One Magic Moment

  “You’re still weary.”

  She looked up at Nicholas quickly. “That isn’t John’s fault. He did the best with what he had.”

  Nicholas smiled. “I wasn’t faulting him for it; just making an observation. We’ll make this a quick trip. I think what you need is an afternoon in front of the fire.”

  Yes, where she could look at John and store up a lifetime of memories of the sight of him with the firelight flickering against his dark hair and his exceptionally handsome face. Then she would then go back to the future, find all the music he’d recorded, and sit with her collection in her solar and spend the rest of her days weeping over him.

  “Tess?”

  She blinked rapidly and looked up at Nicholas, attempting another smile. “I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “I think I’m more tired than I thought.”

  “Shall we go in?”

  She shook her head. “I’m not about to pass up a chance to pry into the workings of Wyckham when I have the lord of the castle at my disposal.”

  She realized she was speaking English, but the French was beyond her. Nicholas only smiled.

  “I don’t know how long you’re planning on staying, but my life is an open book for you for as long as that might be. Since you have on boots, let’s start in the lists.”

  Tess nodded, grateful for the distraction.

  So she walked with him, trailed by his other three sons who looked just like him, and tried not to pepper him with questions. She wasn’t sure where she would have begun, because they were questions she could have asked of John without garrison knights listening and wondering why she was daft.

  They made it to the stables and were admiring a horse before she hit upon the one thing she wanted to know that she hadn’t been able to find in a book. She looked up at him.

  “Are you ever afraid?”

  Nicholas caught his breath, then smiled faintly. “A terrible question, which you doubtless know.” He put Connor down on the floor, then studied the horse in the stall for a moment or two. “In my youth, I would have said to you nay without hesitation. I would have given my life for my family, of course, and grieved if any of them had been lost, but it wouldn’t have inspired fear. But now?” He had to take a deep breath. “I don’t think about it often, but aye, I suppose the fear is always there, waiting in the shadows. If something happened to Jennifer, or the lads—” He paused, then smiled at her. “If it eases you any, Montgomery feels that way about your sister. He is utterly besotted with her.”

  “And he’ll keep her safe?”

  “He is my equal,” Nicholas said simply. “As was John, but he’s gone soft, living in that land of yours with Lilt and chocolate and the saints only know what else. It wouldn’t take him long to regain what little skill he’s set aside for other things, though, if that eases you, though I’m not sure where he would use those skills.”

  “Not many sword-wielding ruffians where I come from,” Tess agreed.

  Nicholas shook his head slowly. “But there are other perils there that he must face that I never will.” He nodded to his left. “I suppose he could tell us of those, if he cared to.”

  Tess looked to find the source of all her turmoil leaning against a post in the stable, freshly scrubbed and looking like a lord in his own right.

  “Getting the tour?” he asked politely.

  She nodded, putting on her best smile. “Your brother has been very kind.”

  “And now he can get lost,” John said with an arch look cast that brother’s way. “I can carry on from here.”

  Nicholas leaned against a stall door. “I think that perhaps instead I should offer my services as chaperon.”

  “When hell freezes over,” John said with a snort. “I’m going to give Tess a riding lesson, so there won’t be any mauling of her person unless she falls off her horse.”

  “Horse?” Tess echoed. She realized it had come out as more of a squeak, but it was too late to take it back.

  “Every noblewoman should know how to ride,” John said, looking at her solemnly. “My lady.”

  Nicholas put his hand briefly on her shoulder. “I think in this I can safely say that my brother knows what he’s about. He’s an excellent rider, and I think he has the good sense not to put you up on a horse that will fling you back into his arms. You’ll be safe enough.”

  “Ah,” Tess said, “I think I’ll pass.”

  “And I think you won’t,” John said easily. “Tess, you must learn to ride. You cannot be in this—ah, I mean—” He dragged his hand through his hair. “You must learn to ride,” he finished. “Nonnegotiable.”

  She wanted to argue with him that everything short of death and taxes was negotiable, but she knew she didn’t have a leg to stand on—and since she would likely fall off her first horse and break both legs, maybe it was best she just get it over with. But she wasn’t about to let John think he had the upper hand.

  “Maybe,” she said firmly.

  Nicholas laughed and gathered up his sons. “Let’s leave them to it, lads. Hands in plain sight all the time, Johnny lad. Don’t make me take you out to the lists and beat you to a pulp because you didn’t behave yourself.”

  John rolled his eyes. “Begone, my lord, whilst my tongue is still in check.”

  Nicholas flicked him on the ear as he passed, then continued on with his sons looking back longingly. Tess watched them go, then looked up at John.

  “This isn’t necessary—”

  “It is,” he corrected. “Critical, actually.”

  It occurred to her, with a startling flash that made her slightly queasy, that he might be entertaining the thought that not only did he want to stay in medieval England, he couldn’t get out of medieval England.

  Which meant she couldn’t, either.

  She felt her mouth go dry. “All right,” she managed.

  “Trust me.”

  “I do.”

