by Lynn Kurland
Stephen’s phone rang, making her jump. He glanced at the number but didn’t take the call. Peaches looked at him with a frown.
“Do I dare ask?”
“Irene,” he said briefly. “She’ll keep. But I’d best ring Humphreys before he’s assaulted by questions he won’t know how to answer.”
“Have you got answers for him?” she asked in surprise.
He shot her a look. “He has a vague idea of my evening’s activities, but I don’t care to be more specific than I have to, which means I’m going to be inventing a few things as I go. Please don’t let that be a permanent blot on my character.”
She waved him on to his subterfuge, which he engaged in the moment they hit the main road and he found a place to pull over.
He very briefly discussed with his valet the situation and the necessity of collecting both his and Miss Alexander’s things and dismissing Miss Edwina. She closed her eyes and realized that it was becoming far too easy to rely on him to take care of things and worry later about—
Her thoughts ground to a halt.
Dismissing Miss Edwina?
She waited until he’d pulled back on the road and they’d driven for a bit before she dared look at him. Fortunately, she couldn’t see him too clearly, which made it easier for her to think. She contemplated what she could say, if anything, about his very brief conversation with his valet.
If Humphreys had provided her with Edwina the Stern, was it possible that Humphreys had provided her with other things at Stephen’s direction?
Such as a new wardrobe?
She was beginning to think she had been a complete and utter idiot.
Stephen yawned. “I think I should stop for petrol and something to feed us—” He blinked. “What is it?”
She opened her mouth, then shut it. She didn’t want to know. The thought that Stephen de Piaget, the man she had loved to loathe, had been the one to spend his hard-earned sterling on clothes so she wouldn’t look like a country bumpkin …
Well, it was almost more than she could take in.
He fished out another tissue and started to use it on her. He stopped with his hand approximately an inch from her face, looked at her seriously, then held the tissue out.
“I think your feet must pain you.”
It was more her conscience that was paining her, but she didn’t think she could admit as much. She gulped a time or two instead.
“Do you—” She had to take a deep breath. “Do you want me to go inside and get food?”
“I think the ball gown and overcoat might be too conspicuous,” he said seriously.
“Well, we are in the country,” she managed. “I guess riding boots wouldn’t look too strange.”
“Not at this time of night, at least,” he said wryly. “We’ll stop the first chance that presents itself.” He paused. “Are you unwell?”
No, just feeling like an idiot. Of course, she couldn’t say that without talking about all kinds of things she didn’t want to talk about. She limited herself to shaking her head, which seemed to be enough for him.
She closed her eyes, but that made the world spin uncomfortably, so she resigned herself to merely wishing she could close her eyes.
The first chance for food presented itself sooner than she dared hope. She watched Stephen buy gas and snacks, noted that no one inside seemed to find his gear out of the ordinary, then waited a bit more until she was holding a hot cup of tea and they were back on the road. She cleared her throat.
“Thank you,” she managed.
He glanced at her. “The tea is that good?”
“I wasn’t talking about the tea,” she said. “I meant the other business.”
He frowned, then realization apparently dawned. “Oh, that. It was nothing, really.”
Peaches supposed there was no time like the present to offer a full complement of apologies, if she was going to do it at all.
“It was something to me,” she said, shifting a little so she could look at him. “You saved my life. Thank you.”
He shrugged. “My pleasure.”
She paused. “I’m afraid I wasn’t very gracious about it at the time.”
He didn’t look at her. “You needn’t like me, Miss Alexander.” He shot her a brief glance. “I can be something of an arse from time to time.”
“Can you?” she mused. “I wonder.”
“You probably shouldn’t.”
Well, that wasn’t exactly a warming of relations, but she supposed she might as well press on while she had the chance.
“You were very kind to me and Tess before Christmas,” she said quickly, before she lost her courage. “I repaid you poorly.”
“Did you?”
She was starting to wonder if she shouldn’t just keep her mouth shut, but she had just had a brush with death and getting stuff off her chest seemed like the right thing to do.
“You were, I think, teasing me once,” she said. “At that little party—”
“I know the one.”
She took a deep breath. “I took it personally, and I don’t think I should have.” She paused. “I apologize.”
He said nothing. She waited, but he still said nothing. Maybe he wasn’t good at accepting apologies, or he thought she was crazy, or he just didn’t care what she thought.
Maybe he hadn’t been teasing her, and he really thought she was a flake.
She waited for what she was sure was at least half an eternity before she cleared her throat and changed the subject.
“Where are we going?”
He put them on the motorway, but he still didn’t look at her. She was almost to the point where she was back to thinking she ought to just punch him and be done with it when he spoke.
“I think I can get us to Cambridge without falling asleep and causing an incident,” he said wearily, “though I fear Sedgwick is beyond me tonight.” He shot her a brief look. “I think it imprudent to go to Artane, unfortunately, regardless of what I said earlier to the garage lad.”
