Page 38 of I Know You

“Are you saying that to make me like you?” I tease.

He squeezes my hand. “What else would make you like me?”

“Do you have a fondness for puppies?”

“Of course.”

I laugh at the earnest expression he gives me. “What kind of charity?”

“For orphans from the influenza epidemic,” Quint explains. We start another circuit around the fountain, barely paying attention to the people walking around us, which makes guilt at being angry at Ben fizzle around inside me. I put up such a fight, but I’m so engrossed in Quint that I’m not doing what I insisted I was capable of. “It’s been mostly girls of late that my mother finds houses for—people who need maids and are willing to train them, business associates who are willing to hire them as secretaries, things like that.”

I ignore the annoyance at the idea that all these women are capable of is housekeeping and typing. We’ll talk about it later, a voice says, and I shake it away. It has the surety that we will have so much time together.

“It sounds wonderful,” I say instead.

“You’re very—you would be very good at it as well.” He laughs. “Am I going mad?” His voice is low, as though he didn’t mean to ask out loud.

“I suspect we both are.”

“Then perhaps we ought to just enjoy it.”

He winks and then leads me up the steps of the fountain, closer to the bubbling water. We stand there together, watching the ripples wave across the surface. Like the night before, I feel his eyes on me, intense. Suffocating and addicting at the same time. I avoid looking back at him, afraid of the undertow of these sudden feelings.

“Clara.”

The depth to his voice forces me to turn to him. He reaches up to graze my cheek with his fingers and then cups it in his hand, drawing me closer.

“Quint … you can’t do this.” But I lean into his touch, and a magnet pulls me closer so that his breath brushes over my face.

“When I was six, my parents took me out west for the summer,” he says in a low voice, his gaze roving over my face with wonder. “To The Villa. There was a little girl with hazel eyes and dark blonde hair, and my parents say we were inseparable for weeks. I had almost forgotten her until I saw you in my father’s library.”

I remember the boy on the stairs, the memory that confused me in 1901, and my heart rate rockets faster than even the excited beat it goes at having Quint so close.

“Their last name was Granville.”

His whisper, like a confession, shocks me like a bolt of lightning.

I shake my head. “No, it must be a coincidence.” But my voice is unsure. My thoughts are even more uncertain. “It’s impossible.” It means that my parents time-traveled. Or that I somehow traveled on my own and was miraculously okay? That’s even more ludicrous.

Aunt Vi?

I press a palm to my forehead.

“As impossible as knowing I have loved you my whole life?” he asks. He leans close to me, hand on my cheek, staring into my eyes.

I let him kiss me.

It makes no sense, but I know Quint. Our kiss is like a homecoming. The way his fingers gently press on the back of my neck and in my hair, and how they make heat dance through my cheeks, is familiar. The movement of his lips over mine is something I’ve done over and over, yet it’s new and exciting at the same time, and I can’t explain any of it. But his kiss is delirious and breathtaking, and it threatens to consume me.

When we break away, I can only marvel at him. How could I know, centimeter by centimeter, how to kiss Quint as though I’ve done it a thousand times when I’ve only met him the day before?

Wonder plays across his expression too. “How can that be…?” he asks in a gentle, awe-filled voice, as though the same incredible recognition threads through him as well. “It’s as if I’ve done that every day of my life for sixty years,” he whispers.

I take a deep breath. “You’re scaring me, Quint Allen.” Yet my emotions focus and settle instead.

He brushes a finger over my cheek once again, his smile returning. “And you are reassuring me.”

We meet with Ben and William not much later as they make another circuit around the fountain. I’m still so shaken by our first kiss—no, first is wrong—that I don’t protest when Quint suggests he and I return to have dinner at Gracewoods. Ben even looks relieved, and guilt returns until I recall why he’s relieved: he doesn’t believe me capable of the assignment the task force gave us.