Wizard's Daughter (Sherbrooke Brides 10)

She walked over to the big mahogany desk, pausing a moment by the ghost's chair. She leaned down to say into an invisible ear, "You might try to be of some assistance here. A song perhaps that isn't lewd, a song that really means some­thing."

There was nothing from the chair.

Rosalind sat behind the desk in the overlarge leather chair. "Let me get a piece of foolscap and a pencil. I want to list out all the questions. Then we will try to go about answering them one at a time." She sat down and began writing. He watched her silently until at last she looked up at him. She said very precisely, "The question at the very top of my list, Nicholas, is why did you marry me? You are the only one who knows the answer to that question. Tell me now."

His brain, working at a furious speed until this moment, shut down. Nothing at all came out of his mouth.

She said, her voice utterly expressionless, "Very well, I don't really blame you for keeping quiet. Your answer wouldn't be excessively gratifying to a new bride, would it? So allow me to answer it for you. You married me because you knew if you were ever to figure out this debt business, figure out what exactly was owed to me, figure out exactly what you had to do in order to rid yourself of the wretched dream, and this immense sense of obligation you feel, that the men of your family have felt for many generations, then I had to be close to you, I would have to be tied to you. Yes, I can understand that you would be terrified I would get away from you.

"So as I see it, you married me because you felt you had to." And she wrote it down.

He lunged to his feet. "Bloody hell, no!"

She looked him dead in the eye. He was pale, his eyes blacker than midnight. Slowly, at last, he nodded, and his black eyes were now desolate, his face leached of color. "Yes, that is what happened."

Rosalind slowly rose, the pencil still in her hand. "So much has happened since I met you, so many inexplicable things. I'll wager it's because the two main players are fi­nally together. Do you remember I asked you once if your grandfather was a wizard and you told me you didn't know? But then you told me he knew things, guessed things that no one else would know?"

"I remember," he said. "There was something in him, something magic. I can say that now without feeling contempt for myself."

"I accept that your grandfather was magic. This magic goes all the way back to Captain Jared Vail, it simply has to, and it puts magic in you as well. No, don't argue.

"Now, do you believe this being who saved Captain Jared is some ancestor of mine?"

He didn't want to answer, she saw it clearly, but finally he said, "It is possible."

"All right, if Captain Jared was a wizard, and Rennat the Titled Wizard of the East saved him in order to wring agree­ment from him, then it also makes sense that he knew I was in trouble—or would be in trouble—and in need of saving whenever the time was right. You know, when something bad would happen to me."

Slowly he nodded.

"Do you believe I'm a witch, Nicholas? Do you believe that someone tried to kill me because they recognized me for what I was, recognized I was from this long line of wizards, and was afraid I could harm them in some way? And so this someone tried to destroy the witch, or tried to destroy the spawn of this long-ago wizard?"

"I don't know."

He walked to where she now stood, and placed his hands on her shoulders. "I simply don't know, Rosalind , but I do know that everything is becoming clearer."

"Nothing is clear at all, Nicholas, save that like the Wyverly heiress, you married me because you felt you had to."

"Marrying you was the most important thing I have ever done in my life."

"It didn't matter to you what I wanted."

"You wanted me. That's what you told me. This marriage has been a two-way road, Rosalind . I didn't force you to do anything you didn't want to do."

"But our reasons for marrying each other were quite dif­ferent."

When he said nothing, she continued. "That's beside the point in any case. It didn't matter to you who I was, where I'd come from, what I believed."

"Don't be an idiot. Of course it mattered."

"How were you so certain I was that little girl when you saw me at the ball that night, Nicholas? Surely I bear only the slightest resemblance to the little girl?"

He shrugged but didn't release his hold on her. Was he afraid she'd bolt? Probably. "I knew. I simply knew, there's nothing more I can tell you."

"All right, so you'd found the little girl you'd dreamed about, you were led right to her, is that correct?"

He nodded.

"She was now a woman and that added layers of prob­lems. And your solution was to marry her—me."