Jace wasn’t listening any longer as he took the card, staring but not seeing. His mind was already on the days ahead. Never had he dreamed that in coming to Dùn Cuilean to regain some small piece of Hero, he might find her again. Pocketing the card, he looked up at his longtime neighbor, who was waiting with more patience than a man in the throes of such avid curiosity should be capable of displaying. “Thank you, Donell.”
“My lord, really! What is this all about?” Smith said insistently, denying the dismissal. “Ye ken something, I know it.”
“Let’s just say that I believe I might know her,” he prevaricated, and then smiled. “We share a love of Dùn Cuilean’s history. If she is truly the woman I once knew, I’ll invite you to the wedding.”
“Her young man might have something to say about that.”
“Her what?”
“She came here with a young man. They seemed quite close and…well, they did share a room.”
Jace felt his welling hope slither away into disappointment. Perhaps she wasn’t his Hero, then. If she was, she would feel the same as he did and not be able to look at another romantically. Even his girlfriend of some years hadn’t been able to pull him away from the love he still held in his heart for a woman long dead, much to her dismay and his mother’s as well.
No. The Hero he’d loved remained in the past and this Mikah Bauer’s resemblance was surely nothing but a coincidence. She had a life of her own, a lover who would be unlikely to understand a man who pursued her only for her resemblance to another.
Who demanded answers to questions to which she couldn’t possibly know the answers.
He refused to make such a fool of himself.
Chapter Forty-Three
Frederic Nietzsche once said,“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”
Jace certainly felt the madness, but the reason was somehow escaping him. Despite telling himself that he would not seek out this mysterious doppelgänger of his long-gone Hero Conagham, not only had he done so but was skulking in the shadows like a mad stalker.
He may have escaped the castle unscathed if he hadn’t caught sight of her when he left the restaurant. But as he stood in the door of what had been the Billiards Room in years past, he saw her as she crossed the hall from the base of the stairs and into the Armory. Head high, chin lifted just so. Her blond hair bound in a twist at the base of her neck. In profile, she looked so much like Hero that his heart began to pound and his body stirred in a familiar response to her presence.
By their own will, his feet carried him unwillingly along in her wake. No, not hers. Theirs. Not until she bestowed a bright familiar smile on her companion did he notice the man at her side. In the shadows, Jace studied his competition. The man was tall, probably as tall as he, but much thinner. His wool trench coat showed that much. His short blond hair was worn spiked up on the top in a trendy style Jace recognized from his time in London and Edinburgh. Conscientiously, he ran a hand through his own short black hair.
Objectively, he acknowledged that the other man was handsome enough, if so very different from himself. Younger as well, and suddenly uncertain, Jace wondered what the Hero of today preferred.
If she were Hero at all.
Bugger it. He should never have come to Cuilean. His nerves had been wired since he walked into his former home once again and remembered it was not his at all. And now this! Hope followed by swift disappointment. He fought the urge to take the dog-eared auction brochure that had lured him here again and rip it to shreds.
The uncertainty ate at him. Was it Hero? Was it not? Suddenly, Jace had to know. He had to meet this Mikah Bauer face-to-face, see the blankness that the absence of recognition would bring to her eyes when she saw him, and finally know that it was all pure coincidence.
Nothing but folly.
And finally he could forget the hell the past few months of his life had been.
Almost literal hell.
Over a year ago, he’d gone to Afghanistan—or rather been sent to Afghanistan as a part of his service as a captain in the Army Air Corps. He’d served as a helicopter pilot out of Camp Bastian in support of the Joint Aviation Group supporting NATO, combining the skill with a desire to serve his country.
However, more than two months ago, his Apache had been shot down over the Helmand province in Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban territory. He’d died, they told him. For over three minutes the medics had worked on him amid the fire and shelling as the marines from the nearby U.S. camp kept the insurgents at bay.
What happened in those three minutes changed Jace and left him with a life that was not his own. Whisked away from the sound of gunfire and alarms sounding in the helicopter, he found himself standing in front of Dùn Cuilean, a place he knew well enough, but in that moment he felt as if he were looking at it for the first time.
He’d fought against his fate in those first weeks, fought against the madness he was certain would consume him if he gave in. He lived another man’s life against his will, all the while wondering what happened to his own. The only moments that brought him any peace were those spent with his alter ego in silent contemplation of the portrait that hung over the fireplace in the marquess’s bedchamber.
Those were the times he was sure he’d died, because he knew the woman depicted there.
Or rather, he’d dreamed of her before.
Upon seeing Hero in the flesh, the last burning need to return home—here, to this time and place—withered away. The flames of his astounding love for her consumed him quickly, and he’d been content to stay there in the nineteenth century forever. With her.
That decision hadn’t come easily to him. He had a life and a family in the twenty-first century that were very important to him, yet he knew he could not live and be a whole person without Hero.
