She rocked into him playfully but couldn’t summon up a smile. Turning, she sat in the nook of the wall, careful not to look down. At once comfortable and anxious. Without thinking, she propped her elbow on the top in a familiar pose. “Why don’t you go flirt with that auctioneer’s good-looking assistant? I know you want to. I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t want to leave you out here alone,” he said doubtfully. “They do have great accents over here, though, don’t they?”
“Yes, they…” She stopped suddenly as a shiver of awareness prickled her skin.
“Mikes, what is it?”
She turned her head to look back down the ramparts, and Kris’s eyes followed.
Everything she did was so recognizable to Jace. The way she moved, the way she held herself. The way her head fell back when she laughed. Any of it could be pure coincidence. Mere imagination. But somehow with the way this woman dropped down into that niche so casually, he simply knew. Even if she did not.
“Hero,” he whispered with painful longing.
He saw her entire body stiffen, as if she could hear his words even from this distance, though he knew that would be impossible. Then she looked up and her wide eyes met his down the length of the ramparts. For a split second he read the anguish in her eyes…
Before she leapt up and ran down the ramparts, her footsteps echoing between the walls. Not toward him, as Jace might’ve hoped. She ran in the opposite direction.
Away from him.
He started to follow but her companion held up a hand with a shake of his head and then he, too, was gone. “Mikes! Stop!”
With his injured leg and need for a cane, Jace had no choice but to stay. The cold winds ruffled his hair and bit at his cheeks but he ignored it all, focusing on just one thought.
She’d recognized him.
Somewhere within that woman, his Hero still lived.
Chapter Forty-Four
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
December 31, 2016
Nietzsche’s philosophy had fallen in Jace’s estimation over the last couple of weeks. It wasn’t madness. Plato had been right after all. It was a disease. A torment. One to which he had no cure.
When he first discovered that Mikah Bauer fled Cuilean that night on the ramparts, he decided to let her go. He’d driven away from Cuilean determined to put the past behind him and move forward with his life as well. To heal completely from his physical injuries and return to his duties in the army, though his mother begged him to remain in Scotland. To resume his duties as earl and as the head of their family’s investment firm.
Clearly Mikah ran from him because she feared the damage he could do to her life. How he might upset the relationship with her young man, as Smith had said. Jace shook his head. The man hadn’t seemed puzzled by his identity at all. Obviously, he knew what happened and accepted it.
If she did not want him in her life, who was he to say otherwise?
Who was he to force unwanted memories on her?
So he returned to his own estate at Ballantrae, and all the items he won at the auction—including the portrait of Hero—were consigned to the attic. But it took only a pair of days for his resolve to waver, and the next the portrait of her was hanging in his rooms. His hasty determination to date other women was discarded in favor of familiar nights in contemplation of Hero’s fair features.
That was when Jace knew he’d truly descended into madness. Nights such as those had conjured Hero to him once before, but it wasn’t going to happen again. He was nothing but a fool for refusing to put the past behind him and move on.
If love truly was a disease, he didn’t want a cure. He wanted the fever to rage.
He knew that was the reason he hadn’t given in. Because the possibility of more was still there. It lingered in his mind, gnawing persistently.
Taking her business card, he looked Mikah up on the website for the Milwaukee Art Museum, smiling at the thought of her working in that field when Hero loved it so well. On the staff page, he found her picture, saw her smiling face. His own smile faded when he saw that she’d recently made a donation to the museum of Mongin’sVue de Marly.
Her rejection of their past was at odds with Jace’s burgeoning need to learn more about her, to win her back to him. Recalling Smith saying that Mikah had gone to the cemetery while she was there, Jace visited it as well, curious to see what she had seen. Finding the small crypt beneath the trees, he read the words over the door and entered to find the wide crypt. Laying a hand over Hero’s name, he remembered the fleeting but intense romance that would forever hold his heart. Why would the fates have given so much, only to sweep it away?
Then he remembered that fate had a certain way of crushing one’s hopes. It had done it once before. It would do it again. He’d been about to walk away when he saw the short epitaph below the names. A wish set in stone that their souls might meet again, and he reconsidered the possibility that fate had more in store for them.
Whether Mikah Bauer liked it or not.
