept his hands firmly off of her, wrapped tightly around his drawn-up knees. “You’re not going to go back to refusing to bed me, are you?”
He’d strongly considered it. If he were any kind of gentleman, he wouldn’t take advantage of her magically induced willingness. But the sexual frenzy of the bonding ceremony the night before had uncorked a bottle that could not be stoppered again. On all the long journey from Wartson, he’d managed to restrain himself, thinking that perhaps they’d find a way to come together as equal partners. Or, failing that, that she could go back to her life. Neither was possible any longer. Nor was it possible for him to stop wanting her with all the savagery of his black wizard’s heart.
Nic growled, pushing him onto his back and straddling him. With him pinned under her slight weight, she deftly unlaced his sleep shirt, spread it open to bare his chest, and scraped her nails over his skin. His self-control frayed under her caress. Helpless to resist her, he drank in how glorious she looked, even with her lopsided curls, glossy black and catching the morning sunlight. As much as he’d loved her dramatically long hair, the shorter cut showed off her strong face, the high, sculpted cheekbones, her green eyes dominating with the force of her intelligence and potent charisma.
“You made me a promise,” she reminded him, gaze raking his body along with her avid touch, lips curving wickedly as she toyed with one of his nipples, making him shudder. “Remember? One of the happier benefits of this relationship we find ourselves locked into.” She bent to replace her fingers on his nipple with her mouth, laving it tenderly, then nipping with kitten teeth so he jumped.
Trying to focus his thoughts, he nevertheless combed his fingers through her thick curls, savoring the tensile silk of them. “I am quite certain I made no such promise.”
“Fidelity,” she purred, drawing hard on his nipple so he arched his back. “You said you wanted us to be faithful to each other. A marriage in truth, despite our startling lack of marriage vows to reference.”
They needed to take care of that, have an actual wedding, no matter how much Nic might declaim the need for one. She’d transferred her avid mouth to his other nipple, and his mind had lost all ability to think logically. A bright haze of need obscured the conversation from the evening before, but he was sure they’d ended the argument with him agreeing to the bonding. Certainly he’d formed a plan to establish an equal footing between them so he wouldn’t feel quite so predatory with her. “I will be faithful,” he gasped, her scorching sex grinding against his erection. “But I refuse to take advantage of you.”
She paused, lifting her head, a gleaming black riffle falling over one eye as she gazed at him in shrewd amusement. He tucked it back behind her ear, using the recess from her determined seduction to catch his breath. “You do realize,” she purred, “how ridiculous that sounds given our current positions?”
“The power imbalance is larger than this moment,” he replied quietly, “and exceeds the physical.” He gripped her wrists, moving them easily with his greater strength. “I could do anything to you and you couldn’t stop me. Worse, you wouldn’t even try.” And how terrible was it that the words aroused him further even as he spoke them?
Proving the point, Nic yielded utterly in his grip. “That’s true. Better, I want you to.” She rubbed her groin against his, eyes half closing in sensual surrender. “Do your worst, wizard.”
As if her words snapped some desperately eroding grasp on his better nature, he lost all reason and flipped their positions, pushing her onto her back and pinning her wrists to the floor as he straddled her. “Is this what you want?” he snarled, her magic filling him with the heady scent of red wine and hothouse roses.
“Yes.” She undulated in his grip, body writhing with need, hips lifting as she attempted to spread the lovely thighs he’d pinned together with his knees. “Please, Gabriel. Please.”
It shouldn’t be so exciting to hear her beg, but it was. Taking both of her slender wrists in one hand, he stretched her arms over her head, opening her robe to reveal her lushly naked body beneath. Her deep-rose nipples were taut, tipping her full breasts, her narrow waist a contrast to her generous hips. Tracing her curves with his free hand, he slipped his fingers into the sweet vee at the crest of her rounded thighs, the curls at her mons as glossy thick as her hair. Feeling as if he’d starved for her, he cupped that enticing mound, fastening his mouth on one delicious nipple, exulting in her strangled cry of desire. Turnabout was fair play, so he bit her nipple lightly, stretching her arms tighter as she thrashed beneath him, and parted her swollen nether lips. He groaned as her slick heat met his questing touch.
