Summer Of My Secret Angel (14 page)

Drained of any healthy flush, Charlene
looked close to death with her arms lying lifeless by her side.
With a caring touch, Julian took my mother’s hand. His other hand
stroked first her fingers, then her forehead, wiping long,
colorless strands of hair from her face.

To catch the two in an intimate moment
ranked high on my
never-to-do
list. But for some reason, I
couldn’t tear my eyes away from the scene. Crossing to a weeping
willow, I hid in the long overhanging branches and peeked around
the trunk to catch another glimpse through the glass.

My mother’s eyes remained closed, but her
lips moved with an effort. I’d die to find out what she told him.
The stroking continued for a couple of minutes. All of a sudden,
Charlene’s eyes opened and focused on Julian’s face. Something she
saw there must have caused her pure happiness, for that was what
she radiated with both her face and body.

And then it occurred to me that it wasn’t so
much Julian’s look, but what he did to her with his hands that
stirred a certain change in my mother’s composure. Hadn’t I
experienced a similar stimulation only yesterday?

Charlene propped on her elbows and waited
until he helped her to a sitting position. The lively color of
youth replaced her white face. Her eyes grew wider and lost their
glassy sheen. A spine that had seemed broken only seconds before
straightened. She beamed. Strong and content.

Oh my God
!
Julian was her
personal brand of drug.

As my back sagged against the tree, a breath
pushed out of my lungs. The scene I just witnessed seemed so very
weird. Surreal. What was Julian’s secret? There had to be one.

I peeked around the tree one last time to
catch a glimpse of him talking to my mother while he held her chin
cupped in his hand. Then he tilted his head to gaze through the
window. His eyes caught mine in an instant.

Shock slammed into me.
Bloody hell!
I
couldn’t move.

Julian rose from the sofa, his expression
blank. My nails dug into the bark of the willow, and my heart
knocked against the base of my throat. I swallowed hard. As he held
me with his penetrating stare, I completely forgot why I’d come
there in the first place. The world spun around me. It needed to
stop. Finally, I found the strength to tear my gaze away. I whirled
around and marched back to the vineyard.

Marie cast me a troubled glance when I
stormed past her and Valentine to find a place some fifty feet
away. Knees digging into the ground, I ripped weeds with a whole
new enthusiasm.

Secrets. Secrets.
What was it about
Julian that made everyone feel better around him? Calmer.
Healthier. He could hardly cast a spell over people.

Capable of hypnosis? I shook my head. Dirt
crumbled from the bundle of dandelion I just tore out of the ground
and tossed to the side. With a smudgy arm, I wiped beads of sweat
from my forehead, pushing an angry sigh through gritted teeth.
Damn, there was something weird going on with that guy.

And Charlene? The dragon had awoken from the
dead in the front room. All happy.

All his.

She shouldn’t be his. She was my mother and
about two hundred years too old to be
his
.

Someone laid a hand on my shoulder. At the
touch, I jumped to my feet and shot around. “And why the hell do I
care?” I bellowed before I even got a clear glimpse of who I was
facing.

Julian gazed at me with a stunned
expression. My outburst had made him back off a step. He shrugged,
forlorn.

My nostrils flared as I pushed an angry
breath out. A storm raged inside me. I didn’t know what to do to
keep myself from exploding.

Julian just stared at me. His silken hair
glinted golden in the sun, his eyes shone like the surface of a
calm sea. Inwardly, I whined.
How dare he look so
sweet
?

Oh no, I wouldn’t be fooled this time. A
mental slap helped to tear me out of my passing fancy. His
sweetness must in no way distract me now. He couldn’t work this
calming voodoo on me. I wouldn’t let him. “Stop that!”

“Stop what?”

“Stop weaving your hocus-pocus around
me.”

The left side of his mouth twitched. “Jona,
are you feeling all right?” One of his hands came up to touch my
shoulder again.

A shrill siren shouted
suspicion
inside my head, and I slapped his hand away. “I feel perfectly
fine.” With my finger pointed at his face, I frowned. “I just won’t
let you infect me with your…your…happy feelings. You’re like a
drug.”

