“Think there will be a picture of your man?” Kris teased as they watched the results pop up. Wikipedia was at the top, and though Mikah normally didn’t go there for information, she reached over and brought it up.
“That’s him?” he said skeptically. “That is not at all what I pictured.”
“No, that’s not him.” She rolled her eyes as she reached across once more and scrolled down. “That’s the first marquess.” In addition to that one there was one of Robert Conagham, but none of Ian.
“Guess they didn’t have time to do one before he died,” Kris said.
“So you believe me then?”
“Mostly,” he allowed. “It’s a hard pill to swallow.”
“I know, but I’m glad to know that I wasn’t entirely delusional.”
“Partially delusional is all right then?” He got up and went to the kitchen to pour himself more wine. Taking a healthy swig, he turned to return to the couch and thought better of it, retrieving the bottle and carrying it with him. He was going to need it. “So you dreamt of people and places that are real and can describe it accurately right down to the paint chipping on the bedroom wall, so to speak.”
“People and places I’ve never known or seen,” she clarified. “It’s not like I had a history book on the place.”
“And Lord knows, you’ve had dozens.” He dropped down beside her once more. “So what does all this mean?”
“I don’t know,” Mikah confessed. After a couple attempts to steal Kris’s wine glass for herself, she retrieved a glass from the kitchen and filled it to the brim before taking a long chug. Maybe the alcohol would knock some sense into all this. She sat again, looking at the hundreds of Google results as if one of them could solve the biggest mystery of all. “How could I have dreamt like that about a place I’ve never been to? About people I couldn’t possibly have met?”
Kris stared at the computer as if he too were trying to wrap his mind around it all. “You know what Glo would say about all this, don’t you?”
Gloria was one of their New Age friends who worshipped the Dalai Lama and was thinking of converting to Buddhism, causing her Catholic parents fits.
“She’d say it wasn’t a dream at all but a past life.” After a moment’s reflection she added, “I’d considered it when I first got there.”
“But?”
“Besides not being a big believer?” Mikah shook her head and sipped her wine while considering her answer. “Well for starters, by definition a past life would happen in the past. One wouldn’t normally have their past and current lives occur collinearly, right? Besides, I suppose I figured it had to be a dream because it was all too perfect. Nobody actually has a life like that, you know? Like a fairy tale.”
Kris snorted out a laugh into his own glass and came up coughing. “Yeah, great fairy tale. Right up to the point the evil witch shoved you into a hot oven for dinner.”
Or until the greedy, wicked cousin shot your new husband and dropped you both off a cliff, Mikah amended silently. “Probably still more rational to just think I’m nuts.”
“Why? Most major religions adhere to the idea of reincarnation, you know.”
Mikah laughed. “Sure, but the people who claim to have had past lives are all kinds of crazy? Haven’t you ever noticed that they were always like Joan of Arc in their past lives? Or Queen Elizabeth or Gandhi? No one is ever just a woman who…”
“Who what?”
“Falls in l-love.” Nearly choking on the last word, Mikah chugged the last of her wine to disguise the sobs building in her throat. It didn’t work. She set the glass aside and buried her face in her hands.
Kris rubbed her back in slow, comforting circles. “Why didn’t you ever say it like that before? You talked about this guy but you made it sound like it was just a fling.”
“I was afraid I’d sound even crazier.” She picked up his glass and drained it as well. “You already thought I was losing it.”
“Hadlost it, Mikes,” he corrected. “There was no question about you being only in the process. You were one hundred percent off the deep end. But if it was all real? That’s a different story.”
“Was it, do you think?”
“You tell me.”
She thought about everything, starting at the beginning. All the emotion. The feeling. The sensation. Smell, taste…touch. Tender kisses. Bronzed flesh. And such pleasure.
Hell yes it’d been real.
So, while she hovered between life and death, she’d peeked into a past life. Though it felt as if it were all being experienced in real time to Mikah, it’d all really been a memory crammed into the sixty-eight seconds she’d died.
