One Magic Moment

by Lynn Kurland

  Then again, she supposed she could wonder the same thing about herself, but at least she headed up to the university now and then—

  “Cheers, ducks,” said a rather sloppy voice. “Want some companies?”

  Tess looked up from her tea to find a man sliding into the bench across from her. She didn’t recognize him, but she supposed that wasn’t unusual. Even after a year, she couldn’t say she knew more than half the villagers by sight and even fewer of them by name. The guy now leering at her from across the table might have been a local, but he wasn’t one she wanted to know better.

  “I’m just finishing,” she said, vowing to stand outside in the rain if necessary to avoid any of the proffered companies.

  He put his foot up on the end of her bench, effectively blocking her exit. “I think you should stay and have another cuppa.”

  Tess finished the last sip of her tea, then set her cup down. “And I think you should move your foot while you still can.”

  “A woman with a bit of vim,” he said with an indulgent chuckle. “I like that.”

  Tess looked pointedly at his foot until he put it back on the floor, then grabbed her purse and shifted toward the end of the bench. She started to stand up only to find his hand suddenly on her arm in a grip that was, to put it mildly, unpleasantly firm.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said loudly.

  “You need a bit of taming,” he said in return.

  Tess tried to pull her arm away, but he was having none of that. She was just contemplating how best to grab the teapot so she could slosh the still-very-hot innards on him, then clobber him with the pot itself, when she realized none of that was going to be necessary.

  A hand was suddenly holding on to Mr. Friendly’s forearm in a way that made the aforementioned groper squeak before he covered it up with a very manly “no need to get testy, mate.”

  Tess found herself freed from all unwanted advances. She looked up to find that her rescuer was tall, dark-haired, and very well built. She realized with equal clarity that she had just seen him, hovering in the back of the shop across the street.

  She would have thanked him, or gaped at him, or blurted out a question about his name, but she was too busy being shepherded out of the pub by a man who would have put Ireland’s finest sheepdog to shame.

  She managed to stop outside the pub only because she dug her heels in. She looked up at her rescuer, thanks on the tip of her tongue, only to have her mouth fall open.

  It was her sister Pippa’s husband, Montgomery de Piaget.

  Only it couldn’t be, because the man next to her was dressed in modern clothes and, she soon found, speaking in modern English.

  “Your car’s finished,” he said, taking her by the arm and leading her off the sidewalk. “Looks like rain.”

  It was December; of course it looked like rain. Actually, it looked like snow from where she was standing given the sudden chill that had washed over her. She wished she could have shut her mouth, but she couldn’t.

  She looked around herself to make sure she was still in the twenty-first century, looked at the comforting tarmac under her feet, looked at the shop that rose up in front of her with her little red Ford sitting in front of it. She looked at the fingers curled around her arm in a way that wasn’t at all uncomfortable but definitely supportive, as if she’d been a woman of questionable balance who couldn’t be counted on to make it across the street on her own.

  She took a moment or two to get hold of her rampaging and apparently quite unreliable imagination as she was escorted into the garage’s office. She didn’t see her escort’s face again because he kept it turned away from her as he held out his hand.

  “Charge card,” he said briskly.

  Tess fumbled in her purse for it, feeling not flustered, but floored. She was having a hallucination; that was it. It was broad daylight and she was having a hallucination. Or a paranormal, um, something. And it all involved that man standing on the other side of the counter from her, the one who looked like . . .

  Well, never mind who he looked like. The truth was, he might have looked like someone she knew, but he couldn’t possibly be that someone because that man was safely locked away eight hundred years in the past.

  Her delusion—and she was perfectly happy to term him that and be done—didn’t seem at all inclined to look at her, which was just fine with her. Maybe he’d seen how the first sight of himself had freaked her out and decided that one view of his admittedly gorgeous face was enough.

  She watched his back as he ran her credit card, then at the dark hair that shadowed his face as he pushed the slip across his counter for her to sign. The moment she’d finished, he shoved her keys at her as if he couldn’t wait to be out of her presence, then ushered her out of his office.

  He pointed in the direction he wanted her to go, then disappeared into the darkness at the back of the garage. She looked at the door where she’d last seen the man who definitely wasn’t Montgomery de Piaget but couldn’t have looked any more like him if he had been him, then turned and stumbled out of the shop.

  She ran bodily into Bobby before she realized he was giving her new mirror a last-minute polish. She looked at him and wondered what he thought of his boss, how long he’d worked for him, if he knew any pertinent details about him.

  “All ready to go, then?” Bobby asked with a friendly smile.

  “Sure,” Tess managed. She stepped back as Bobby opened the door but hesitated before she got in. “Could I ask you a question?”

  Bobby shrugged. “As you will, miss.”

  She nodded toward the back of the shop. “Is that your boss?”

  “Aye, miss.”

  “Does he have a name?” she managed.

  “John,” Bobby said simply, “and just John. He don’t like to be talked about so I don’t unless he says to. I fancy you can imagine why.”

