He didn’t welcome her sympathy but acknowledged where it came from. They both had families who had betrayed them. “After a few days, my sons thought they should give nature a hand and help me to my eternal rest. We had a lot of servants, and my youngest son was afraid of getting caught. That was the only thing that gave them pause. Thankfully, that was enough for me to come out of the coma. I disinherited them, left my wife, and searched for someone who could explain what was happening to me.”

“How horrible,” she murmured. “I thought Austin was bad, but you must have felt so hurt when your family turned on you like that.”

“I suppose I did, but it happened so long ago, my children’s children have died of old age.” He added softly, “And it was nothing compared to what came next. War was breaking out. I backed out of old business interests and moved the bulk of my capital to America. In the meantime, I grew desperate to understand how to handle my awakening Power, so I traveled to see the only man I knew who might be able to help. That was the worst decision I’ve ever made.”

Chapter Eleven

Molly had been so mired in the destruction of her life as she knew it, she would have said nothing could pull her out of her own misery.

Yet Josiah managed to do just that. Fascination and curiosity ran rampant as she listened to his story. He omitted place names and other identifiers, but there were a few clues, like his ties to the railroad industry, that gave her enough fuel for some conjecture.

If her guess was right about his language of origin, then he had lived in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. She rifled through her history education. The war that broke out… could it have been World War I?

Her coffee had gone cold, but she sipped it anyway as she watched him. The spring sun threw shadows over his expression. There was a rough elegance to the strong bones of his face and frame, a sense of tough endurance that had enormous appeal. The more contact she had with him, the stronger that appeal grew.

She still wasn’t sure she liked him. But she was beginning to understand how difficult events had shaped his nature, and when push came to shove, he had been there for her multiple times. Astonishingly so.

“If only we could talk to our younger selves,” she muttered wryly. “Think of the pitfalls we could have avoided.”

“I wouldn’t skip one of them.” His voice turned hard. “Each one taught me something. I survived, and I’ll never be trapped by those mistakes again.”

Respect stirred. She tilted her coffee mug at him. “Good attitude.”