Quentin laughed. “Isn’t that true of every man’s fate?”
“No.” Harper looked up at the bulk of Mount St. Helena rising to the east. “Or if it is, I can’t always see it.”
“That’s fortunate, or you’d be very unpopular among your fellow men.”
Pain flashed in Harper’s eyes. “I found that out early on. That’s why I never talked too much. People don’t want to know. I didn’t want to know, either.”
Quentin felt something disagreeably like shame. Who was he to mock this man? Harper had his own tribulations, and he thought he was trying to help. He exposed himself out of a sense of friendship. He thought Quentin was worth the effort.
True friends had been a rare commodity in Quentin’s life, through no one’s fault but his own. He’d either driven them away or run from them, every one. Quentin Forster, the ever-popular, who made people laugh or gasp or shake their heads, but never left them bored.
And he always left.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Some secrets are best left unshared.”
“And some have to be.” Harper looked back at him. “You’ve been running a long time, my friend. Pretty soon you’ll have to stop running and face what’s after you. There’s no other way.”
“You received all this from an axe handle?”
“No.” Harper dangled his hands between his knees. “No.”
Quentin took the handle of the axe in both hands and jerked it free. “Thank you for your advice. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll continue my work—”
Harper stood up. “You’ve come to the right place, Quentin. This is where you make a stand, and fight.”
Quentin swung around, and Harper stepped away from his bared teeth. “Will Johanna come to harm by helping me? Will she?”
“Is that what you’re most afraid of, or is it the way you feel about her?”
“Will she?”
“I don’t see everything. I just know that you and the doc—” He sighed and shook his head. “I’ve told you all I can.”
“You said someone was following me, someone I know. Who?”
Harper took another step back. “I have to rest now.” His voice grew muffled, detached. “I’m tired.”
“Harper—” Quentin reached out, but Harper was already walking back toward the house, stooped and weary. Quentin let him go.
“Your fate depends on the decisions you make,” Harper had said. But it wasn’t just Quentin’s own fate at stake. Harper had told him little about himself he didn’t already know. And as for the business about someone stalking him…
He thought about the many times he’d lost track of hours and events, and his frequent sense of wrongness following those times. Had he committed some reprehensible act that had won him enemies? If so, why hadn’t he sensed pursuit? Loups-garous had too many advantages over humans, at the very least in the keenness of their senses. And he hadn’t met another werewolf in all his journeying across America.
But he was running. Harper was right about that. The soldier had recognized a man running from himself.
The very thing that made him want to run from the Haven was the same element that kept him here, chained to this place by fragile dreams and desperate hunger.
Johanna.
“You’re pining after that woman, and she feels the same. It’s just that neither one of you’ll admit it.”
Hope had an insidious way of popping up in the most unexpected places. Deadly hope, that intensified desire to fever pitch.
Desire obliterated every other need, even the need for escape. The very idea of lying with Johanna was more than he could bear. It raised within him the rapacious predator that wasn’t appeased with stolen kisses in vineyards, or a gentleman’s restraint. It urged him, over and over, to let go. Take what he wanted.
Take Johanna.
She wants you.
He swore foully and slammed the axe into the branch.
Half of the branch spun into the air and flew like a cannon-ball to the edge of the woods. He could prove at least one of Harper’s predictions false.
He raised the axe and brought it down on the branch with all his strength.
Johanna was already to the edge of Silverado Springs before she realized she’d driven the entire distance with no notion of how she’d made the trip.