  Yes, because he would probably draw his sword and skewer you on it, was the first thing she thought, but that thought was so ridiculous, wild horses couldn’t have dragged it out of her. Of course she hadn’t seen what she’d just seen because Montgomery de Piaget was safely tucked away with her sister in 1241. He wasn’t hanging around a garage in the village ten miles from her castle.

  “And you won’t tell me his last name?” she managed.

  Bobby shifted. “As I said, miss, he don’t care to be forthcomin’ about details, if you—”

  “Bobby!”

  Tess jumped at the call, which wasn’t quite a shout but was definitely a warning. Bobby snapped a salute at her, grinned, then hurried back into the shop to see to who knew what. Maybe the whole thing had been a serious deviation from reality and she was operating under rules she didn’t understand. Bobby’s boss, John, was perhaps a ghost and Bobby his undead servant. For all she knew, they were vampires, or werewolves, or whatever other paranormal things the south of England could conjure up.

  Perhaps she needed a little lie-down before she lost it completely.

  She let out her breath slowly, then got into her car. She had to have a few more bracing breaths before she took hold of herself, put the keys into the ignition, and got herself out of the parking lot.

  Half an hour later, she was walking back across her bridge to her very own castle where she could lower the portcullises, bar the door in her great hall, then lock herself in her solar and not have to face anything that made her uncomfortable.

  Peaches looked up as she stumbled finally into the solar and managed to get herself into a chair in front of the fire without looking as if she’d fallen there.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost—wait a minute.” She turned back to her phone call. “Tiffany? Hang on for just a second, would you? I have a situation here.” Peaches put her thumb back over the phone. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Tess managed. “I’m good.”

  “You don’t look good,” Peaches said. “Maybe you should go upstairs and lie down.”

  “I had a nap las
t week.”

  “Have another one today.”

  Tess took a deep breath. “I can’t. I have clients coming today.”

  “That’s tomorrow. I checked your schedule.”

  “Then I have phone calls to make.”

  Peaches frowned at her, then shrugged slightly and turned back to her conversation.

  Tess checked her calendar, then realized she did indeed have a phone call to make. She decided she was grateful she hadn’t blown off what could be a potentially large party after the new year. She would have to trot out all her best manners and coherent conversation.

  It would keep her from thinking about things that really made her crazy. There were people who resembled their ancestors to such a degree that it was spooky, weren’t there? She’d seen it countless times in history books. Maybe John the garage owner was somehow related to the de Piagets and all their good genes had found home in him.

  It could happen.

  It could also happen that there were strange and mysterious things going on within a twenty-mile radius of her house.

  She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised.

  Chapter 2

  He’d always known it would be steel to kill him.

  John de Piaget kept the engine balanced on the hoist long enough to look to his right to make certain he had enough space to roll out from underneath it before it slipped its moorings and crushed him. Finding that side of his garage floor comfortingly empty, he took a deep breath, then flung himself to his right the split second before the engine overbalanced and landed on the floor where his empty head had recently been.

  He pushed himself up until he was merely sitting on the floor, shaking like a woman, instead of lying there, shaking like the fool he was. He never made mistakes like the one he’d just made. Fortunately, he knew just at whose feet to lay the blame.

  That wench who had interrupted the peace of his shop not an hour earlier.

  He looked at Bobby, who had been talking to him just before he’d almost killed himself. “She forgot what?”

  “Her credit card.” Bobby paused. “Want help with the engine?”

  John looked at his lone employee, an experienced mechanic who Grant had taken on just before he’d sold John the shop. He didn’t like to ask for aid, but in this case he couldn’t do anything else. He nodded, then accepted help with righting the block and settling things as he should have to start with.

  It took less than two hours to put the entire Jaguar back together. He thanked Bobby briskly for his aid, cleaned his hands, then went into his office to phone the owner to tell her she could send someone for her car anytime she liked. He fished her husband’s card she’d given him out of his wallet, then froze.

  Geoffrey Segrave, Segrave & Kingsley, LLP.

  John pursed his lips. A solicitor amongst a clutch of lawyerly types, no doubt. He was tempted to wallow in the irony of doing business with a man bearing that last name, but he didn’t do irony any longer. In fact, there were several things he didn’t do any longer, beginning and ending with looking at anything that might have loitered in his past—

  He cut his thoughts off before they migrated to points forbidden and uncomfortable. He arranged for one of the man’s flunkies to come pick up the Jag the next day for his lady wife, then hung up and considered the rest of his afternoon. He looked at the credit card on his counter, then at the garage. There were times, he supposed, when what looked like a bad idea from the start was exactly what it seemed.

  Hadn’t he told himself that setting up shop in a small village might be less than desirable? Hadn’t he reminded himself that if one wanted to avoid standing out, losing oneself in a city of decent size was the wisest course of action? Had he not fought with a good deal of determination what had felt like the hand of Fate in each step that had led him from a rather comfortable, if nomadic, life in the north to a far-too-exposed existence in the south?

