The Fake Dating Spell novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Hers

By evening the anger had come.

It came late and all at once.

Wynne sat in the town house kitchen with a cup of tea gone cold, and she wanted to throw it through the window.

"Two years," she said, and set the cup down hard.

"I know."

"I made him famous. I sat up nights writing his margins, and I thought I was in love."

"You were in love," Tavish said. "That part was real. He just built a cage around it."

She put her head in her hands.

The thread lay on the table between them, steady and gold, humming faintly.

"I keep waiting to feel it," she said into her palms. "The pull. Every time I think of his face I wait for it."

"And?"

"Nothing. It's gone. It's like a tooth that's been pulled."

Tavish said nothing.

She looked up.

He was standing at the stove with his back half to her, his shoulders set.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing."

"Tavish."

"Wynne."

He turned.

"You are free. For the first time in two years, you are free. I won't be the next thing you have to climb out of."

"Is that what you think this is?"

"I think the spell pushes us together whether we like it or not."

He looked at the floor.

"I think you've been shut in a tower and I'm the first door that opened."

He stared at the table.

"If you wanted to end it now, I would let you go."

He swallowed.

"I'd find another way to keep the Keep."

"Would you?"

"I would."

"You would lose your four hundred men."

"I would."

She stood up and walked around the table.

He did not move, and she stopped so close that she had to tilt her head back to see him.

"Do you know what I've been thinking all day?" she said.

"No."

"That I want to take off all my clothes and sit on your lap."

She held up her wrist.

"And watch the thread, to see if it gets brighter or dimmer."

His breath caught.

"The ward is gone," Wynne said.

"I don't love him. I don't want him. I'm angry and I'm sad and I'm free, and I want you."

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