Chapter 7 #2
The failure had been a progressive one that developed over approximately five days, during which time he’d noticed himself noticing things about Roslyn Campbell that had nothing to do with her role as his healer and everything to do with how she was a woman living in his house, wearing his shirts, sitting across from him each evening with lamplight shining on her dark-honey hair and a rare, startled laugh that undid him more effectively than any magic he’d ever encountered.
He noticed the way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear when she was concentrating, a habitual gesture she performed without awareness and that drew his attention to the graceful line of her jaw and the small, delicate ear and the elegant curve of her neck.
And he noticed the shade of blue her eyes became when she was amused. Perhaps it was only the lamplight, but they seemed to take on an almost greenish hue, shifting from Sleeping Beauty turquoise to Kingman, as though humor somehow physically altered their wavelength.
Her own laugh surprised her, that much he could tell.
It usually arrived without warning, pushed out of her by something he’d said before she could catch it, and the expression on her face in the half second afterward was always the same — a flash of startled pleasure followed by a quick pause, as though she was checking to make sure her laughter hadn’t cost her anything she couldn’t afford to spend.
He found himself maneuvering their conversations to evoke that laugh, a use of his intellect so far beneath his dignity that he refused to examine it too closely.
He noticed other things, too, such as the way she moved through his house with increasing familiarity, her path from kitchen to study to bedroom no longer hesitant but assured, as though the geography of his life had become a landscape she could navigate without thinking.
And there was the way she had arranged the kitchen to suit her preferences; the tea tin had been moved to the counter closest to the stove, the spices reorganized in an order that made sense to her rather than to him, and the dish towel was now always folded over the edge of the sink in a neat rectangle he found both endearing and vaguely territorial.
He’d taken note of the way she hummed sometimes while she cooked, a tuneless half-melody she clearly wasn’t aware she was making and which he’d started listening for the way someone might listen for a particular bird singing outside their window.
She was rearranging him, not just his kitchen and not just his magic, but the internal furniture of his life, the careful arrangement of solitude and control he’d maintained for the past seventeen years.
And she was doing it without even trying.
That made it nearly impossible to defend against, because you couldn’t ward yourself against something that wasn’t an attack.
Naturally, he was appalled by all this. He was thirty-eight years old and had spent seventeen of those years in the house he’d bought to replace the family that had thrown him out, and he’d built an entire identity around the premise that solitude was a choice he’d made rather than a wound that had been inflicted on him.
He wasn’t about to let that identity be dismantled by the way a twenty-something nurse practitioner from Cottonwood, Arizona, looked when she ate soup in the lamplight.
Propinquity, he thought, the increased likelihood of forming attachments to those in close proximity.
It was a reasonable enough explanation, he supposed; he hadn’t been in sustained close contact with another person in nearly two decades, and the healing sessions, which required her to touch him twice a day in ways that left his defenses systematically opened and examined, had created an artificial intimacy that his starved psyche was mistaking for something real.
Trauma bonding, if one wanted to be clinical about it. He’d been alone too long, and his mind was grafting significance onto the first human connection that had come within reach.
It was a good theory. In fact, it was exactly the kind of theory he would construct, logical, well-supported, and conveniently self-protective.
He could cite literature on the subject, had in fact read several papers on the psychological effects of isolation and forced proximity during his years of solitary research, and the framework fit neatly enough that he should have been able to file his inconvenient feelings under a clinical explanation for his current state of mind and move on.
He was also increasingly certain that it was a lie.
Because the thing he felt when Roslyn laughed wasn’t the frantic grasping of a drowning man reaching for anything that felt like a safe harbor. This was quieter than that, and much more specific.
This strange, new emotion was a pleasure in being known in the small, daily sense of having someone notice how you took your tea and when you were lying about being tired and which subjects made your voice change pitch.
She knew him, and that knowing hadn’t made her leave — not because she couldn’t, although he supposed that was true enough, but because he’d watched her shift from prisoner to clinician to something he didn’t have a word for that encompassed both.
He was in trouble. The phrase resonated in his thoughts with the same cadence as on the first night, when she’d left his study after delivering her ultimatum, and he’d sat in his chair and thought, I am in considerable trouble.
He’d been correct then, and he was correct now. The intervening two weeks had only deepened the accuracy of his assessment of the situation.
That evening, after the healing session, she brought the tray and they ate at the desk as they always did.
The soup was better than usual; she’d found dried mushrooms in the back of the pantry and reconstituted them with the last of the chicken broth, and the result was rich and earthy.
He didn’t compliment the soup aloud, but he did acknowledge it with a second serving.
“Our outer wards are deteriorating,” he said.
She looked up from her bowl, graceful brows drawing together. “‘Our’ outer wards?”
“The house’s outer wards,” he clarified. “The ones I built. They are deteriorating faster than projected, and if they’re not repaired soon, the dampening field will be insufficient to mask us from the Gibsons.”
Her frown only deepened. “You’re not ready to do that kind of work.”
He’d been anticipating that kind of rebuttal.
“I’m considerably more ready than I was a week ago, which is attributable to your treatment, and I acknowledge that.
” The concession cost him, but he delivered it without hesitation.
“However, the wards can’t wait for a full recovery that may take weeks we don’t have. ”
She set down her spoon and sent him a very direct look.
“I need to be clear about this. Your magic is now at maybe sixty percent capacity. The scarring around your heart is still dense enough that sustained magical output — the kind that ward repair requires — risks reopening damage I’ve spent two weeks closing.
If you push too hard, the setback won’t be days this time. It could be permanent.”
Unwelcome news, but he couldn’t allow it to sway him. “And if the outer wards fail, the dampening field will collapse, and every witch within fifty miles will know exactly where we are.”
“Then we’ll deal with that when it happens,” she replied calmly.
A response he’d been expecting. “You seem very fond of that particular strategy.”
“And you seem very fond of solving problems by burning through reserves you don’t have.
” She met his gaze across the desk, her expression frank.
“You’ve been alone so long that your first instinct in every crisis is to throw your own body at it.
It hasn’t occurred to you that there might be other options. ”
As much as he disliked admitting such a thing, he knew she was right.
The rightness of her observation was connected to what she’d said on the night of his confession — you’ve been alone for a very long time — and to the way she looked at him now, not with anger or clinical assessment, but with something closer to frustration born of concern.
“What other options?” he asked, sounding quieter and more controlled than he’d expected.
“Let me help.” She set her own bowl aside and leaned forward, elbows on the desk. “Walk me through the ward structure and let me reinforce the weakest sections with healing magic. It won’t be the same as a proper repair, but it would buy time without draining you.”
At once, he shook his head. “Healing magic isn’t warding magic. The two disciplines are entirely different.”
Her mouth tightened, but her voice was even as she said, “I’m aware of that.
But your wards aren’t just abstract structures, are they?
They’re extensions of your gift, powered by your magic.
If I strengthen the source, the wards benefit.
” She paused, and he watched her gather her argument with the same methodical care she’d brought to his treatment.
“I’ve been doing that for two weeks already.
Your wards are in better shape now than they were when I arrived, and I haven’t touched them directly.
I’ve just been healing you, and the wards responded because they’re part of your system. This would just be more targeted.”