He angled his head and questioned my sanity
with an arched eyebrow. “You better put this on, girl.” A straw hat
dangled from his hand. “A sun stroke can be a nasty issue.”

He stuck the hat on my head and tapped the
top. Invisible roots tied me to the ground when he pivoted and
walked away.

The hat shaded my face from the wretched
glare of the sun and shielded my eyes. Julian brought it for me.
I’d be damned if he wasn’t concerned about me. My steely core
turned liquid. He really cared.

But that was not an excuse for his
relationship with my mother, and I sure didn’t need him to care
about me. I needed no one. Hand clenched around the brim, I tore
the hat from my head. Like a flying saucer it shot at Julian’s
back. “I don’t need a bloody hat! What I want is an answer!”

He stopped and turned around. “An answer?”
After he picked up the straw hat from the dirty ground, he wiped
off the dust with one hand. “And just what would you want to know,
Jona?” he drawled.

One heartbeat. Two. I couldn’t bring myself
to mouth the question. Julian waited while seconds ticked by.

Ah hell, what was I afraid of? With a final
deep inhale, I stalked the few feet to him and, on tiptoes,
glowered at his face. “Are you, or are you not, my mother’s
lover?”

Julian cast a nervous glance over his
shoulder like he was afraid someone could’ve heard me. His firm
fingers curled around my upper arm. He pulled me farther away from
where Marie worked the field.

“I’m a lot of things, but certainly not her
lover,” he hissed. “And if you stopped spying on people, you’d
never come up with such stupid ideas.”

“I wasn’t spying,” I snapped and yanked my
arm from his hold. “Not intentionally, anyway.”

He stopped in his tracks when I did and
faced me. “What
then
were you doing in the garden while I
checked on your mother?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Oh, but what kind of relationship I have
with her is
your
business, right?”

“Right! No. Argh!” I raked a hand through my
hair.

It
was
my business. After all, we
were talking about my goddamned mother. “What’s your intention? To
become my stepfather?” A gruesome shiver trailed down my spine.
That could never happen—especially when I felt so annoyingly
attracted to him.

Julian said nothing. Instead his brows
pulled together. He studied me with penetrating eyes.

I retreated a step from his intense stare.
But this little distance could barely block whatever channel he
used to read me. I so hated to be an open book.

“Now, give me that damned hat,” I growled.
The woven straw crunched under my grip as I snatched the hat from
his hand and put it on my head. I stormed away, headed for the
fertilizer container. His amused chuckle bounced off my back in the
heated air.

Done crawling on the ground for today, it
was time to strew some powder again. The floury dust ran through my
cupped hand and bedecked the earth around the shrubs. Alone, the
task was not the most entertaining of jobs but still preferable to
the slouched work of weeding.

I had hardly made it down one row when shoes
crunched the path behind me. I prayed it would be Marie or even
Valentine, but I already knew it was neither of them. To suppress a
pissed growl took some effort as I glanced over my shoulder. Julian
had started tending to the other side of the path.

After a few more steps, he caught up with me
but still avoided my glare. I couldn’t resist casting a sideways
glance at him every now and then.

The ripped hems of his blue jeans scuffed
along the path as he moved. I traced up his long legs,
concentrating a few moments on his lean hips, taking in the
enticing sight. His blue t-shirt hugged his flat stomach and firm
chest, the short sleeves flexed with his biceps. My fingers itched
to trace a line from his neck down his back to the slight curve
just above the waistband of his pants. Heat rushed to my cheeks at
that thought.

While we walked with only about five feet of
footpath between us, my annoyance with him flared off quickly. I
tried to hold on to that anger—it felt more comfortable to be
pissed with someone than discover an unwanted addiction to his
smile.

Maybe I was mistaken. What if all the
hocus-pocus around him was simply the way my subconscious was
dealing with a very scary fact—that I was falling for this guy? And
fast.

The comfortable feeling when I’d opened my
eyes to him this morning surfaced in my mind. As if he was no
ordinary man but my personal island of peace. I craved this man
like nothing else. He said he wasn’t Charlene’s lover, but could he
be trusted?

