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.Another tear fell. Then another.
“Do you think I cannot understand your fears?” He wiped the tears away with the pad of his thumb, showing all the patience and intuition Ian ever had. “I would imagine I’ve felt each one of them myself. It’s why I did not come straight away. I feared 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.Weare the same together.”
“It’s crazy to think that our lives were meant to be influenced by theirs.”
“But it was not just their lives. That wasmylife.” His brogue grew thicker as he spoke. “Do ye think I look back and think, ‘Ian said this’ or ‘Ian did that?’Idid those things.Iwas the one who held ye for hours in the caves. It wasmyarms that burned in pain,myheart that was tortured by 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’d never thought to fall in love at all,” he went on. “I might’ve 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, he went to close the window, thinking carefully over the words he would say, knowing his future was hanging in the balance.
“I live near Dùn Cuilean,” he paused and chuckled. “I almost said, ‘did you know that?’ in an almost rhetorical manner.” He 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 the castle, 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 he 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’d 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, he looked at her in surprise. “Weren’t you?”
She 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’d been hit by that carriage.”
“Only just then?” Recalling 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 a hundred times he could have.
“Yes,” Mikah answered, “and after that night…that last night, I woke up again in Glasgow, still on the street where I’d been hit.”
Taking a seat next to her 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?”
She 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.”
Jace stilled sensing there was more. “But 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-Seven
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 an accident as well. 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 he nodded to confirm that that was his deduction as well. “The cane?” she asked with gratifying concern. “Are you all right?”