“Please, Gabriel,” Nic chanted the pleas. “I need you inside me. Please, oh please.”
He needed no further urging, any vague thought of going slowly fleeing in the face of the grinding need to bury himself in her. Releasing her wrists, he spread her knees wide, taking a moment to savor the sight of her open sex, an even deeper rose, unbearably erotically lovely with the twinned curves of her ass beneath.
Positioning his cock, he thrust into her, not going gently at all. And Nic screamed, full-throated, digging her nails into the rug as her back bowed, thrusting her full breasts into glorious profile. She was so beautiful, magic emanating from her skin like a mist that warmed the coldest, dampest, and loneliest corners of his soul. Burying himself in her felt like coming home to the place he’d longed for all his life and hadn’t known how to find. And as she wrapped her long arms and legs around him, her seeking mouth finding his and drinking him in, he felt embraced, somehow loved and accepted unconditionally as no one else ever had.
A great irony there, as he was the worst person in the world for her.
“You’re thinking too much,” she said throatily, then sinking her teeth into the side of his neck, galvanizing him with overwhelming need. “Stop thinking. Take. Have.”
She’d said that to him on the floor of the arcanium. And he’d obeyed. He’d taken everything she offered and more.
He took again.
Thrusting into her, pushing ever deeper, as if seeking out and devouring every drop of her being, he was barely aware of her incoherent cries in his ear, her nails digging into his ass as if trying to pull him even deeper. He flung himself into the frenzy of it, her magic flowing into him thick and hot as blood, nourishing and heady, filling him with power.
She convulsed under him, her thunderous climax seizing him by the throat and dragging him after. Helpless in her grip as her sex clamped on his phallus like a fist, he spent himself in her welcoming depths, then collapsed in a bloodred haze, momentarily dizzy from the utter loss of self. Nic’s essence of wine-infused roses filled him so thoroughly he didn’t know where he ended and she began.
Lying there, their skin slicked together as the sun grew ever brighter with the warming day, her body lush and yielding as a bower of rose petals, he wondered blearily if this happened to all wizards. The Convocation made much of the familiar submitting to their wizard’s will, but did other wizards also discover this drowning influence of their familiar’s aura?
Nic laughed hoarsely, her full breasts shivering with her amusement, crushed under him. Chagrined, he levered himself onto his elbows, shifting the bulk of his weight off of her. Her legs still vised around his hips, holding him tightly sheathed in her still. She gazed at him, sultry green eyes half lidded, full lips curving with sensual satisfaction. So beautiful, even with the half-healed abrasions and purple-green bruises mottling her collarbones and throat from the hunters’ collar. He felt as terrible about them as if he’d put them there himself. Observing his perusal, Nic raised a brow in inquiry.
“Why do you laugh?” he asked instead of voicing those thoughts, finding he had to clear his throat to get the words through.
“I should time your busy brain,” she replied, “from the moment I can get you to stop thinking until you start up again.” She wriggled beneath him, digging her heels into his ass to keep him swallowed in her. “It could be an interesting challenge, to attempt to beat my personal bests.”
Charmed and amused by her despite himself, he allowed a grudging smile. “I don’t think I’m quite that bad.”
“You aren’t always,” she conceded. “You weren’t the night of our Betrothal Trial, canny as you were about seducing me.”
He lowered his head to kiss her, thinking to make it a kind of apology but unable to resist tasting her, sweeping his tongue inside her delicious mouth, feeding on her lush lips like the sweetest of fruits. She sighed, her languid body melting further, her fingertips lightly and lazily caressing his spine. That night had been a more innocent time, at least for him, when he’d believed her willing to wed him and only needing some gentling to grow used to him. Regrets, indeed.
