Chapter 63

SUCKING IN A BREATH, Jack looked at his wife. Admittedly, when he realized she was still holding back, he had been angry. That she could still be keeping information from him was reprehensible—especially with them being married now! But his anger abated when he realized that he, too, was hiding a rather large secret.

A secret it was time to tell.

“I’ve been to the manor, Nora,” he said.

Her eyes grew wide. “I don’t understand,” she said, shak-ing her head.

“The battle you spoke of, the one when you escaped and your brother told you to split up, I was there that day. I was in the room with you and your brother.”

She shook her head in confusion. He could see in her eyes she had difficulty understanding. “But nobody was there. Are you…are you one of my father’s guards? Were you hired by him to get to me?”

She backed away from him with horror on her face. Immediately realizing his blunder, the sheer disgust on her face made him desperate. “No! No, I am not employed by your father. I never was. Nora, love, I wasn’t physically there. What I am trying to tell you is that I dreamed of you and the others. For as long as I can remember, I have dreamed of that battle. It is the same every time. I follow you as you fight your way through the manor. I feel you getting tired, and I can do nothing to help you. I followed you into the chamber with your brother, then through the corridors. I know your face, your brother’s face, as well as if they were my own.”

Nora stopped retreating, the disgust turning into stunned hope. A shudder of relief ran through Jack, and he continued, “The first time I saw you in the flesh, I thought I was dreaming. It had never occurred to me that you were a real person or at least one I would ever meet. I had thought that I must have seen you in passing somewhere when I was young and your image stayed with me. The dream has stayed consistent, never chang-ing. It was why I stayed in the beginning. I needed answers. I needed to know why you appeared to me so many times.”

“So, you believe then?”

“I don’t know about eternal life,” Jack shook his head, “but I believe in you. I believe something brought us together.”

“The stone is more powerful than we thought,” Nora said, pulling herself back up onto the cart. Jack mounted his horse and reined in next to her. “It is more imperative than ever that we find the others. We need to know all it can do.”

“And you think the answers are at your father’s manor?”

Slowly, they made it back onto the road and continued the journey north. “It’s the beginning. Ben suggested we start at the beginning and work the problem together. I cannot say what we might find there, if anything helpful at all. It just seems the place to start. Perhaps the others have returned themselves, and we can find clues as to their whereabouts. Perhaps Bridget left a clue in a book in my father’s library. It was the only place all four of us had in common.”

“If it still exists.”

“What do you mean?” Nora asked.

“Do you think the manor will still be standing?”

“Of course it will! It was built in the fourteenth century, sir. It has seen many battles and years of hardship and has persevered.”

“Don’t get your petticoats in a tangle,” Jack quipped. “Supposedly, you have not been there in almost a century. It could be in shambles now.”

“Supposedly?” Nora echoed. “Do you still not believe me?”

“I already told you, I believe in you. I believe this is what you believe. But no, I am not convinced of the truth of the matter as yet.” Jack would have done anything to keep the wounded look off her beautiful face—except lie. He would not lie to spare her feelings. If there would be nothing else between them, there had to be truth. And he did believe with absolute conviction that she believed everything she said. For now, that was good enough for him.

But he sensed that it most certainly was not good enough for her.

“I just wonder what we will come across. If your father has been in America, who has been seeing to the manor? Would any of the servants not question that their employer did not age? How long could he protect that secret?” Jack asked.

“I cannot say,” Nora shrugged. “I have never stayed anywhere long enough for that to be an issue, and Ben believed me from the first.”

Her insinuation was not lost on Jack. He wanted to believe her, but it was all just too fantastic. He still had trouble comprehending something so momentous. If her story were, in fact, real, and not something she conjured in her imagination, the global implications would be astronomical. How could the two of them possibly protect such a huge secret? Especially when her father was doing everything he could to see that they failed.

There was more to it than that. If this all were true, that would mean that Nora had spent nearly a century running for her life, decades of fighting on her own, of looking over her shoul-der, never knowing whether or not she was truly safe—whether or not she would sleep through the night without being killed or molested. And that made his blood boil. That made him seethe with a rage he had never experienced before. That she could go even an hour with that sort of fear and insecurity made his stomach plummet. Just thinking about what could have happened to her…

It was no matter anymore. She had him now. She had him always. In time, he would figure out what to do with these feelings inside of him that continued to fight their way to the surface. In time, he would see the truth of her words in whether or not she aged. Perhaps in a few years, he would have his an-swer and would take the elixir—if it did what she insisted.

There were days when he thought he would explode out of his skin with the intensity of his feelings, all new and overpowering. Then there were other days when it seemed that he had always felt this way. He had known her in his dreams for as long as he could remember, but until the night he’d dreamt her death, he had not known he could feel like this. For twenty-eight years, he had survived on his own—all without knowing that he wasn’t feeling a thing. He didn’t want to go back to that. Could not go back to that.

Jack had spent hours on the ship thinking over that dream. It took place in the future, but when? How long did they have? Was that dream proof enough that Nora spoke the truth? People spoke to each other through their minds. But no, that was not what that had felt like. It felt like the woman’s voice, Bridget, was right in his ear. How could these things be possible?

They came upon a small village as the sun began to set. Jack didn’t want to travel at night if it could be avoided, not in an unfamiliar land. If they were set upon, Nora would have trouble racing away with the cart. They would have to stay and fight.

“Are you hungry?” Nora asked. “Perhaps there is a pub here.”

“We will look for an inn and stop for the night,” Jack replied. “Do you know how far we are from your home?”

“It is not my home, Jack,” she snapped. Jack was sur-prised by how testy she had become. Did being on her home country’s soil make her nervous?

“What is the difference? You were born there, raised there.”

“And then I was ripped from it by a battle between my father and myself, my brother, and our friends! If my father is still in residence, he is not keeping the hearth burning for me. I am no longer welcome there, not as a member of the family. It cannot possibly be referred to as my home. I should think it would be glaringly obvious by now that I have no home.” She sighed heavily before she continued. “I am not even sure what we are looking for by going there, I just know that we must.”

Jack cocked his head, looked at her for a moment. She blew out a frustrated breath and looked away. Reining in closer to her, he reached out and tucked a curl behind her ear.

“What’s wrong, Nora?” he asked gently.

“Wrong? Why, nothing. Why would you think such a thing?”

“Oh, call it a hunch, my lady.”

“I am not your lady! I am your wife!”

Jack chuckled, pulled back and began to ride again, which only served to frustrate his wife further.

“I amuse you? You have nothing to say?”

“To what, Nora? I had thought we had gotten everything out in the open. You told your deep secret, and I told mine. We are on even ground now, are we not?”

Nora shook her head slightly and looked off in the distance. “Perhaps I just have too much time to think,” she said softly.

“Remember what I said. You do not have to keep your own counsel anymore, Nora,” Jack replied. He reached out and hooked his finger under her chin, turning her face to look at him. “There is the two of us now. Until we find the others, it’s you and I against the world. You can tell me anything now.”

Nora pulled away from his touch and put some distance between them. “I cannot tell you this,” she murmured.

Jack furrowed his brow. So, she was hiding something still. He’d thought she was keeping something back from him but couldn’t imagine what more there could be. What could be worse than telling him her father and his army of unknown quantity wanted to kill them over a stone? What could be worse than telling him she was over a century old?