“Why don’t you go?” Mikah said. To Jace’s surprise, she was still speaking to Waters. In that moment, he expected Mikah to ask the same question of him and to explain to him that she was happy as she was.
Waters didn’t seem as surprised, but went immediately to her side. “Mikes …”
“Go back to the party,” she insisted. “There’s plenty of time still and I’m sure everyone’s waiting for you.”
“I don’t want to leave you here like this.”
“I’ll be fine.” She looked up then, her brilliant eyes meeting Jace’s across the room. “Won’t I be fine?”
“I would never harm her,” Jace assured Waters gravely.
Though there was still doubt in his eyes, Waters relented to Mikah’s additional prodding. After a warning look to Jace, he said his goodbyes, bending to whisper in Mikah’s ear before kissing her cheek.
“I love you, too.”
Her whispered words were barely audible, but Jace felt them tear at his heart. This had all been a mistake. The very last thing he wanted to do was hurt her. To cause her pain. If she were truly happy …
Jace looked around the loft again, recalling Waters’s own insinuations. What if Mikah wasn’t truly happy? What if, like him, this Waters was prepared to sacrifice the affection he clearly held for Mikah for what he thought might benefit her? Jace had to know. It was what had brought him here against his better judgment, the need to assure himself of her happiness and well-being.
Watching him warily, Mikah bent, unzipping her tall black boots and pulling them off.
Jace looked down at her small feet, watching as she curled her toes inside her stockings as she lingered near the bedroom door, her hands clasped nervously in front of her. His eyes traveled familiarly up her length until he reached her face once more. Again he wondered at the difference in her that wasn’t merely the result of modern clothing. Her cheeks were still pink from the cold but her wide eyes dominated her face, and Jace realized that that she was wearing makeup. Hero had been a natural beauty, fresh of face, but with the cosmetics, she was stunning. Hers eyes, lips, and cheeks were emphasized and enhanced, giving her a more glamorous appearance.
But with that allure came a distance, a separation that made it difficult for Jace to see his Hero beneath, yet Jace knew that he would not be able to leave until he knew for certain.
“You know me.”
“Yes.” The word escaped her lips easily, but she shook her head in denial of the word. “No. No, I don’t. Who are you?”
“My name is Jason MacAuliffe. Jace, and aye, you do know me.”
“No,” she insisted, wringing her hands together. Her eyes slid over him, taking in every detail. “You are a stranger to me.”
“We both know that you and I have never been strangers,” he said softly.
Chapter Forty-Five
That thick Scottish brogue Mikah remembered so well slid seductively down her spine, sending goosebumps prickling across her flesh. God, it was him. As much as she wanted to deny it, there was no coincidence imaginable that could set a scene such as this one.
She studied him now, so much closer than he’d been when she had first seen him on the ramparts. When she had heard—no, felt—her name, Hero’s name, being whispered. Nothing could have prepared her to see him there. A ghost, an echo. Closer now than he had been in the hall, when she had become so alarmingly aware of him in the space of a single breath.
Mikah had thought him to be identical to Ian Conagham, but he wasn’t exactly. Ian had been only thirty, while this man was older by more than a couple years. There was a tension in his jaw, a seriousness in his eyes that was not Ian’s. The same but different.
“On the ramparts. Why did you run?”
“I thought …” Mikah swallowed deeply and finally took a hesitant step toward him even as he walked toward her. She watched him come, noticing the slight limp that was at odds with that proud military bearing she remembered and wondering at it. Nervously she twisted her ring around her finger. Hero’s wedding ring. A symbol of the sudden love that had found and ensnared them. But it wasn’t her love, she mentally repeated the words that had become her mantra. It had been theirs.
What she’d had was a glimpse, a taste for herself. She needed to remember that, but it was so very difficult when her Ian was standing in front of her. “When I saw you, I thought I had finally truly lost it. I saw you and I saw all the wishful thinking, all the insanity of the past couple months there. When I left Cuilean after the auction, I was determined to let it go. To let Ian go.”
“To let me go.”
“No, Ian,” she said firmly, her mantra singing in her ears. “You are not him. Ian is long dead.” Mikah’s throat tightened around the word. Through all of this, she had never said that so blatantly before. Ian had been gone, taken, lost, but never dead.
Mikah tore away from his gaze, crossing to the windows that overlooked Lake Michigan. Pushing open a window, she welcomed the rush of winter air. It lifted her hair, cooled her flaming cheeks, and dried the tears that sprang to her eyes. Ian. As she hadn’t since her return from Scotland, Mikah let herself fully remember him once more.
In her mind she heard the lilting strains of a waltz. Their waltz.
It tore at her heart.
Mikah felt him behind her, felt the familiar heat of his body against hers. Felt his hands slide around her waist and turn her until her body was pressed against his. Felt his heart beat against her cheek, his lips brush against her ear. “Don’t cry, my love. I am here.”
And she wanted him to be.
Just the feel of him against her was achingly dear. Her arms slid around his waist and curled up his back as his came around her to pull her trembling body close. He felt the same as she remembered and different at the same time. Stronger, more muscular beneath his tailored dress shirt and sport coat. Yet so was she, and her body still fit against him just so. He lifted her hand from his chest, raising it to his mouth.