“That night was also salient,” he murmured against her lips, enjoying the brush of them as he spoke, “in that we actually made it to the bed. Something we should consider for the future.”
“The future,” she echoed in a dreamy voice. “That sounds promising. Though the floor serves well enough, here or the arcanium. I’ll put acquiring a mattress for the arcanium bed on my list. Don’t tense up.”
He closed his eyes against the images that wanted to roar up. Nic, chained to that bed with silver glinting against her dusky skin, spreadeagled and helpless to stop him. He started to withdraw from her even as his cock immediately hardened at the thought, but Nic held him tight.
“And don’t run from this,” she said in a harder voice, winding her fingers in his hair.
He opened his eyes to meet the green glitter of hers. “Nic…”
“You could have me on the arcanium bed without a mattress,” she noted in a helpful tone, not fooling him for a moment, “but those silver coils will abrade my skin. If you choose to draw blood from me, there are—”
“Stop,” he barked out, far more harshly than he intended. “Let me go.”
“You don’t want to go,” she murmured, moving her hips to stroke her slick inner muscles around his phallus.
He groaned, meeting her movements despite himself. “I want to be gentle with you. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Then be gentle.” She smiled, feathering her fingertips over the shells of his ears, making him shiver. “All ways can be ours. Have me any way you want me. It’s good and right. All of it.”
He doubted that, but he was too far gone to deny himself. Or her. Or whatever she was up to with these seductive games. Determined to last longer this time—and able to, with the savage passion slaked for the moment—he made love to her, showering her face, throat, and breasts with kisses. Nuzzling and licking those bruises as if he could erase them from her otherwise flawless skin. Finding the depth and rhythm that best pleased her, he brought her to climax twice more before releasing himself into her.
This time, it felt like a benediction, and like an offering. A small repayment for his many crimes against her.
She sighed and stretched, at last unwinding her legs. “A personal best,” she decided. “Except you’re already thinking again.”
He rolled onto his back beside her, gazing up at the tongue-in-groove pattern of their bedroom ceiling. “I was only thinking that we need to have a healer see to your throat, and the hunter’s bite on your arm, too.”
“True. Also your injuries, though you’re healing well. The nice thing about magical healing is making it all go away immediately. Let’s do that today.” When he cleared his throat, she turned her head and narrowed her gaze. “You said you have a healer here in Meresin.”
“We do,” he replied defensively. “Of the regular variety. Not a wizard.”
She groaned, beating her head lightly on the floor. “Silly me. What was I thinking?”
She’d been thinking that she still lived in the Convocation, where people had easy access to magical healing. “Will you go?” he asked.
“Go where?”
“Home, to House Elal, as your father bids.”
She rolled her head to look at him, losing the dreamy softness. “This is my home.”
“But if you wish, I—”
“Gabriel.” She levered up onto one elbow, the robe she still wore sliding off one smooth shoulder, golden and delicately muscled. “More precisely, you are my home now. I’m bonded to you. Even if you sent me away, I would find my way back to you. I thought you were clear on this.”
“But your father—”
“Papa doesn’t know we completed the bonding ritual. He’s simply probing, guessing, testing for your response. That letter was addressed to you, wizard to wizard. Lord Elal wants to determine whether Lord Phel has taken his familiar in hand.”
He winced at her phrasing, certain that she employed those terms with deliberate ruthlessness. Probably she thought she could inure him to what she believed were the immutable realities of the Convocation. Something he intended to fight, even if he had to go down doing it.
“No, he doesn’t know, does he?” Indulging himself, he stroked a finger along the velvet skin of her shoulder, taking in the sight of her gloriously nude, voluptuous figure, so enticingly framed by the bronze robe. “Nobody knows that we made the bonding ritual reciprocal, that I’m as bound to you and you are to me.” Likely that’s why the very concept of parting from her felt impossible, striking him with a physical ache.