  He was going to have to fight harder next time, that was obvious.

  “Oy, boss,” Bobby said from behind him, “what about the young miss’s card?”

  John suppressed the urge to flinch. ’Twas his fault she’d left it behind, of course, because he’d stopped just short of shoving her out of his shop. He would have vastly preferred to have been able to say that it was because he’d been distracted, or irritated that he’d had to rescue her in the pub, or anxious to get her out of his office so he could see to other things.

  But none of that was true.

  The truth was, he’d watched her walk over to the pub, then followed her there just to have another look at her. Could he be blamed for ordering for himself a Lilt, neat, to be enjoyed whilst leaning against the wall watching a young woman who seemed to have trouble judging the distance between her passenger door and the nearest unyielding surface? Grant had told him he would have some regular customers with peculiar mechanical issues. He’d never expected that one of them would take his breath away just to look at her.

  He supposed she would have gotten away from Frank’s lecherous advances soon enough on her own, but he’d been across the tavern, brandishing his chivalry, almost before he’d known he was going to.

  He sighed, then turned and took the credit card from Bobby. “I’ll get it back to her. What’s left on your list for the day?”

  “I’m finished,” Bobby said. “Unless you’d like me to pop the bonnet on that old Jag of yours—”

  “I’ll see to that one myself,” John said without hesitation, “though your generosity is much appreciated.” He couldn’t bring himself to thank Bobby again for the earlier rescue. Once had been more than enough.

  “I’ll tidy up, then,” Bobby said, then trudged past him out into the garage, already humming some mindless tune that was popular in the current day.

  John had hummed enough mindless things in recent years that he thought he might safely leave them behind for the afternoon and see to a few other things.

  “Lock up for me after you’re through, would you?” John called. “I’ve an errand to run.”

  “She’s a bit o’ alright,” Bobby agreed.

  “I’m taking groceries to Mrs. Winston,” John said darkly.

  “Old Doris?” Bobby asked with a laugh. “Aye, she’s a bit o’ alright as well.”

  John cursed him under his breath and left the shop. He did indeed intend to be about a bit of good-deed-doing, though he couldn’t say it was completely altruistic. Doris Winston was every day of eighty and managed her own grocery visits with ease, but she happened to have an ear to the ground on a daily basis. If there was anything to be known about that dark-haired beauty who’d come into his shop and knocked the breath from him, it would be Doris.

  John hated to think what she’d dredged up about him.

  The tale he’d noised about himself was an innocuous one about his having left home early, then having bummed about various garages by day and bands by night until he’d come into a bit of money, which had allowed him to buy old Grant’s garage when the man’s rheumatism had necessitated a decamping for France. All of which, for the most part, was true.

  Well, except the part about limiting himself to bands. It wouldn’t have done his reputation as a gearhead any good for anyone to have known he far preferred classical guitar to grunge, jazz to pop, and that he could be, when he’d occasionally indulged in a pint too many, prevailed upon to dredge up a ballad or two of a less modern vintage. Fortunately for him, the women he’d been stupid enough to play them for had been completely clueless as to their origin.

  And his, for that matter.

  He had to admit, he found himself longing, just once, to meet a gel who looked at him, then looked away, instead of looking, then boldly looking a bit more until he’d understood the invitation. He’d become just as adept at the look that said he wasn’t at all interested.

  He hadn’t been able to muster up even a hint of that sort of look that afternoon. He’d been too damn flustered, something he had never once in his life experienced.r />
  Perhaps that should have been a sign of some sort.

  Aye, one that said he should ask old Mrs. Winston where the poor driver in question might be found so he could return her card to her and have done as quickly as possible. He turned up the collar of his leather jacket and quickened his pace toward the local green grocer.

  Half an hour later, he was standing under the awning of Doris Winston’s front stoop. The door opened and he was greeted with almost as much enthusiasm as she used when he arrived to pay his rent on the little cottage behind his shop that she owned. He’d offered to buy it—indeed he would have preferred that—but she had insisted that for as long as she was alive she wanted to see him every month. Not being one to argue with old women, he’d acquiesced without complaint. The grocery runs were made simply because he liked her.

  “Ah, Johnny,” she said, holding open her door, “you’ve come for tea.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble,” he said politely.

  “You know it’s no trouble, lad. Come and sit, and fill an old woman’s ears with village gossip. I heard you rescued a pretty thing from unwanted advances in the pub a few minutes ago.”

  “Three hours ago,” John corrected, following her into her kitchen. “Who passed on those tidings?”

  “I never reveal my sources,” Doris said airily. “Just leave the things there, love, and come sit. We’ll have a little chat over my famous black currant jam.”

  He imagined they would.

  She graciously allowed him to hold out her chair at her tea table. He sat across from her, indulged for a quarter hour in a ritual he had come to quite enjoy over the years, then pushed his cup aside and looked at his landlady.

  “I’m curious,” he said in as offhand a manner as he could manage. “Mildly.”

  “Her name’s Tess Alexander.”