“I’m not an infant, Doctor, and you aren’t a grandmother yet, unless I’m very much mistaken.” He grabbed her hand and turned it palm up. The hand was lightly callused and strong, but her fingers were tapered and graceful. The fingers of an artist. Fingers that would heal a wound or stroke naked skin with equal skill…
“Ah, yes,” he intoned with an air of dramatic mystery. “I see that you have a long life ahead of you. You let nothing get in the way of your ambitions. But unexpected adventure awaits. A great challenge. And romance.” He drew his finger over the creases in her palm. “A man has come into your life.”
She reclaimed her hand without haste. “If that is the best you can do, Mr. Forster, you need additional instruction in fortune-telling.”
Was that a twinkle in her blue eyes? Did she have a sense of humor, after all?
“Alas, the gypsies who raised me are far away.”
“Then you’d do better to read your own palm, Mr. Forster. You came very near death.”
“I doubt it, Doctor. I’m not easy to kill.”
Her face grew even more serious, and her voice reminded him of a professor at Oxford who he’d regarded as a personal gadfly. “The effects of inebriety are cumulative,” she said. “How long have you been drinking?”
He hid a wince. It wasn’t a subject he cared to discuss. “How long have you been a doctor?”
She gazed into his eyes, holding him with sheer will as another werewolf might do. “I do not think you understand, Mr. Forster. You were suffering from acute delirium tremens, a condition that is often fatal. You have been with us for four days, most of which time you have been unconscious or raving. I am frankly amazed to see you capable of rational communication.”
Raving. “I suppose I made a nuisance of myself,” he said. “What did I rave about?”
“Most of your words were incomprehensible.” She cocked her head. “But there was a pattern. When I first found you in a field about a mile from here, you tried to speak to me. You warned me of some evil, that I was in danger.”
He shivered. He didn’t remember it. He didn’t want to. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I must have sounded quite mad.”
“You have no recollection of this.”
He shook his head. “Unfortunately not.”
“What is the last thing you do remember?”
“I was staying in San Francisco. I won a bit of money in a game. I was planning to catch the ferry to Oakland.”
“You are now near the town of Silverado Springs, in the Napa Valley, some miles north of either San Francisco or Oakland,” she said. “Do you often experience these periods of amnesia?”
“Sometimes.” What did they say about confession being good for the soul? It certainly seemed to be helping now. “Generally when I have a bit too much to drink.” And half the time I don’t even remember the drinking.
“It seems I owe you a great deal,” he said, smiling to charm her away from more questions. “It was kind of you to take me in and look after me. At least I can pay you for your care.” He reached for the drawer.
“We can discuss fees later, Mr. Forster.”
“Quentin, please.”
“Quentin,” she said, in that schoolmistress tone. “Make an attempt to grasp that you have been suffering a severe condition for nearly a week, that you have apparently lost any memory of a portion of your life, and that you may not survive another bout. Such a state is not to be taken lightly—”
“Do you take anything lightly, Johanna?”
“Not where a life is concerned. And you are fortunate I do not, or I should have left you in the field.”
Beneath her dogged assertiveness he detected the one thing she didn’t want him to see—a woman’s inevitably soft heart. The sort of heart that had caused her to take in a drunken stranger and care for him with no promise of reward.
And he knew his own strength. If he’d been raving, he might have become dangerous. Dangerous to her and anyone around her.