It was a gentle kiss he placed there, but then he moved her hand back and forth across his lips, a caress that sparked a remembrance. When he pressed another kiss to her palm, Mikah shuddered helplessly, remembering when Ian had done the very same that day by the pagoda. Looks were one thing. Words, another. But actions?
Mikah’s arms slid around him, clutching him to her. In turn, his arms were binding her so tightly to him that she could scarcely breathe. She did not care. The chemistry was there, his heart beating against hers so comfortably. He even smelled so right. “Ian?”
“Aye, Hero. I’m here.”
Mikah tilted her head back to look at him, caught the light of love burning in his chocolate gaze, and then his lips captured hers in a tender kiss, full of longing. With sudden joy, Mikah returned his kiss. Heat flared between them. The heat of passion, of love, and of rediscovery.
She smoothed a hand over his chest, and his hand came up to cover hers. He caressed gently and paused, fingering the ring she wore. He pulled away and looked down at her hand.
“Where did you get this?” Mikah started at the hoarsely spoken words. She could hear his wonder. Feel his emotion at the sight of the ring that had so briefly bound them.
“It was right where we … they left it.” Those words, her hesitation and alteration of those words, brought Mikah back to reality. What had she been thinking? That this Jason—Jace—could somehow fill the gap Ian had left in her heart? Nothing had changed.
Mikah drew away from him in horror. “I think you should go.”
Jace frowned, clearly puzzled by her sudden chill. “Go?”
“Leave.” Mikah went to the door and opened it, pointing to the hallway.
“Hero …”
“I’m not Hero!” she exploded. Her hands fisted at her sides as she stared at him. “She’s dead. They are both dead! This,” she wrenched the ring from her finger and stared down at the sparkling emerald. “This is just a fantasy for us. Someone else’s reality, and I won’t be sucked back into it
again!” She threw the ring at him and he caught it, his fingers curling around it. “Now go!”
Mikah buried her face in her hands. She felt him approach rather than heard him. The heat of his body neared and warmed. In spite of her shaky resolve, Mikah couldn’t help but shiver.
He walked past her, and part of Mikah cried out not to let him go, but she knew that she had to do what was best. And what was best was not to fall back into the madness that had beckoned to her for the past three months. The door closed, and a moment later, Mikah felt warm hands encircling her wrists and she almost sobbed in relief … or in defeat. She wasn’t certain which one.
Forcing her hands down, he spoke softly. “Look at me, my love.”
The command was such a gentle one that Mikah could not deny him. She opened her eyes and met his familiar dark gaze. That chocolaty warmth was still there. So like Ian, his eyes, his kindness, and unfortunately, his determination. A tear slid down her cheek.
“Why do you deny it?” His brogue was low and husky but there was pain beneath it. Pain that was on par with her own. “I am Ian Conagham as surely as you are Hero, his wife.”
Still Mikah did not dare agree with that. As much as she had fantasized of a moment like this, as much as it would be so easy to do, she wasn’t Hero any more than this man was the Ian she had known. They were different people with different pasts, different interests. If they were to do this only to be disappointed in those differences, her heart would be broken all over again. She didn’t want that. It had taken her three months to accept the truth. Ian, her Ian, was dead and buried.
If this man ended up being nothing more than a poor substitute … if she ended up being the same for him, Mikah feared she would never recover.
I can’t. I can’t, she thought. Another tear fell. Then another.
“Do you think I cannot understand your fears?” he asked, wiping the tears away with the pad of his thumb and showing all the patience and intuition Ian ever had. “I would imagine that I have felt each one of them myself. It is why I did not come straight away. I feared that you would not be the woman I remembered.”
“And I’m not.”
“It is not only the person we remember, it is the essence of their soul,” he told her quietly, “and I believe that has not changed. You are the same. We are the same together.”
“It is crazy to think that our lives were meant to be influenced by theirs,” she denied.
“But it was not just their lives. That was my life.” His brogue grew thicker as he spoke. “Do ye think I look back and think, ‘Ian said this’ or ‘Ian did that’? I did those things. I was the one who held ye for hours in the caves. It was my arms that burned in pain, my heart that was torn apart with the fear that ye were going to die.”
Tears sprang to Mikah’s eyes, burning as she blinked them back. Her heart beat harder against her ribs, as if her chest were constricting it tightly.
“I was the one filled with incredulity that I might fall in love with a woman so quickly when I had never thought to fall in love at all,” he went on. “I might have started out apart from him, but once I came to accept it, the actions were his and mine together. The memories I have are my own. They aren’t merely the residue of their lives.”
Mikah felt much the same. Hero’s life had been hers. She just wished she could be as confident in a serendipitous future as Jace. “How can you be so sure?”
Jace took her hand and led her to the sofa, hoping to ease the pain in his leg and concentrate on her. She sat heavily and took the wine glass he handed her without hesitation. While she drank, Jace went to close the window, thinking carefully over the words he would say, knowing his future was hanging in the balance.
