One Magic Moment

by Lynn Kurland

  “I’ll come when you’re not there.”

  He nodded. “Wise.”

  “I think so, too.”

  He shot her a look. “Lock the door, Tess.”

  “I will.”

  “Good night.”

  “Thank you, John,” she said, very quietly.

  He shrugged aside her thanks, because he could do nothing else. He nodded briskly, then turned and walked down the steps. He heard the hall door close and supposed she must have bolted it. He wasn’t about to go check.

  He put his head down and walked across the courtyard and out the front gates before his chivalry hung itself about his neck like a millstone and kept him from going on with the most sensible course of action. He ignored the fact that if Tess Alexander had been his, he would have lowered every damned portcullis the keep boasted and posted two dozen guardsmen with sharp swords and sour dispositions outside her door to keep her safe.

  But as she wasn’t his, he couldn’t do any of that. He also couldn’t bloody well camp in his car in her car park, either.

  He cursed his way to his car, cursed some more as he backed out, then continued to accompany himself with foul words as he headed down the road back to the village.

  He wasn’t going to spend the night worrying about her, or pace until dawn because he was losing sleep over her, or think any more about how many times he’d fought the urge to pull her into his arms and hold her securely against him. She was not for him and he was not for her.

  The sooner he accepted that indisputable fact, the happier he would be.

  He would go home and make a list of all the reasons he didn’t like her. Hell, he didn’t know her well enough to dislike her, but he was certain that a list of that sort could be made with enough diligence.

  And once he had done that, he would return to his very sensible, monotonous existence of being a mediocre studio musician, a modestly skilled restorer of expensive cars, and a compulsive watcher of stocks on his damned phone.

  He honestly couldn’t imagine anything more interesting.

  Not at all.

  Chapter 7

  Tess leaned against a wall in an alcove leading into a courtyard in the oldest part of the second oldest university in England and shivered. She wasn’t one for leaning, but she was just stretched too thin at the moment to do anything else but try to keep herself upright.

  She’d been in Cambridge for less than two days and to her utter surprise, she found she was ready to be finished and go home. It was odd, that sensation, given that she’d worked the whole of her life to get to where she was standing. From the time she’d understood in what sort of unstable situation she’d found herself in with her parents, she’d vowed that she would make something different for herself. Her chance had come at fifteen, when her parents had dumped her and her five sisters onto their aunt Edna and vanished without a backward glance.

  Her older sisters, Moonbeam and Cinderella, had been already on their way out the door by that point and hadn’t been subjected to the full brunt of the Victorian-era-inspired living conditions. Her younger sisters, Pippa and Valerie, had had to endure it longer than she and Peaches had, but she hadn’t minded it at all. She’d had her sights set on Cambridge from the beginning and Aunt Edna’s Victorian Institute of Arduous Study by Candlelight had suited her. She’d graduated from high school two years early, then blown through her undergrad and graduate degrees in just under six years. She’d just begun to work her way up the academic ladder when the offer of a castle had come her way and completely changed her life.

  She looked out into the courtyard steeped in history and wondered why it was she wasn’t still feeling that almost feverish urge to climb over everyone in her way to get to the top.

  She put her hand briefly to her head. No fever. Maybe she was having a midlife crisis. She was tempted to call Peaches and see if that sounded reasonable, but she suppressed the urge. Losing a sibling was probably pretty high up on that Life Change list, so maybe she just needed to take it easy and roll with things for a bit.

  She didn’t particularly care for rolling, truth be told.

  She was going to have to make a few life decisions very shortly, whether she wanted to or not. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be teaching full-time, but she also wasn’t sure she wanted to own a castle and simply host parties, either. The truth was, she missed the smell of old libraries and the visions of medieval glory she found safely lurking only inside them. She missed teaching bright-eyed students who were as nuts about the Middle Ages as she was. She missed spirited discussions with other academics who were as passionate about their opinions as she was about hers.

  She was also getting a little tired of catering to spoiled rich people who talked through an evening of the most amazing medieval music she had ever listened to, played in the appropriate setting by a man who knew a thing or two about what he was doing.

  She pulled her coat closer around herself. She wanted to go home, but home had become a place that didn’t feel all that comfortable anymore. If it had been just continually wondering about Pippa and her life, she might have been able to put that behind her eventually. But now putting that behind her was impossible because ten miles away was a man who had moved into her village, a man she didn’t want to see again—and not just because he’d suggested it would be best that they not run into each other. No, it was more than that.

  It was that he was her damned brother-in-law’s twin.

  She wondered if it might be time to call Lord Roland’s lawyer and get his number. Roland had told her that she could, if she liked, call him any time she felt overwhelmed. At the moment, she was tempted to ask him if he wanted the castle back so she could move back into a minuscule flat near Cambridge and hide herself away in the library where she wouldn’t be troubled by shades of her sister, reenactment whackos, or the real deal driving a pricey black sports car.