  He smiled, a grave, serious smile that she’d never seen him wear before, then found herself suddenly seated quite comfortably on a pile of hay while he went to put the appropriate gear on what was hopefully Wyckham’s gentlest nag.

  She tried to calm her racing heart and warm her very chilly hands.

  She failed.

  Medieval England?

  She tucked her hands under her arms and hoped they would stop shaking by the time she needed them.

  Chapter 22

  John stood with his back against a tree, watching Tess look out over a panoramic vista that had been covered with snow the night before. He was profoundly grateful for a decent cloak, though he wouldn’t have argued if some fairy godmother had waved her wand and caused his Vanquish—complete with its very serviceable heater—to appear behind him. A pity he wouldn’t have been able to get inside it given that he’d left his keys, his phone, and his credit card locked safely in Nicholas’s trunk.

  He suppressed the urge to drag his hands through his hair. He honestly couldn’t say what had been worse: leaving Artane for the first time or coming back to medieval England unexpectedly. Both had been wrenching.

  Only then, he hadn’t had a certain woman he would leave behind if he chose a century she didn’t belong to.

  He watched the woman in question and wondered what she was thinking. He’d actually spent quite a bit of the previous day watching her and wondering the same thing. He’d known she was sitting on the side of the lists, watching him as he trained. She had seemed a little shell-shocked, but he couldn’t blame her for it. He was quite certain he’d worn that same look for the first few fortnights after his arrival in the Future. It was to be expected.

  She’d seemed very uncomfortable at first with the horse he’d put her up on until she’d realized that he truly wasn’t going to let go of the lunge line and leave her cantering off into the distance. She came by an excellent seat naturally somehow, and there had come a point where she’d actually smiled a time or two.

  Her hands, though, had been positively frigid when he’d pulled
off her gloves to see how they’d survived her first lesson. That had come, he’d suspected, from more than just the chill, as profound as it was.

  He’d taken her inside and spent the afternoon and evening making sure she and Jennifer were well-fed and always sitting closest to the fire. The conversation in Nicholas’s solar that evening had been carried on partly in French, partly in English, and had involved a wide range of topics that had been as innocuous as possible. Tess had mostly listened gravely. John had caught the single, questioning look Nicholas had sent him, but had only been able to shrug in return. Tess was thinking about something, but he was damned if he knew what.

  That morning he’d marched out to the lists with his brother, indulged in a brief lunch with Tess, then announced that it was time for her to try a little ride outside the castle walls. She was plucky, he would give her that. Facing medieval times head-on instead of from the comfort of a library had to have been daunting, but she’d done it without hesitation.

  Silently, of course, but without hesitation.

  All of which left him where he was, leaning back against a tree with a sword at his side, freezing his arse off so he could have ten minutes of privacy with the woman he loved.

  The woman who seemed to be about three heartbeats from bolting, truth be told.

  She looked like something out of a painting, standing there in a deep blue cloak with its hood pulled up around her face and her stillness a tangible thing. Wyckham sat in a particularly lovely part of the country, which only added to the perfection of what he was seeing. He regretted having left his phone back at the keep. He would have happily taken a picture to remind him of the moment.

  Tess turned and looked at him, and he lost his breath. He supposed he should have been accustomed to the sight of her, but he found he wasn’t. She was beautiful, and brilliant, and courageous.

  But she also looked still fragile enough that he reached out toward her without thinking. She looked over her shoulder at the guardsmen who surrounded them at a discreet distance, then shook her head at him.

  “I’m fine,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.”

  “I fear it would be the opposite,” he said seriously, “so I will forebear.” He took off his cloak and started to put it around her, but she balked.

  “You’ll freeze.”

  “We won’t stay long.”

  He covered her cloak with his own, then fastened it at her throat. He hesitated, then put his hands on her shoulders.

  “How are you?” he asked seriously.

  “I’m fine,” she said, nodding as if she strove to convince herself of it. “And since we have all this frigid privacy, you could see your way clear to telling me a few of the details about yourself that you couldn’t seem to lay your fingers on eight hundred years from now.”

  He studied her in silence for a moment or two, then decided perhaps standing out in the middle of a winter wonderland was not the place to delve into thoughts and feeling she might not want to share. He couldn’t imagine she wanted to discuss his past—either in the present or the Future—but perhaps it was the easiest thing for her to talk about. He looked for someplace to sit, but there was nothing that wasn’t covered in four inches of snow. He looked at her.

  “We’d best make this quick.”

  “You’re the one talking.”

  He had to take a deep breath. “I think I might have to sit down in truth.”

  “You can’t. It’s snowing again.”

  To his surprise, he found that was indeed the case. “Very well. Ten minutes, then we go back.”

  “That will give you just about enough time to tell me how you went from 1233 to the Future without losing your marbles. I’ll save the rest of my questions for when we’re in front of a hot fire.”

  He suppressed the urge to shift uncomfortably. “I’ve never told anyone the particulars.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, then looked at him. “And you don’t have to tell me,” she said quietly. “Not really. I know it’s a private thing—”

  “No, I want to,” he interrupted quickly. “Just don’t bloody my nose if I hesitate.”