“We don’t know that it made any difference,” she warned him, but she returned his caress with a tenderness at odds with her forbidding tone.
“We’ll have to experiment, to find out.”
“Something else for the long list of tasks we’re not getting to by lying here on the floor, ravaging each other.”
It pleased him—and perhaps salved his conscience—that she phrased it as a mutual ravaging.
“If there is a difference in the bonding, we should disguise that fact from the proctor,” she added.
“Wouldn’t the Convocation be interested to know that the bonding doesn’t have to be so one-sided, though? Maybe we should show the proctor the truth.” Maybe familiars wouldn’t have to be so dependent. They could enjoy more freedoms, even choose the wizards they partnered with.
“You cannot be serious.” Nic sat up, drawing her robe around her and scowling at him, her tone scathing.
“It could change a great deal.” He sat up also, then pushed to his feet and offered her a hand up.
She took it, then faced him, her expression deadly serious. “Gabriel, I know you’re an idealist, and I also know that you’ve had very little experience dealing with the Convocation, but you cannot imagine that they would take this news well.”
“Yes, it would shake things up at the academy, but—”
“Gabriel!” She interrupted him so sharply, with real fear in her face. “It would turn the Convocation upside down. Do you really think the wizards would stand back and let you do even the slightest thing to erode their grip on the power they enjoy?”
He shook his head. “We can fight them on it, then.”
“Fight them?” She threw back her head and laughed. “Who—you, me, and the barely talented water mages of the Meresin swamps?”
“If necessary,” he replied stubbornly.
She set her teeth, jaw flexing. “Do you have any concept of how vast the Convocation is? We’re talking twelve High Houses, thirty-six second-tier houses, and at least a hundred lower-ranking houses. All of them have more than a single wizard leading them.”
“Yes, but I have the most powerful familiar in the Convocation,” he countered with a smile that she didn’t return.
“They will crush us,” she said implacably. “This is not a fight you can win, Gabriel.”
Maybe not, but it sat ill with him to simply give up without even trying. “Wouldn’t it be worth it?” he asked her softly, stroking the back of her fine-boned hand. “We could change the world, so no familiar ever has to endure the Betrothal Trials again, so no other brilliant young woman like you feels forced to escape to another country to avoid losing her very will.”
“Gabriel…” Her eyes gleamed, luminous with emotion, but she pressed her full lips together into a firm line. “People only change the world in novels. It’s a romantic idea, but not a practical one. The stories don’t tell the real tale because it’s short and boring: someone tries to buck the system, fails, and dies.”
“You said once before that when you read my dossier that you knew I would be the sort to dash myself brainless trying to fight the Convocation,” he offered, still hoping to make her smile. No luck there. She only gazed at him with that look of panic and despair.
“I know it,” she spat, but without any real fire. “I should’ve filed my summary refusal right then.”
“Why didn’t you?” he asked, genuinely curious. “I mean, besides the fact that you also recognized I was naïve and desperate and thus a good bet to be easily manipulated—why didn’t you give the rogue wizard from a fallen house a hard pass?”
“Clearly a major lapse in judgment on my part. Temporary insanity, perhaps,” she replied haughtily, jerking her hand away and tying her robe firmly.
“I think you liked that I was outside the Convocation’s rigid structure,” he speculated, amused by her. “You’re a rebel at heart, Lady Veronica Elal.”
“There’s no need to resort to name calling,” she retorted, then sobered, giving him a very serious look. “Gabriel, please don’t try to fight the Convocation. You’ll only lose. Your status, your house, and likely your life along with it.”
“You’d be free of me in that eventuality,” he felt he had to point out. “Wasn’t that your ideal, to end up a young widow?”
“Yes, but I wanted to be a rich widow,” she countered, smiling at last. “Which means that you”—she punctuated the word by stabbing a finger into his bare chest—“need to reply to my father. Tell him I belong to you now and that my dowry should be delivered to you immediately. It takes money to make money, and I have big plans for increasing the wealth of House Phel.”