  She hadn’t seen the real deal in four days, a fact for which she was enormously grateful. Truly. He’d played for the party on Friday, then disappeared. She’d holed up in her castle for the weekend, only opening her door on Saturday to the decorators who’d come to turn it into a Yuletide fantasyland for the next round of parties on the following weekend. She’d exchanged greetings with Peaches on Sunday afternoon as she’d picked her up at the train station, then sent her home while she took the train north. Crashing on a friend’s couch had been a diversion, true, but only in that she’d had two days to try to work out the kink in her neck.

  She’d spent the past two days working on a paper she was preparing for publication. She had been asked to give a lecture the following morning, then she would head back to dangerous territory to prep for the weekend festivities. She had nothing in front of her for the rest of the day but more time in the library where she could hide out and attempt to face things medieval.

  Well, things medieval that had nothing to do with Sedgwick, its environs, or former inhabitants of the keep or their relations.

  She briefly contemplated lunch, but decided that could wait. What she really needed was a hot fire and a nap, but that seemed destined to carry her along a path where she wasn’t going to want to go. First she would start napping, then she would stop putting her hair up, then she would be spending her days in a ratty bathrobe and fluffy slippers. It just wouldn’t end well, she was sure of that.

  She pushed away from the wall and started across the courtyard, looking at the stones at her feet, already planning her assault on the library. That was a happy place full of things she was familiar with. It would surely cure what ailed—

  She ran into an immobile shape before she realized she wasn’t really watching where she was going. She looked up, an apology ready on her lips, along with a word of thanks for the steadying hands on her arms.

  Then she froze.

  Standing in front of her was John de Piaget.

  He released her, but said nothing. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands. She felt one of them flutter up and fuss wit
h the back of her hair self-consciously. She reclaimed control of it and put it and her other one in her pockets where their shaking wouldn’t be noticed. It took her a moment before she could even manage to form words.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, though she imagined they weren’t shaking. It was such an unthinkingly modern thing to do, she almost lost her breath.

  She realized suddenly that the question she wanted to ask wasn’t, What are you doing at Cambridge? It was, What the hell are you doing in the twenty-first century?

  Though she was curious about the first as well.

  He looked profoundly uncomfortable. “I thought you might be hungry.”

  She was just sure she hadn’t heard him right. Hard on the heels of wondering if she were losing her hearing was wondering how he’d found her and why he’d taken all the trouble to drive up from the village to tell her that he thought she might be hungry.

  But, no, he hadn’t driven that far. It was Tuesday. He’d been in London, recording things for that rich girl who didn’t want him to have a girlfriend. Tess didn’t need to check her watch to know it was just after noon, which meant he’d either worked hard or finished early. Or maybe the girl hadn’t showed up and he’d been at loose ends. It just wasn’t possible that he’d decided that in spite of his desire to never run into her again, he’d just meandered over to Cambridge, seen her stumbling across the courtyard, and decided that maybe she needed something to eat.

  It occurred to her that she was frantically searching for things to think about, anything to think about besides the fact that just the sight of the man in front of her was enough to simply rock her very foundations. It wasn’t his looks, or his background, or the fact that somehow, beyond reason, when she looked at him, she felt as if she’d been waiting her entire life to walk into her great hall and find him waiting for her there, in front of the fire, with a welcoming smile on his face.

  It was all of those things put together.

  He wasn’t wearing a welcoming smile now. She nodded to herself over that, taking it as a sign that she was losing her mind. He didn’t fit in at all with what she’d expected for herself. In fact, not only did he not fit in, he was completely wrong for it. She wanted a nice guy she could walk all over. She didn’t want one who herded her and protected her and worried about whether or not she’d had lunch.

  She had very vivid memories of Montgomery pulling Pippa behind him and reaching for his sword every time he’d smelled danger in the air, but she shoved those aside before she got lost in them.

  “Tess?”

  She focused on him. “What?”

  “Lunch?” he prompted.

  She grasped for the fast-disappearing shreds of coherent thought. “I thought you were in London today.”

  “I was,” he said.

  “Finish early?” she asked in an effort to deflect attention from the fact that just standing two feet from him was having a ruinous effect on her common sense and ability to not feel faint.

  “The brat had a cold,” he said, sounding faintly disgusted, “and couldn’t be bothered to show up. I provided her with a practice track or two and left about ten.”

  “And drove here?” she asked, because she had to say something. Honestly, she didn’t want to know what he’d done after he’d left the studio. She didn’t want to see him. He said she bothered him, but that didn’t come close to describing what he did to her.

  He looked at her for a moment or two in silence, then nodded.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  He looked slightly uncomfortable. “I saw your sister in the market yesterday.”

  “And you talked to her because she wasn’t me,” she said before she could stop herself.

  She would have taken the words back if she could have, because she didn’t want him to think she cared one way or another what he thought—because she had obviously been thrust back to junior high thanks to some weird quirk in the flux capacitor. She was beginning to think all time travel should be banned for those with any hearts to break.