“Because your parents wouldn’t approve?” she asked lightly.
“They think my interest in swords is limited to admiring them as they loiter behind glass cases.”
“I wasn’t talking about the swords, actually,” she said, striving to maintain a casual tone. “I was thinking they wouldn’t approve of your being out late at night with a woman dressed in a lovely but rather soiled ball gown.”
He shook his head. “My parents are far past the point where they question my activities or the company I keep, but that isn’t my reason for avoiding the hall. I think it best we simply go to my flat and avoid discussion. Humphreys will bring your things in the morning.” He glanced at her then. “You’ll be perfectly safe.”
She shifted so she could look at him by the faint light of his dashboard. She supposed of all the things she would ever think about him, thinking that he would be anything but a perfect gentleman would never have crossed her mind. She was actually more worried about his reputation than anything else, though she supposed he was, as he said, an adult. If he felt uncomfortable about her sleeping over at his house, he could drop her off at a hotel.
But she found she couldn’t say any of that. All she could do was watch him as unobtrusively as possible and wonder how it was they had gotten so far off on the wrong foot. And their recent bonding in medieval England aside, she wasn’t sure he was interested in changing that. Seeing her thawed, yes. Putting her back on a train to Sedgwick, definitely.
But not anything else, surely.
So she spent the trip drinking tea, ignoring the pain of her hands and feet thawing, and watching Stephen keep himself awake. He changed radio stations, opened the window now and again, and otherwise simply soldiered on. Still, it was pushing three on the car’s clock before he pulled into the driveway of a semi-detached house near Cambridge’s colleges. He shut the car off but left his hands on the steering wheel for quite some time.
Peaches almost wondered if he’d fallen
asleep, but he looked at her at just the moment before she opened her mouth.
“You make me nervous.”
She blinked, wondering if she were dreaming. “What?”
“I have difficulties saying the right thing,” he said slowly. He glanced at her briefly. “To you.”
She shook her head, because she was just sure she was hearing things. “What in the world are you talking about?”
He only looked at her, longer this time, as if he strove to memorize what she looked like, then he shook his head, pulled the keys out of the ignition, and opened the driver’s side door.
“Wait for me.”
“Arf.”
“That’s baa, Miss Alexander. Baa.”
Peaches watched him go and then found herself smiling. She thought she might understand just a bit how he could have so many women chasing him.
Oh, who was she kidding? Women would chase him just for his face and his body alone. The title probably was a bonus and most of them probably had absolutely no appreciation for his very dry sense of humor or his abundant charm.
Her door was opened. Stephen looked at her, then started a bit.
“Are you feeling suddenly unwell?”
She opened her mouth to tell him she was just being overwhelmed by kind thoughts about him, then decided silence was the better part of valor. She shut her mouth, shook her head, then wondered if her legs were equal to holding her up. Stephen unbuckled her, then slipped his arms around her back and under her knees.
Peaches squawked.
He stopped. “Something wrong?”
“You can’t carry me.”
“I think I can, actually.”
“I mean, you shouldn’t carry me,” she said. “What will the neighbors think?”
“The neighbors are dreaming sweet dreams without care, but they’ll stop if you protest all the way into the house.”
She barely missed elbowing him in the nose as she put her arm around his neck, and she managed to shut the door without shutting him in it.
“I’m sturdier than I look,” she offered. “Really.”
He only carried her to his front porch without comment—or any huffing and puffing. He managed to get the door unlocked and open without dropping her. He set her on her feet, then pushed the switch to turn on the lights.
Peaches caught her breath in spite of herself. She felt as if she’d walked back in time a hundred years. No, maybe not that long. The décor was early 1950s British professor, and it was spectacular.
“Wow,” she managed.
He sighed. “Overdone, I know, but my grandmother keeps foisting her damned antiques off on me. I’d prefer a decent lamp and a comfortable chair by the fire, but she thinks if I’m going to pretend to be a scholar, I might as well not embarrass the family by doddering about in a tatty bathrobe.”
Peaches smiled. “I like her taste.”
“She will be enormously gratified to hear it. Let’s look at your feet, then you’ll decide if you want a shower or a bath. The second bedroom has neither, I fear, but you can have your choice of what lies in other places.”
“I’m not sure I want to move from here,” Peaches said honestly. “I don’t want to leave a trail on your floors.”
He shook his head. “The floors don’t matter. Here, sit on the stairs.”
She sat, then looked at her feet as he squatted down and pulled her skirts out of the way. Her toes weren’t frostbitten, miraculously, and didn’t look all that much worse for the wear. Just filthy.
Stephen looked up at her. “Shower or bath?”
“Shower,” she said gratefully. “Tell me you have one of those endlessly heating things so I can stand in there for the rest of the night.”
“I do,” he said, rising. “If you’ll wait but a minute, I’ll fetch you a robe.”
