He brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Don’t be. What we’re doing is a good thing, Grace. Future generations will thank us the same way we now thank Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and the Wright brothers.”
He cupped her cheek and lifted her face up to his. “You’re one of them, Grace,” he whispered.
And then he kissed her.
She didn’t kiss him back. She couldn’t.
He didn’t smell right.
And he tasted like bitter coffee.
Her toes didn’t tingle, and her breath didn’t catch.
It wasn’t the same. Heck, it wasn’t even close.
“I wouldn’t be doing that, girl, if I were you,” Father Daar suddenly said from the doorway of the living room.
Grace pulled back and flushed crimson. Great. She’d just been caught kissing—by an old-fashioned priest, of all people.
Jonathan stood up and faced Daar. “It’s okay, Father,” he said. “Grace and I…well, we have a history together.”
“You’ll not have a future if the MacKeage realizes this,” Daar said, walking into the room and settling into Jonathan’s seat. He dismissed Jonathan in much the same way Grey had dismissed him at her home earlier that afternoon. And, like before, Jonathan didn’t seem to realize the insult or even the threat the priest had alluded to. He simply walked out of the room, back to his computer.
Daar lifted a brow at her, looking at the book in her lap. “Been doing some reading?”
Grace laid the book on the floor by her chair. “No. I thought it might be Scottish, though, and I was looking for the meaning of Gu Bràth.”
“It’s Gaelic, girl,” he said, leaning back in his chair as he grinned at her. “And Gu Bràth means “forever.”
Until eternity.” He leaned closer and said, his crystal-clear blue eyes sparkling, “Or until Judgment Day.
The old Gaelic language is hard to pin down exactly,” he continued, settling back in his chair again.
“Words can have many meanings.”
“What do the words mean for Grey and the others?”
He looked back at the fire, absently watching the flames. “The MacKeage gave this place the name Gu Bràth and said this mountain was their home now, forever, and that nothing short of God himself would ever uproot them again.”
Grace wondered what had happened back in Scotland that had forced the four men to build a new life here. Whatever it was, it had been a painful experience for the priest to use words like uproot and for Grey to declare to God that it would never happen again.
“Why do people refer to him as ‘the MacKeage’?” she asked, drawing Father Daar’s attention again.
“What does that mean?”
“The laird of a clan is always referred to by the clan’s name. The laird of the Campbells would be the Campbell,” he said as example.
“Grey’s a laird? A real one?”
“It’s an old title.” Daar set his cane across his knees and fingered the wood. “It’s not used much anymore today. But the title still exists.”
Grace was fascinated. So that was why the others listened to Grey, even though Ian and Callum were older. But she hadn’t thought people still put stock in rank. Not the way the three men seemed to do, anyway.
She wanted to ask the priest more about it, but he suddenly nodded at the cookie tin sitting on top of the mantel. “She’s not in there, you know,” he told her softly. “She’s here,” he said, pointing at her and then tapping his own chest. He waved a hand in the air. “Mary has moved into the energies of our life forces now and is part of the people whose lives she touched.”
“I know,” Grace admitted rather sheepishly, feeling a bit silly for carrying her sister’s ashes everywhere.
“But they’re all I have left of her. And in less than four months, I won’t even have that.”
“Ah, the Summer Solstice,” he said, nodding. “Your birthdays.”
“How do you know that?”
“Mary would walk up the mountain to visit me at least once a week. She told me that you both had the same birthday. Summer Solstice.”
Grace felt her insides get all mushy, and she smiled. “It doesn’t always fall on the same date every year, you know. Mary was born on June twentieth, and I was born on the twenty-first. But both days were the Summer Solstice on those years, and so Mom decided that we should celebrate that event instead.”
“Mary told me you were each born at the exact moment of the Solstice,” Daar said. “Is that true, or was she pulling an old man’s leg? She had that kind of sense of humor.”
“She wasn’t lying. It’s the weirdest thing. All of my half brothers were born on the same day, too. Mom always made a huge celebration of it, and even after they’d left home, my brothers always came back for our birthdays on Summer Solstice. What are the odds of that happening in one family?”
“You consider it a mere coincidence? Maybe not something a bit more magical?” he asked, his clear, steady blue eyes watching her with an intensity that grew unsettling.
Grace laughed to break the tension she was suddenly feeling. “Of course not, Father. There is no such thing as magic.”
He looked aghast. “You don’t believe in magic, girl?”
“I’m a scientist. I believe what is based in fact.”
“Then explain eight children being born to one father, all on the day of the same celestial event,” he demanded gently.
“It’s a simple mathematical occurrence. It’s no different from what the odds might be that a comet will hit Earth or that a tornado will drive a piece of hay straight through a tree trunk. The probability is not likely, but it still happens occasionally.”
“So math explains what magic can’t.”
“Yes. I’m sure we aren’t the first family to have each child born on the same date,” she said. “Not when you consider the number of births since the beginning of mankind.”
The priest turned and frowned at the fire. Grace hoped she hadn’t insulted him. She was enjoying this philosophical discussion.
“Do you believe in time travel, Father?” she asked, deciding to continue with it and maybe bridge the subject of Michael.
He looked back at her, his eyes narrowed. “I doubt you do. Am I right?”
“In theory, it is possible. Einstein may have already proved that for us. But nobody knows. So my answer is no, I don’t believe in time travel.”
“Then why would you be asking me such a question?”
“Because you and I know somebody who says he’s traveled eight hundred years from the past. And I’m wondering if he’s insane, or if there’s a good explanation for his…confusion.”
As she spoke, the old priest’s eyes grew wide, and his complexion grew paler and paler.
“Who told you this?” he asked in a whisper-soft voice. “Who said he’s traveled through time?”
“Michael MacBain,” she told him in her own whisper, leaning closer so that only he could hear her. “He told Mary he was born in the year A.D. 1171.”
She saw the priest take a deep, almost painful breath as he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
Grace waited a good two minutes for him to answer her, but he just sat there, his eyes closed as he fingered the polished burls of his cane.
Grace decided to try another tack.
“Can you keep a secret, Father?” she asked, leaning closer again. “Baby’s not my son. He’s Mary’s.
And Michael’s.”
He snapped his eyes open and looked at her. You would have thought she had baked him a cake, he looked so suddenly pleased with her. “The bairn’s not yours?”
“No,” she confirmed for him, nodding her head. “But I’m not sure I should tell Michael he has a son. I don’t know if the man is sane or not.”
“Of course he’s sane, girl. Your sister loved him, didn’t she? He’s as right in the head as you and I.”
“But he thinks he traveled through time.”