One Magic Moment (13 page)
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 with 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?
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.
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 with 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.
“Good heavens,” Stephen breathed.
Tess looked at him, but she could find absolutely nothing to say. She was afraid if she opened her mouth, she just might lose all the control over herself she’d been exercising over the past six weeks. Freaking out in the middle of a courtyard at Cambridge wasn’t exactly how she wanted to carry on with her academic career.
Stephen took off his scarf and wrapped it around her neck. “Tess, love, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“You don’t look any better,” she said pointedly.
He laughed rather uncomfortably. “Yes, well, I was expecting to see you. I wasn’t expecting to see
him
.” He took her backpack from off her arm and slung it over his shoulder. “Who was that?”
him
.” He took her backpack from off her arm and slung it over his shoulder. “Who was that?”
“Who do you think it was?”
“I’m not sure I want to speculate,” he said carefully. “How long ago did you meet him?”
“Last week,” she said. “I think.”
His face was full of pity. “Ah, my dear,” he said, reaching out and gathering her under his arm. “You’ve been through it, haven’t you? Let’s go hide in my office, and you’ll give me the whole story.”
She didn’t argue—not that she had the chance to. He shepherded her toward his office without hesitation and without brooking any argument. Those de Piaget men: putting sheepdogs to shame for over eight centuries.
She walked into his office, then sighed a sigh she hadn’t realized she’d been holding on to as he shut the door behind him. She let him see her settled in the most comfortable chair he owned, an overstuffed floral thing that he reserved for special company, accepted a cup of tea, then set it aside when she realized she wasn’t going to be able to drink it.
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