She waited and almost fell asleep as she did so. She accepted a robe and a towel, managed to get herself into the shower and wash off all the medieval grime, then get herself somewhat dressed for company.
Stephen had warmed up some sort of broth she didn’t dare ask the source of. She ate what he gave her without question and ignored the fact that her imaginary bearded raw-food guru would have been appalled by the distinctly bovine bouquet. Stephen helped her to the bottom of the stairs, then stopped.
“The guest room is up and to the left,” he said. “Use whatever you find there that suits you.”
“I don’t know how to begin to thank you,” she said, with feeling.
He was back to solemn and grave. “Truly, Miss Alexander, there is no need.”
It would have taken three steps. Three normal, easy, doable steps to be in his arms. She’d been there once, in the past, for approximately sixty seconds. She wondered how he felt about that. She wondered how he would feel if she took those three steps at present and put her arms around him.
She settled for something less taxing. “You could call me Peaches, you know.”
He went very still. She saw him do it. She also thought he might have been on the verge of reaching out to pull her into his arms.
But he didn’t. He simply took her hand, then made a low bow over it. Then he straightened and merely looked at her.
Peaches supposed that was answer enough. She turned and trudged up the stairs. She put her hand out to open the guest room door.
“Good night, Peaches,” came the quiet words from below.
She smiled. “Good night, Stephen.”
She heard his firm footsteps carry him off into the depths of the downstairs, no doubt so he could enjoy his own endless shower. She walked into the bedroom, turned on the light long enough to find the bed, then put herself between the sheets, robe and all.
If an ordinary bed wasn’t absolute heaven after endless hours in medieval England, she didn’t know what was.
Good night, Peaches.
She fell asleep smiling.
Chapter 16
Stephen walked up the street, wondering if he’d lost his mind. It was possible, of course. Time travel was uncharted territory for him. He supposed he might have made a second call to Zachary Smith to ask him a few more pointed questions. Given the number of times Zachary had apparently traveled through the centuries, he would certainly know.
Yes, perhaps the strain of lingering in a time not his own had affected him adversely. He considered that quite seriously as he let himself in his front door. It was exceptionally strange how one minute a man could be living a very normal, unremarkable life, then the next find himself completely out of his element.
Take what he was holding in his hands, for example. He walked into his kitchen and set his burdens down on the table: green drink of some species and scones made from whole grains. He looked at them suspiciously. It occurred to him that he might well enjoy the cardboard carrier it had all come in more than the goods themselves, but the long-haired, rather earthy lad at the juice bar had assured him that both the scones and the drinks would be delicious.
Perhaps it would be well to whip up a few eggs to mitigate any possible ill effects.
By the time he had a plate full of eggs scrambled with some lovely sausage, Peaches had emerged from another shower. He was yet again unaccountably nervous, which he found to be quite possibly the most ridiculous occurrence of his life, but there it was. He cleared his throat. It was all he could do not to shift from one foot to the other.
“Green drink,” he said, gesturing toward what he’d put at her plate. “And scones that are rumored to be healthier than ordinary scones, but you’ll have to be the judge.”
She sank down into her chair, then looked up at him in surprise. “Green drink?”
“I didn’t make it myself, if that eases your mind any.”
She smiled.
And he was lost yet again.
He sat down without delay, because it seemed the wisest course of action. He made a production of arranging silverware and examining his own cup of green juice. It looked absolutely disgusting and smelled remark
ably like horse breath after the horse in question had spent the day chewing down a pasture, but he had faced sterner tests than this and survived. If imbibing things of this nature was what was required to impress the woman sitting across from him, then imbibe them he would.
“You’re having some as well?”
She sounded absolutely delighted, which he knew should have given him pause, but perhaps she had nothing more nefarious in mind than good wishes for his health. He attempted a smile, but was afraid it had come out as a grimace.
“Yes, accompanied by real food I sautéed in half a cup of butter,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t want to overwhelm myself right off.”
She sipped, then sighed in pleasure. “It’s delicious. I’ll have yours if it doesn’t agree with you.”
He sipped. It was rather tasty if one could ignore the color, which resembled pond scum, and the aftertaste, which left him fully believing he’d just clipped the lawn with his teeth. He considered its immediate effects on his tum, then slid the cup across the table. Better safe than sorry. “All yours.”
“After what you’ve eaten—or not eaten—in a vacation locale we won’t mention?”
“I’m still trying to recover,” he said, tucking happily into his eggs. “This will make great strides in erasing the unsettling culinary memories.”
Silence fell. He looked at her finally to find her merely toying with her scone. She was watching him.
“What is it?” he asked, finally giving in to shifting uncomfortably. He never shifted. It was testament enough of the week he’d had that he did it without hesitation.
“I was just wondering.”
He set his fork down and looked at her. “About what?” he asked uneasily.