Face the Fire Page 0,26

so long to come back?"

Sam turned his head, looked out on the cove. "It wasn't my time. This is. Now let me ask you one. In your expert opinion, with your research, your calculations, your projections, am I necessary to the Three Sisters?"

"I'm still working on that. I do know you're part of what's necessary to Mia's role in it - the third step."

"Her acceptance of me." When Mac frowned, drummed his fingers on the deck rail, Sam felt unease slither into his belly. "You don't agree."

"Her choice, when it comes, has to do with her own feelings. Accepting them, and what's right for her. That might mean accepting you, or it might mean resolving her emotions by rejecting you - without malice." Mac cleared his throat. "The last step has to do with love."

"I'm fully aware of that."

"It doesn't require her to . . . it doesn't mean, in my opinion, that she'll be obliged to love you now, but that she accepts what she once felt, and that it wasn't meant. To, well, let you go without resentment and cherish what used to be. Anyway, it's a theory."

The hem of Sam's coat snapped in a stray gust of wind. "I don't like your theory."

"I wouldn't like it either from where you're standing. The third sister killed herself rather than face her lover's desertion. Her circle was broken, and she was alone."

"I know the goddamn story."

"Just hear me out. Even then, she protected the island, and her bloodline and the line of her sisters. As far as she could with what she had left. But she couldn't - or wouldn't - save herself. Couldn't or wouldn't live without the love of one man. That was her weakness, and her mistake."

It was direct enough to follow. It was logical. It was maddening. "And Mia's lived without me very well."

"On one level," Mac agreed. "On another, and in my opinion, she's never resolved her feelings, never forgiven you or accepted. She'll have to, one way or the other, and with a whole heart. If she doesn't, she'll be vulnerable, and as the protective spell weakens, she'll lose."

"And if I'd stayed away?"

"The logical conclusion is you weren't meant to stay away. And the presence of more magic on the island . . . well, it can't hurt."

He'd never thought it could. But his conversation with Mac had put doubts in his mind. He'd come back to the island with no questions about what needed to be, and would be done. He would win Mia again, and once things were as they had been between them, the curse would be broken. End of story.

End of story, he thought now as he walked the beach by the cove, because he hadn't wanted to look beyond it. He wanted Mia, was ready for Mia, and that was that.

He'd never once entertained the notion that her not wanting him, not loving him, might be the answer. He looked toward the mouth of the cave. Maybe it was time to explore that possibility, and face his ghosts. As he walked toward the cave, his heart beat too fast. He stopped, waiting until he'd controlled it, then ducked into the cave's shadows.

For a moment, it was filled with sound. Their voices, her laughter. The sighs of lovers. And of weeping.

She'd come here to cry for him. Knowing it, feeling it, sliced him with sharp stabs of guilt. He willed them clear, then stood in the silence, with only the backdrop of the surf lapping at the shore. When he'd been a boy, the cave had been Aladdin's, or a bandit's hideout, or whatever he and Zack and other friends had made it.

Then he'd no longer been a boy, or not quite a boy, and it had been Mia. His legs felt weak as he moved to the far wall, knelt and saw the words he'd carved for her. She hadn't scored them out. Until that moment, until a fist released its squeezing grip on his heart, he hadn't realized he'd been afraid she might. That she could. And if she could, that her heart would be lost to him. Ever and always.

He reached out, and light filled the words, seemed to drip from them like tears of gold. He felt in that light everything the boy had felt when he'd carved them, with magic and utter faith.

It rocked him, staggered him that there had been so much bursting inside that boy that the man he was could still