Too restless to eat, Johanna took a tray in to her father and found him clean, contented, and alert. He had a broad grin for her, and ate with real gusto.
“I’ve been neglecting you, Papa,” she said, helping him cut a piece of cold roast beef into small pieces. “I am sorry.”
He tasted a bite and rolled his eyes. “Sehr gut.” After a moment he looked at her. “Don’t worry, meine Walkürchen. The young man has been very good company.”
Quentin. “He’s been spending much time with you?”
“A fine lad. Knows how to tell a good joke.”
“You like him very much, Papa.”
“Don’t you?”
That old, piercing gaze caught her unaware. “Of course I do. But he is a—” She’d almost said patient, and remembered that her father had thought him a doctor.
“We made a good choice, bringing him in,” Papa said. “He has a healer’s touch.”
A healer’s touch. Her father had always been a keen judge of character. Was he still? There could be no doubt that Quentin had done him only good, as he had May.
But then there was Lewis. And Irene, who was now avoiding him. And today’s disconcerting revelations.
She put her father to bed and went to seek Quentin. He was already waiting for her in the hall.
“We must talk,” he said.
Her mind’s eye filled with a tantalizing vision of Quentin standing naked in the woods, then shifted to the image of his face, snarling and brutal. Suddenly she didn’t want to be alone with him in her office, or anywhere inside four walls.
“Yes,” she said. “Shall we go to the vineyard?”
It was a place of tidily spaced rows of vines pruned into tortured shrubs, each standing alone, well-disciplined troops of obstinate old men laden with burdens of new grapes.
The kind of place where he and Johanna could be together yet totally apart.
Quentin paused to run his fingers over the plump, nearly ripe fruit on the nearest vine, pretending to be fascinated by them. All the while his senses were focused on the woman a few feet away.
Of the little he recalled from his latest memory lapse, one thing stood clear in his mind: Johanna’s arms. Johanna’s touch. Johanna, holding him, comforting him. Johanna’s voice whispering, “I care for you, Quentin.”
What had he done to provoke those words, that tenderness? And what had happened afterward to bring the wariness into her eyes, while Harper watched vigilantly beside her?
He crushed a grape between his fingers and let the pulp fall. “What did I do, Johanna?” he asked. “You told me that I entered another spontaneous trance, but I know very well that’s not all.” He sought her eyes. “Tell me the truth.”
She paused in her own examination of an immature bunch of grapes and looked up. She was too restrained, too emotionless. Hiding something from him.
Something he wasn’t going to like.
“As you know,” she said, “our past few meetings have not been very successful. I haven’t been able to fully hypnotize you, as I did at first. But this time—” Her body tensed as if to take a step toward him, but she reached for the nearest vine instead. “You underwent a sort of transformation. It was as if you were indeed a child again. A child who had suffered much.”
He laughed, torn by mingled relief and dread. “Ah, the agonies of youth. I must have disgusted you.”
“Stop.” She didn’t touch him, but the sheer force of her determination silenced him. “You make light of it, but things happened in your childhood that must have affected you deeply. You told me about your grandfather—”
Her voice faded. Between one moment and the next, his mind went blank. Pictures, like photographs frozen in time, came to him one by one. Greyburn. Playing on the vast lawn with Rowena and Braden. The Great Hall hung with its swords and shields and immense wooden doors carved with images of wolves and men. His mother in bed, slowly dying. The room with the armor, where Grandfather dealt out punishment. And the cellar…
A swell of dizziness sent him grabbing a handful of leaves as if their frailty could support him. They tore from the vine and fluttered to the ground.