“I hear and obey,” he replied wryly.
“Surely that’s my line,” she quipped, softening the stabbing finger to trace his midline down to his belly and the loose cotton pants he’d pulled up again. “Besides, I’d love to get my trousseau and have more than two dresses.”
“I’ll get you more clothes.”
“There are other things I’d like to have, too. Stop being fastidious about this. That money is owed to you, and those things are mine. Demand that he send it all.”
In truth, he was dreading that particular task. Even at his most ambitious, he hadn’t wanted the fortune that accompanied Nic’s hand in marriage. He wouldn’t have agreed to the dowry in the first place if he hadn’t needed it to compensate for the staggering fee he’d had to pay the Convocation for his chance at the Betrothal Trials. He’d practically exhausted House Phel’s coffers to come up with that money. Still, Nic’s dowry made the whole enterprise feel too much of a financial transaction—something he supposed he should’ve recognized about the acquisition of a familiar much sooner.
“Maybe we should invite your parents to the wedding,” he suggested on impulse, enjoying that he’d surprised her, those raven wing brows arcing as if to take flight. “They could bring the dowry as a wedding gift, and you could reassure yourself of your mother’s well-being.” Surely Lord Elal wouldn’t keep the bride’s mother in feline form for that event, and Nic would be reassured to see her mother.
“What wedding?” Now her brows drew together.
“I’d like to have the ceremony, to offer willing vows to each other.”
“We’re bonded. There’s no stronger vow that that. In the eyes of the Convocation, we’re more than married. I’m Lady Phel now.”
“Nevertheless.” He reclaimed her hand, holding it between his. “Will you marry me?”
She rolled her eyes. “This is driven by sentiment. It makes no practical sense.”
“Still.” He couldn’t help smiling at her exasperation. “Will you marry me?”
“I already did,” she snapped, waving her free hand at the green landscape outside the window. “Else I wouldn’t be living in a swamp.”
“It’s a marsh. I really need to teach you the difference.”
“I’ll add it to our ever-growing list of tasks,” she replied, sounding not at all enthused.
“So…?” He raised his brows.
“With all we have to get handled, you really want to add a wedding? That’s a lot of time, effort, and expense.”
“Yes. I have my priorities.”
“I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?”
Privately, he considered that Nic could likely talk him out of anything if she put the full fiery force of her will to it, but he wasn’t about to put that particular weapon in her hand. “Will you marry me, Nic?” he asked for the third time, hoping it would be the charm, as in the not-very-accurate tales of magic.
She pursed her full lips. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt to have a big social event to counter the inevitable gossip about my ill-advised attempt to escape. And it will help to establish House Phel’s position in society, prove that you’re not as much of an impoverished bumpkin from the swamps as people believe. Of course, you’d have to raise the remainder of the house from the marshes and bogs if you want to invite guests and have them be impressed.”
“Speaking of time, effort, and expense.” He grimaced at the daunting thought.
Patting his cheek, she smiled with confidence. “Remember that you have the most powerful familiar in the Convocation to assist you now. Additional incentive for you to demand my dowry immediately: We’re going to need the money to dazzle the guests. And tell Papa to send my wedding gown. I had a really pretty one. If I’m going to have the wedding, I want that dress.”
“A society wedding, huh?” He’d been picturing an intimate family event, maybe in the peach orchard with the trees in blossom.
“Have you changed your mind?” she asked archly, a challenging glint in her eye.
“Not at all.” Though it made his skin crawl to think of those haughty Convocation wizards on his lands.
“Then I will marry you, Gabriel Phel.” She fluttered her lashes and kissed him. “Redundant though it may be, as you’re well and truly stuck with me.”
Before she could skip away, he caught her around the waist, indulging in a much longer kiss that left them both breathless. “Get dressed, and I’ll show you where the house accounts are.”
“Oh, darling,” she cooed. “You say the sweetest things.”
