Page 59 of A Winding Wave of Magic
“Because you’re so quiet.” My cheeks heated under the force of his glare.
“Ah.” He tugged at the collar of his shirt. Fidgeting again, I noted. “No, I was just thinking how much you look like your grandfather.”
Now it was my turn to jerk. “My grandfather?”
“The black hair.”
“How do you know what my grandfather looked like? Both of mine were dead before I was born.”
Now it was his turn to flush. “Er, I’ve seen pictures.”
He rolled his jaw and looked away again. I sniffed and reread the description of steakau poivrefor the fourth time. Gran had shown her former lover to him but not to me? She hadn’t kept any pictures in the house—some superstition about how the images steal the soul. Whenever I asked about my family history, she simply told me to look in the mirror, and in the meantime, the stories I wanted would find me themselves.
I always assumed that was through her clothing or other items in the house. Did she mean now, through her lawyer?
I waited for Jonathan to continue, but he studiously examined the edge of his empty water glass instead, even buffing out a smudge with the tip of his napkin.
“Your wine, sir?” The waitress reappeared, holding a bottle face out toward Jonathan.
He gave a curt nod, and she poured a sample into his glass and waited while he tasted it.
“Yes, that’s fine,” he said, setting it back down so she could pour us each a glassful.
We ordered our dinners, and then sipped for a moment, eyeing each other over the rims.
“Well, what about you, Captain Taciturn?” I asked, suddenly tired of the fact that this person knew immeasurably more information about me than I did about him. My patience was starting to run out.
“Captain Taciturn?” His expression widened into the kind of smile that won’t let you look away, and I couldn’t help but smile back. “Has a nice ring to it.”
“You come, you go, you tell me absolutely nothing about yourself other than the fact that you were somehow best friends with my reclusive grandmother and that you happen to knowwhat her lover, who by all accounts was never photographed, looks like. So, who is Dr. Jonathan Lynch, attorney and particle physicist?”
I pronounced the name in the same rounded syllables of his accent, which earned me one arched sandy brow and the scratching of a fingernail over the tablecloth in short, mechanical spurts of three.
“What would you like to know?”Scratch, scratch, scratch.
I stared at the fingers. “For starters, do you always fidget this much?”
Immediately the hand was withdrawn to his lap, and I was rewarded with a stalwart frown. “The condition seems to worsen in stressful situations.”
“Do I stress you out, Jonathan?” I was baiting him, but I just couldn’t help it. It was nice to see that polished exterior ruffled.
“In ways you couldn’t possibly understand.” He took a long sip of his wine and continued to cradle the bowl close while he spoke. “You do try your best, don’t you?”
At that, I reddened, so he kindly changed the subject.
“I was born in Italy. Schooled in Britain, summered in Ireland, then lived there…for a time. A bit of a vagabond, I suppose.”
“Italy? Really?”
“Northern,” he said with the kind of exasperation that told me I wasn’t the only person to question his origins. “Near the Austrian border. Most of the people in the village speak a bastardized version of German now. I boarded at a school in the Lakes District from the age of eleven or so, and thus…” He gestured his hands in a “ta-da” motion.
“Is your family Italian too?”
“My mother is from that village. My father was English, though.” His mouth pressed into a tight line, and he took a long sip of wine before pouring himself more.
I frowned. The mercurial behavior was maddening, and I wasn’t used to having to decipher emotions based on something so abstract as body language. “Now what did I do?”
He sighed and shut his eyes a moment before refocusing them on me, the effect of which was instantaneous. I felt a chill down my neck that wasn’t just linked to the fact that sorcerers could easily manipulate air temperature. Perhaps I was the mercurial one.