  He had the grace to look slightly ... something. Sheepish wasn’t it, nor was apologetic. He looked as if his conscience might have been giving him the slightest twinge of discomfort.

  “Your sister doesn’t bother me,” he said, finally.

  “Give her time,” she advised. “She will.”

  The look he gave her almost singed on her on the spot. “I don’t think I’m in any danger there.”

  Implying, perhaps, that he was in danger where she was concerned.

  She almost turned and ran. It would have been the first sensible thing she’d done since she’d met him. Fortunately for her, she was very good at taking things only at face value, so she would assume he simply wasn’t moved to lyricism by Peaches, which had no bearing on his opinion of her, and stay right where she was. Well, that and her shoes seemed to have become stuck to the flagstones beneath them.

  “Your sister said she wasn’t sure if you had either money or a hamper full of snacks,” he continued, as if the words were being dragged from him by a team of calm but relentless horses. “And since that was the case, I thought perhaps it would be prudent to see to both.”

  “I have money,” she managed.

  He met her eyes. “Then since that’s seen to, let’s go find you something to eat.”

  “Is this a date?”

  “Saints, nay—er, no,” he said quickly. He took a deep breath. “You’re too thin.”

  She clenched her hands in her pockets, stung from the vehemence of his denial. All right, so he didn’t want to date her. Apparently he just wanted to drive through horrendous London traffic then lie in wait for her at University merely to torment her. For what reason, she couldn’t imagine. It couldn’t be because he wanted to date her, because he’d just said he didn’t.

  “You know,” she said, when she thought she could speak without decking him, “a person can cross the line from politely protective to overly critical pretty quickly if one isn’t careful.”

  He chewed on his words for a minute. “I talk too much.”

  “Yes, that is definitely your problem.”

  A corner of his mouth quirked up the slightest bit. “Are we going to stand here in the cold and discuss my failings all morning or are you going to let me feed you?”

  “I hadn’t begun to point out your flaws for your edification—”

  She glanced behind him, on the off chance there might be someone standing behind him with a white board and markers, ready to take her list down for her. But there wasn’t.

  But doom was.

  Doom, or maybe catastrophe, or the beginning of the end of John de Piaget’s safe, comfortable life in a century not his own. She wasn’t sure what to call it. She was even less sure how she was going to keep John’s doom, who was dressed quite nattily in trousers and a tweed jacket with a cashmere scarf tossed carelessly about his neck, from blurting out something untoward—and the list of what those things could be was almost as long as her yet-to-be-made list of John’s faults.

  Or perhaps not. The man walking toward them with a smile was no one any more nefarious than a man whose class she had taken early on in her career at Cambridge. He had been a mentor first, advising her on academics and providing a listening ear for everything else. In time, he had become a friend. In the end he had become something of a brother.

  The problem was, he also happened to be the eldest son of Edward de Piaget, the current Earl of Artane.

  “Oh, I say, Tess,” Stephen de Piaget said, walking up to her with a broad smile. “So good to see you. I’ve been in London all week, humoring my grandmother, and didn’t realize you were here.”

  Tess would have held out her hands to stop the train wreck before it started, but she couldn’t. She could only stand there and have complete sympathy for a deer caught in headlights. She watched, mute, as John stepped aside and turned to make a little triangle of disaster w
ith the three of them. He looked at Stephen and froze.

  Maybe he was experiencing that deer thing as well.

  Tess looked from Stephen to John and back again, because she couldn’t help herself. She also couldn’t help but compare John’s meeting of Stephen with the one Montgomery had had with his, ah, nephew if the branches of the de Piaget family tree could be twisted in the right way. The only difference between John’s reaction and Montgomery’s was that John’s right hand only twitched instead of reaching for a sword as Montgomery’s had done.

  Stephen mastered his surprise no doubt thanks to generations of breeding and probably more poker games than he was willing to admit to.

  He and John stared at each other, almost mirrors of each other, for several eternal moments before Tess managed to speak.

  “Stephen,” she said—well, she croaked, really, but she didn’t suppose anyone was actually listening to her so how she sounded probably didn’t matter. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Stephen, this is John de Piaget. He lives in the village near Sedgwick.” She had to take a deep breath to finish. “John, this is a colleague of mine, Stephen, the Viscount Haulton and Lord Etham.”

  They shook hands like polite gentlemen—again generations of quality breeding and mothers who cared about manners, apparently. John, however, was wearing a look she was quite certain was a decent copy of the one she’d worn when she had first seen him. Odd that she knew him well enough to know that he was doing his damndest not to give any indication of what he was feeling. He suddenly took a step backward, checked his watch, then looked at her gravely.

  “I’m afraid I’ve suddenly remembered an appointment I’d forgotten. If you’ll excuse me?”

  And without waiting for an answer, he turned and walked away.

  Tess watched him go. He wasn’t running, but he wasn’t dawdling, either. She honestly couldn’t blame him. He had come face-to-face with his past, his future, and his present all wrapped up in a man who would someday hold the title his father had initially wrested away from a medieval king of England.