"Selena's . . . family," she managed finally.
The thumb-sucking girl?Lara?gasped. She slowly withdrew her thumb from her mouth and gazed at Selena, her gray eyes glistening with sudden tears. Selena remembered the word for that look.
Longing. Selena understood longing. It was what she felt for Ian.
Andrew laughed. "Yes, I rather suppose we are your family."
Selena tried to draw her gaze away from Lara's, but she couldn't. She saw such pain and fear and hope in
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the child's eyes. For the first time, she understood that here, in this great and lonely house by the sea, she was not the only lost soul.
Chapter Eight
Evening fell in silken folds of lavender across the sky. In the distance, a tall, white church spire caught the last rays of the setting sun. Newly blossoming trees clung to the sides of the narrow gravel road, their leaf-studded limbs fanned out, wooden fingers tapping on the carriage's roof.
Ian sat deep in the squabbed burgundy velvet seat, his knees tucked carefully against the door. A cloudy pane of glass was his window to the outside world, and through tired eyes, he watched the scenery crawl past. The town was an endless stream of small, well-tended white clapboard houses on squares of spring grass, their flanks guarded by a battalion of evergreen trees. In the center of it all sat a glassy blue lake, the type of lake that cried out for ice-skaters in winter and picnics in the hot days of summer.
The carriage hit a pothole and quaked to the right. Ian slammed into the wall, and Johann's knees rammed into his in an electric touch.
The images hit Ian before he had recovered his balance. A pine coffin, bare and unadorned ... a pale, dark-haired woman strapped to a dirty-sheeted bed, writhing, whimpering Johann's name through her tears . .. a door slamming shut, a lock turning with a click.
And this time there was more than just the concrete mental pictures. There was a feeling, an emotion so all-
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consuming and powerful that Ian felt jolted back in his seat.
Sadness. Grief that could swallow a man, turn his soul inside out.
Ian's head snapped up. He found Johann staring at him. As usual, the younger man wore a sardonic half-smile. "Going to read my future, Herr Doctor?"
Ian searched Johann's thin, angular face, stared into his watery green eyes. His heart was pumping so fast, he could hear it, and the familiar headache was a dull thudding behind his eyes.
Johann's sarcastic smile faded. He pulled back, swung his legs farther away from Ian's. "You did read my thoughts. I was thinking of my wife."
Ian knew he shouldn't say anything, should retreat into the icy silence that had been his world for so long. But he couldn't manage it. He was too shaken by what he had seen and felt. "I had no idea ..."
Johann's whol
e face seemed to soften. For once, there was no cynicism in his eyes, no bitter curve to his lips. "Like everyone else, you heard it was a scandal." He shook his head. "It was a crime."
Silence slipped between them, less comfortable than before. "You know." Johann said the words so quietly, Ian wondered if the man had meant to speak at all. "I fell in love with Marie the first moment I saw her."
Ian didn't know what to say. "She must have been everything you'd imagined her to be."
"No." Johann turned, stared out the cloudy window. His shoulders rounded forward, his head banged tiredly against the cushioned wall. "She was different, my little Marie. People called her a whore?of course, she was one. But to see the truth of her, I had to look deeper. Past the heavy cosmetics and obscene costumes and practiced responses." He turned back to Ian, and there was no mistaking the tears in his eyes. "I had to see her with my heart and tell the world to go to hell. When she
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got sick with the syphilis, I stayed with her, nursed her to the end."
"And look what it's cost you."
"My death?" Johann laughed quietly, a surprisingly unaffected and honest sound. "If that's all you felt when you touched me, Ian. Touch again. The good memories far outweigh the bad, and loving her was worth any price. I died the moment she did.... My body simply doesn't know it."