“I live near Cuilean,” he paused and chuckled. “I almost said, ‘did you know that?’ in an almost rhetorical manner.” Jace took the other glass of wine, lifting it for a healthy swallow. “That was actually the worst of it for me. I grew up near Cuilean, not an hour away. We used to visit there when I was a child, my family and I. It fascinated me always.”
“I guess I can relate to that,” she said, and Jace understood that she must have had similar incidents, growing up.
“Each time I was there, I was assailed by a sense of déjà vu.” Again she nodded, and, encouraged, Jace continued. “When I first … went back, shall we say? I thought I was merely back in Scotland and close to home. Then it was but a dream of a place I loved, but entrapped as I was within this other person, I was sure that I had gone mad. I fought it, refusing to accept any of it. For a month I thought I’d been delivered straight into a fiendish hell, a delusional metamorphosis of a half-forgotten history lesson. Until Hero came to Cuilean.”
“You were there a month before that?”
Distracted from his tale, Jace looked at her in surprise. “Weren’t you?”
Mikah shook her head. “No, I was in Glasgow working with my job and was hit by a car. I woke up and was told I had been hit by that carriage.”
“Only just then?” he asked, but remembering Hero’s confusion at the time, some of her words, he came to a startling conclusion. As brief as it was, for a time Mikah had had control. A control he wished he would have had many times.
“Yes,” Mikah answered, “and after that night … that last night at Cuilean, I woke up again in Glasgow, still on the street where I had been hit.”
Taking a seat next to Mikah on the sofa, Jace waited a heartbeat to see if she would shy away from him again. When she didn’t, he reached out and took her hand in his. Her flesh was cold and he warmed her hand between his. “You weren’t badly injured?”
Mikah stiffened but didn’t pull away. Just like Hero when they had first met, skittish, denying their attraction. And she maintained that they were so very different!
“No, just my head but …”
Jace stilled. “What?”
“Nothing, my dad told me afterward that the paramedics said …”
“That you had died?” he finished for her, latching on to the commonality. “For how long? How long were you gone?”
“Sixty-eight seconds.”
Chapter Forty-Six
Sixty-eight seconds that changed my life.
“I was gone for more than three minutes, they told me,” Jace said thoughtfully, then answered her unspoken question. “I was in a crash. My helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan. They said it took more than three minutes to revive me.”
“So we died and stepped into our past lives,” she concluded though her heart had almost halted once again at his words, and Jace nodded to confirm that that was his deduction as well. “The cane?” she asked with evident concern. “Are you all right?”
“Some metal fragments were embedded in my thigh,” he said. “They were afraid that I might lose my leg.”
“You were a soldier?”
“We didn’t change much, did we?” Then he smiled that blasted lopsided smile that never failed to melt her heart. Begrudging him such a powerful weapon to use against her, Mikah stood and walked back toward the windows. In the reflection, she could see him follow, though this time he kept his distance.
Past lives. Souls lost. Sometimes she didn’t care what dozens of world religions believed, to her it all still held a hint of madness. That was part of the reason Mikah had been so determined to set Ian in the past, to move on. To deny Jason MacAuliffe’s very existence.
“If you grew up near Cuilean and were familiar with the history, did you know that Ian and Hero were going to die? The whole time?” she asked.
Jace frowned. “On some level perhaps. I … we felt a sense of unease but I could not pinpoint it at the time. I was quite apart from myself, you understand, after I stopped fighting my fate. His life was my own.”
Mikah nodded. She did understand that. Once she had completely given herself over to a life as Hero, Mikah’s life and voice had faded completely away leaving only Hero. “Why did it even happen then? All the experts say, that if you go to a past life you ca
n change a wrong and make it right again. Why were we there to begin with if we weren’t there to change what had happened? What was the point of it all?”
Jace could hear the pain in her voice, felt it as his own. For a long while, he had wondered the very same thing. The guilt and sense of failure at not being able to stop the tragedy had followed him for months afterward until he finally felt an understanding for it all. “I think we experienced what we did so that we might remember and recognize each other now, in this time when fate brought us together once more. Were it not for that journey, we would never have met in this life. It prompted you to go back to Cuilean, as I did. You said long ago that you always knew you would find what you were waiting for at Cuilean. Remember?”
Mikah nodded.
“It brought us together again. Smith helped me to realize who you were. I was torn between talking to you and leaving you alone. Given that madness isn’t generally rewarded, I felt compelled to opt for the latter,” Jace said, flashing that lopsided grin again, and her pulse raced involuntarily. “I was determined to let the entire incident ‘go,’ as you said. I wasn’t about to chase the insanity.”
“So why did you?”
“Smith told me that you went to their tomb. Did you not read the inscription? ‘Until they meet again,’ it said,” he explained. “Over the past couple of weeks, I came to the conclusion that those words were a command of sorts. I had to come. I had to see if the woman I fell so desperately in love with was truly here as well. I never would have made this journey to find you without having seen that. Still, given the circumstances, I almost didn’t.”
Mikah blinked in surprise. “What circumstances? Why weren’t you going to come?”
“Something else Smith said,” Jace shifted, putting space between them. “If you were … are … happy with your young man, I didn’t want to ruin that for you.”
“My young man?” she parroted.
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