Instead, she’d learned something about herself that was difficult to face, a sign of personal weakness she couldn’t afford.
Her disciplined mind had failed her. She’d given in to the desires of her body, as witless as any callow girl.
She rested her head in her hands. How ironic. For Quentin, who must find this sort of thing so easy, the dalliance was forgotten in posthypnotic amnesia. While she, who had abandoned all thought of courtship or love, found herself plunged into the maelstrom all over again.
She picked up her pen with a shaking hand and realized it was the one Quentin had broken. One edge was sharp enough to cut. She swept the pieces to the side of her desk, located another pen in a drawer, and laid out Quentin’s casebook.
Initial observations after first hypnotic session: Patient suffers from delusions of lycanthropy: consequence of former experience in army and childhood? Prognosis:
Her fingers ached from her fierce grip on the pen. She let it fall. No amount of staring at what she’d written could make Quentin Forster fit neatly between the lines.
Only curing him would bring an end to this… this madness. But cure him she must, no matter how long it took.
Only then could she cure herself.
Quentin slipped out of the house on silent feet, bound for the forest on the hill.
He passed through the garden and jumped the low whitewashed fence without meeting any of the other patients. For that he was grateful; his mouth felt as empty of words as a spring gone dry of water. The only thing it was good for now was kissing Johanna.
And that had been a mistake.
The land rose abruptly from the Haven’s little niche of the Napa Valley. Live oaks and pines marched up the hills and into low mountains, another kind of haven for the wild creatures that made this sylvan paradise their home.
Quentin removed his shoes and stockings a few yards into the woods. He sighed as his feet sank into the soil, made up of the memories of countless autumns and the richly scented dust of pine. He smelled some small animal nearby, a rabbit frozen in fear of a potential hunter. At the base of a massive, red-barked conifer, a larger animal had left its clawed mark.
Life was all around him—life other than human. A life he’d all but left behind. He needed to be reminded of it now.
He started up the steep hillside, drinking in the forest through his feet and with every breath. This country wasn’t like Northumberland, with its bare, broad moors and patches of ancient woodland. But it would do. It would more than suffice.
If he could find the courage to Change.
A faint path stretched out before him, worn into the prosperous, sun-dappled earth. Deliberately he left it, breaking into a lope that was as natural to him as superhuman senses. He leaped a small, deep ravine that carried the scent of recent moisture. The steep incline beyond challenged him to a faster pace, and he went up and up until his muscles burned and his clothing was damp with perspiration.
At the top of the hill he paused. The Valley spread out below, a patchwork of vineyards and fields with another range of hills on the opposite side, dominated by the crag-topped Mount St. Helena. Civilization held in the arms of the wilderness.
The image made him groan. His mind was full of similar comparisons, every one having to do with tangled bodies and naked flesh.
His flesh. Johanna’s body. A body made for loving. And a mouth…
Bloody hell. He still wasn’t sure what had made him do it. The decision to kiss Johanna had been spur of the moment, sprung fully grown from a source unbound by reason. He tried to remember his chain of thought beforehand: had he meant it as a joke on the too-serious doctor, a pleasant experiment to test the full extent of his interest in her… and hers in him? To see just how far the Valkyrie would melt when she thought she was safe?
That he’d been in a trance for some time he had no doubt. But something had snapped him out of it, and he’d wakened to find Johanna gone. That was when the compulsion struck him, as if he’d temporarily become someone else. Someone who didn’t let moral compunction stand in the way of his desires.