“My understanding is that such healings are staged, and the person being healed isn’t actually sick,” she offered cautiously, although really, how he’d managed to fall for something so predictable was both a surprise and a disappointment. “So while the session looks authentic—”
“One of the people was me,” he broke in, lifting a challenging eyebrow.
Okay, that did change things considerably. She scrambled for another explanation. “The placebo effect can be quite powerful. If you expected her touch to heal you, perhaps your body and mind worked in concert to manifest the expected results.”
His lips twisted, but the expression on his face looked more haunted than amused. “I was dead at the time. Lights out. So my mind wasn’t exactly orderin’ my body about.”
“Dead.” The word erupted from Faith on a startled breath. “I don’t believe it. You’re here. You couldn’t have—” She mentally backed up and sought a more compassionate approach. He’d obviously undergone something traumatic, and convinced himself Kait had saved him.
“If you were unconscious, you couldn’t have seen what actually happened.”
The strangest stillness gripped him, he followed it up with a feigned casual shrug.
“True enough. I didn’t see what happened. I was out of it. You, however, saw every minute of it.” He cocked his head and watched her closely. “So tell me, sweetheart, was Kait fakin’ it? Was Cosky?”
“What are you talking about?” Faith whispered, but she suspected she already knew. Something about that moonlit night in the forest had been needling her.
His long, lean, absolutely still body stretched across the ground. Cosky and Kait kneeling beside him, their hands pressed against his motionless chest. The anguish on Zane and Mac’s faces. The ethereal play of moonlight silvering his glowing, frozen form.
He’d been glowing . . . so had Kait and Cosky.
He shook his head and tsked her. “Come on, darlin’, don’t play dumb on me now. Why don’t you tell me what you saw in the woods that night?”
There was an equal measure of curiosity and challenge in the blue eyes locked on her face.
Faith swallowed hard, regrouping. “You’re saying you were dead? That Kait healed you and brought you back to life?”
“In a nutshell.” He shuffled his shoulders and frowned slightly. “Although I hear Cosky had somethin’ to do with it too.”
“But if you were unconscious, you don’t know what happened.”
“I reckon I remember enough. Like gettin’ shot. Like bleedin’ out. I remember that.” The laconic, lazy drawl didn’t match the tight look in his eyes, or the tension on his face.
Shot . . . bleeding out . . .
He had been drenched in blood, lying there so still . . . she’d been certain he’d been killed.
“Kait, Cosky, and Zane said you were just stunned. That your protective vest caught the bullets,” she repeated their explanation slowly, even as doubt swelled in her mind. She’d sensed something odd in their account, had been puzzling over it for days.
He tilted his head and considered her, curiosity eating at the tension on his face. “How’d they explain the blood?”
“They said you’d fallen on top of one of those . . . those men and that the blood was his, not yours.”
“Blood transfer, clever.” There was admiration in the comment.
Faith stiffened her shoulders and pushed aside her doubt. That weird glow arcing between the three of them had just been the play of moonlight illuminating their bodies in the dark. There was absolutely no proof that he’d been shot, let alone that he’d died and Kait had healed him and then dragged him back to life.
“Everything they said makes sense. I’m sure that’s what happened. You probably just had a bad dream, and events got mixed up in your head.” Which reminded her of his earlier excuse about why he couldn’t have a relationship with her. “You said yourself that your head’s all scrambled.”
“I wasn’t wearin’ a bullet-proof vest.”
He tossed the words at her like hot wax, where they hit and clung and burned into her mind. She froze, but just for a second. “But they said—they told me you were wearing a vest. The bullets hit the vest.”
“They lied. They gave you the most plausible explanation, one you’d believe. I wasn’t wearin’ a vest. None of us were. The blood was mine. Most of it, anyway, I reckon.” He paused to study her face, and whatever he saw softened the sharpness in his voice. “Kait doesn’t want her gift made public. We promised to keep it quiet when she healed Cosky.” He nodded slowly, emphatically, as her mouth opened in shock. “Yep, she did. She healed Cosky. I was there. I saw it. And guess what? There’s absolute proof in Cos’s case. X-rays indicatin’ a radical improvement in a twenty-four-hour period, which led to a confused and curious orthopedic surgeon.”
“There has to be some rational explanation.” Metaphysical healing? Really?
“There is—it’s called faith healin’.”