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Startled, she stared at him, not quite able to wrap her head around what he was saying.
“You didn’t fall meekly in line with their plans, did you?” Gabriel demanded with an amused lift of his brows. “No, you defied the path he laid out for you—with your mother’s assistance, I might point out—and you escaped his control. Think about it. All along, his goal has been to get you back to House Elal. He’s tried sending spirits after you, having you bodily abducted, playing on your affection, frightening you with implied threats to your mother. And now he’s trying to break you by threatening to cut you off from your family and inheritance entirely.”
“And working with Lady El-Adrel to plant someone else in your house.”
“Our house,” he corrected firmly. “Your father would never anticipate that you’d have feelings for me, would he?”
“He might have anticipated the Fascination, but that can’t be induced by…” Aghast, she stopped, as if by not speaking the thought aloud, she could stop it from being true.
“Nic?” Gabriel reached across the narrow space and took her hands. “You can tell me. You’re thinking your father somehow induced the Fascination.”
“It’s largely regarded as a myth,” she said faintly, remembering how easily Quinn had dismissed the possibility. “That’s what they say at Convocation Academy. That it’s not real. That the tale of Sylus and Lyndella is a bunch of romantic nonsense. But then I experienced it, with you, and Maman told me it happened to her too, with…”
“With your father,” Gabriel finished grimly. Dropping her hands abruptly, he exploded out of his chair and paced away. Raking both hands through his hair, he clutched his skull, body vibrating with tension. In that posture, displaying his muscular back, spectacular thighs, and tight ass, he looked absurdly beautiful to her. Amazing that she could be so attracted to him, have fantasies of undressing that gorgeous body and losing herself in passion with him, even in a moment of crisis like this. Or, perhaps, especially in a moment of crisis. Somewhere along the way, he’d become the rock she clung to.
Gabriel spun, dropping his hands but still clenching them into fists. “I didn’t plan this with him,” he said with urgency. “I know you have no reason to believe me, not after I cheated with the fertility spell, but I did not collude with your father to trap you with me. I promise. I swear on anything you ask.”
She blinked at him, dragging her mind back from lascivious fantasies of ravishing him, trying to follow the path of his thoughts instead. “It never occurred to me that you might have,” she replied honestly.
“It should,” he bit out. Then pressed his fists to his temples, pressing his eyes and lips firmly shut. When he opened his eyes again, he came to her and knelt on the rug before her, taking her hands in his. “No one would blame you for coming to that conclusion, least of all me.”
“Gabriel,” she said very solemnly, then leaned forward to press a kiss between his dark brows, lingering a moment so he’d feel her love in the caress. “You may be willing to skirt—even openly subvert—Convocation law, but you would never stoop to that level of villainy. I would never believe it of you.”
He released a breath, his shoulders relaxing. “Thank you. I couldn’t bear it if you left me.”
“I can’t leave you,” she chided gently. “More, I don’t want to. I can’t imagine ever wanting to.”
“But if the Fascination isn’t real…”
“Even if Papa worked some incantation to create the Fascination, whatever I felt was real. The bonding is very real. You can feel it between us, yes?”
He nodded reluctantly. “I just hate thinking that your feelings for me are the result of magic.”
“At some point, you’re going to have to trust me to know what I feel. If the Fascination was my imagination, I love you now. If the Fascination was the result of some manipulation of my father’s, I love you now. The result is the same, my only love.”
He regarded her with a wistfulness that twisted her heart, balanced by a wry twist to his sensuous lips. “Sometimes I’m not sure if you call me your only love because you mean it or because you’re teasing me.”
“Yes,” she replied promptly, and he laughed, kissing her with sweet affection.
