Face the Fire by Nora Roberts

island, the families, the bloodlines, and so on. Did you practice in New York?”
    “Depends on your definition.” It wasn’t often that Sam found himself being studied like a science experiment, or that he would have allowed it. But something about Mac appealed to him. “I’ve never neglected the Craft, but I don’t advertise either.”
    “Makes sense. So what do you think of the legend?”
    “I’ve never considered it a legend. It’s history, and fact.”
    “Exactly.” Delighted, Mac lifted his bottle in a kind of toast. “I’ve done a time line, projecting the spin, you might say, of the cycle. By my calculations—”
    “We have until September,” Sam interrupted. “No later than the equinox.”
    Mac nodded slowly. “Well, bingo. Welcome home, Sam.”
    “Thanks.” He sipped his beer. “It’s good to be back.”
    “Are you going to be open to working with me?”
    “It’d be stupid to turn down the input of an expert. I’ve read your books.”
    “Yeah?”
    “You have an open and flexible mind.”
    “Someone else said that to me, once.” Mac thought of Mia, but was tactful enough not to mention her name. “Can I ask you a personal question?”
    “Yes, as long as I can tell you to mind your own business as an answer.”
    “Deal. If you knew September was a kind of deadline, why did you wait 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 heremotions 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