Every few steps, Julian wiped his dusty hand
on his backside, just to dip his fingers anew into the bucket and
retrieve another handful of powder. The right side of his bottom
was soon covered in white—like mine had been that morning after
he’d groped me.

To remember the feel of his hand on my butt
brought a pack of hot coals to the center of my stomach. Dear God,
I mustn’t even think about it. I took off the hat to fan myself,
then placed it back on, and tried to concentrate on the work.

“Is Quinn really your lover?”

Air whizzed out of my lungs. I shot a
stunned glance at Julian’s face. The question shimmered in his
eyes.

Yeah right, you so want to know that,
don’t you
?
I didn’t reply.

“I didn’t think he was,” Julian said, the
satisfied tone unmistakable.

Even though we barely spoke during the
following few hours, I enjoyed just being near him. Once, as I bent
over and rolled up the hems of my pants to expose my pale calves to
the warming sun, I caught Julian staring me. I tilted my head and
met his gaze. He gave me a tight-lipped grin. Then he returned to
work.

There were not many things I was going to
miss when I took off tonight, but Julian’s smile was definitely one
of them.

We left the vineyard together with the
others at about five in the afternoon. I was starved and welcomed
the smell of food when we entered the kitchen. Marie had decked the
table with cold cuts, vegetables, boiled eggs and bread.

To my great delight I learned that the
dragon was fast asleep in the front room and Marie didn’t dare wake
her just yet. With only the four of us surrounding the table, I
experienced what it must feel like to belong to a normal
family.

My aunt spoke about a new boutique in town
that she would love to visit on the weekend, while Julian playfully
pierced a slice of cucumber on my plate before I could. He shoved
it into his grinning mouth.

I’d just sucked in a breath to tell him off,
when Albert disrupted my feigned anger. “Now, Jona, how do you feel
after your first day out in the vineyard?”

To be fair, I had trouble keeping my eyes
open, but I’d also hardly felt better in my life. “My back aches a
bit,” I admitted, stretching, and gave Marie a sheepish look.
“Throwing that funny flour to the ground was the better idea after
all.”

“You mean the fertilizer?” my uncle
corrected.

I nodded. “I only hope it won’t turn into
dough with the next rain.”

Now he and his wife laughed while Julian
shook his head.

“It sure won’t,” Albert said. “It is nothing
like flour at all.”

“What exactly is it?” I asked.

My uncle’s eyes cut to Julian. “Boy, did you
not tell her? You spent the entire day out there together.”

And what a fine day it was.

Julian shrugged, swallowing a bite of bread.
“She never asked.”

While his nonchalant attitude made me and my
aunt chuckle, Albert tsked at him. Then his glance returned to me.
“What you and Julian did today was supply the plants with minerals
and vitamins to grow healthy and strong. You could have dissolved
the powder in water and poured it over the roots. But to carry a
can is a lot more exhausting than to carry a bucket with powder. To
the plants it makes no difference.”

Excitement rode Albert’s voice when he spoke
about his vines. It made him happy to tell me all about the
different types of grapes and how the geographical location
affected the taste of the wine later.

That evening I found I could show the man a
good time just by listening to him, even long after we’d finished
our dinner.

“Tomorrow, when we are out again, I will
show you how to operate the tester and you can do scans of the
ground if you like.” My uncle beamed at me.

I felt a painful sting in my chest, knowing
there would be no tomorrow for me here. I’d already be gone and on
my way back to England when my family woke the next morning.

1. A NEST OF BIRDS
   

THE FIRST LIGHT of a new day warmed my face.
My nose itched and I rubbed my finger on the tip while forcing my
eyes to open. Throbbing pain in my forehead reminded me of Julian’s
advice to wear a hat on a scorching day in the open field. A warm
drop of drool rolled down my chin. I wiped it off with the back of
my hand and raised my head from the hard surface.
What the
hell…

Where was I?

As I straightened my stiff back in the
chair, a long yawn escaped me. My muscles rebelled but my joints
clicked into place with a good stretch. When my arms sank back to
the desk, I spotted my work from last night. A half-finished
farewell letter addressed to Marie, crumpled from my tired body
resting on it all night.