He was playing with her again, and she could not simply dismiss it as she wished to. “My passion is for my work, as was my father’s.”
“Did he love your mother?”
She pushed to her feet, brushing off her skirt with more vigor than was strictly necessary. “Yes. As I loved her. You may rest assured that I have known love, Mr. Forster.”
He stood up behind her, close enough that his breath teased her hair. “I never doubted that you’ve given love. I only wonder if you have kept enough for yourself.”
His words had the unexpected effect of thrusting her into the past—her past. In an instant she was back in the parlor of the house in Philadelphia, and Rolf was the one standing behind her.
Chapter 10
You must choose, Johanna: lock yourself away in this unwomanly profession or become what you were meant to be.” His hands settled on her hips, molded themselves to her breasts. “This body was meant to be loved and bear children. Don’t deny what you are—”
She turned to face him. “I cannot abandon what it is in me to be. Of course I wish to marry you, and to have children. But I am good at what I do. I can help others who desperately need it.” She met his gaze steadily. “Why must I be the one to choose? Would you give up being a physician for my sake ?”
He laughed. “Always so rational. You pretend to be a man. Do you have a heart like a normal woman, or is it a machine within your breast?”
His accusation hurt as little had done since Mama’s death. She’d never believed it would come to this—that he, a doctor like herself, who’d once encouraged her in her studies, should betray her now and demand such a sacrifice.
“I wish only to be your equal, Rolf. Your partner—”
He pulled her roughly into his arms and kissed her: a hard, punishing kiss that bruised her mouth. It left her cold and dead inside. This was not the Rolf she knew.
Or had she simply been wrong from the start? Her skill was a threat to him. He did not want her to succeed. If she had used her vaunted intelligence, she should have seen the signs, the symptoms that had led to this moment.
“You will never be my equal, Johanna,” Rolf said, pushing away from her, “or any man’s, though you pretend to be one. And no other man will want what you are becoming. You’ll be lonely the rest of your life, old and barren and dried up inside.”
She understood then that he was right. She’d run into many obstacles during her years of study, confronted many men who thought she defied the very role God had intended for all of her sex.
Rolf had changed… and so had she.
So be it.
Her face felt stiff, a mask of marble without life. “If you and the world ask me to choose between my heart and my intellect, then I shall do so, Rolf. I will become the very thing you believe me to be. And I will live quite happily without the kind of love you offer.”
“Johanna.”
She jerked back to herself. Not Rolf’s voice, but Quentin’s. His hands rested on her shoulders.
“You were very far away,” he said. “Who was he?”
Had she spoken aloud? “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You were thinking of a man. I can tell.”
“It is unimportant.” She tried to step free, but his grip tightened.
“Who was he?”
“The subject cannot matter to you, Quentin. You are my patient—”
“Did you love him?”
“Let me go.”
He did so, but only after a long hesitation. His unwillingness was palpable.
A shiver of alarm raced down Johanna’s spine. Even so small a change in Quentin—the tiniest hint of possessiveness—reminded her that she didn’t truly know him.
“I am responsible for helping you,” she said. “You are not responsible for me.” She raised her voice. “We’re returning to the house, everyone.”
They answered with various degrees of enthusiasm and trooped back the way they’d come. Quentin had nothing to say, but kept to himself in a kind of brooding silence.