  She looked at him for several moments in silence, then sighed deeply. She closed the distance between them and put her arms around him. “I won’t,” she said, very quietly.

  He wrapped his arms around her without hesitation. He wasn’t sure if she was trembling from the cold or something else, and he didn’t dare ask. Perhaps they could blame it all on the cold, for he was shivering as much as she was.

  “How do you want this sordid tale?” he asked, trying to remove himself as far as possible from the emotions of it. “English or in the appropriate local vernacular?”

  “English, since you have a choice. Just make it short. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She took his cloak and wrapped it around as much of him as she could. “What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been where you weren’t supposed to be?”

  He took a deep breath. “I was in Nick’s solar, nosing about in his private trunk. There were rumors, you see, of things pertaining to Jennifer’s dowry that Montgomery and I had speculated on, though I’ll point out he didn’t have the stomach to investigate with me. Likely afeared he would find a faery inside,” he finished in disgust.

  “Your brother has grown up,” she said with a smile. “In case you were curious about that.”

  “Has he?” John mused. “I’m afraid he’s fixed in my mind as a dreamy, tenderhearted lad of ten-and-nine.”

  “Stephen might have a different opinion—at least about his sword skill—but we’ll leave that for later. So, you ventured where your brother feared to tread, then what?”

  “I saw a map, with all manner of red Xs littering it.”

  “Time gates?” she asked faintly.

  “I suspected the like. It was a poorly kept secret within my family that my sister Amanda’s husband was from the Future and I suspected the same thing of Jennifer.” He had to take another bracing breath of arctic air. “That isn’t entirely true. I saw her simply appear out of thin air, so I knew, once I saw those Xs, just exactly what they meant. I had to investigate.”

  “Your poor parents.”

  “I daresay.” He sighed. “I certainly wasn’t about to tell my father that I intended to try one of those gates to see where it took me, so I simply informed him that since I had my spurs clanking so prettily at my heels, I was ready to venture off into the world and make my fortune and would he see his way clear to giving me a bit of my inheritance so I could.”

  She pulled back and looked up at him. “What did he say?”

  “He told me to go soak my head until good sense returned.”

  “Did he know what you were planning, then?”

  He smiled wearily. “I can’t say for certain. All I know is that the conversation deteriorated rather quickly from there. I think my reply to him included the words stingy and whoreson.”

  “Oh, John,” she said with a pained smile. “I imagine it wasn’t a very pleasant afternoon.”

  “Oh, it didn’t last all afternoon,” he said easily. “He threw a bag of gold at me—a very heavy one, as it happened—then threw me out of his hall. Bodily.”

  She studied him for a moment or two in silence. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Aye, but it isn’t interesting, having to do with, as it did, other men’s lands and inheritances and things that were none of my business. I’ll tell you all one afternoon when we’ve absolutely nothing else to discuss. Suffice it to say that I had no idea my father knew so many vile words or that he could use them as so many parts of speech.”

  “He must love you very much,” she murmured.

  “We are, I fear, very much alike,” John admitted. “Bossy, unpleasant, short-tempered—”

  “Chivalrous,” she corrected, “loyal, protective.”

  He tightened his arms around her briefly. “All these medieval luxuries have clouded your vision, but I
won’t argue with you. My father is all those things, as well as absolutely relentless in the safeguarding of his children which is why, I suppose, his reaction surprised me so greatly. I assumed he would gently attempt to dissuade me from trotting off to be a part of some illfated Crusade or join myself to Henry’s court, but . . .” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t expect him to throw me out of his hall. I fair broke my neck rolling down the front steps.”

  “Maybe he thought it would bring you to your senses.”

  He sighed. “Looking back on it now, I would say you have it aright. He no doubt though a night or two sleeping in a ditch—without a horse or gear, mind you, which he refused to allow me to take—would bring me to heel. I was too furious to think clearly, which will no doubt come as a surprise to you knowing how tractable and reasonable I always am.”

  She only smiled and said nothing.

  “I borrowed pen and parchment from the village alderman,” he continued, “scribbled a note, then looked for someone to carry it to Nick. I knew he would understand where no one else would. I gave it to Everard of Chevington, but apparently he wasn’t to be trusted.”

  She shivered. “Chevington is a creepy place.”

  “Isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to spend a night under that roof—what’s left of it.”

  “What then? What did you do when you found yourself in the Future?”

  “Found a job mucking out stables until I had enough money set aside—current pounds, of course, not the gold I’d brought with me—to stop mucking out stables. I bought a guitar and a bass, learned to play both, then bummed around playing bass in garage bands for a bit until I thought I’d had enough of the Future. I packed up my gear and started back toward Artane, fully intending to step on that very large X and make peace with my father.”

  She was very still. “And?”

  “It didn’t work,” he said lightly, though at the time he’d felt anything but casual about it. “The gate was, well, turbulent is the only way I can describe it. I think if I’d stepped into it, I wouldn’t have found myself in the right time. I tried another spot I’d memorized, was summarily gang-pressed into Victoria’s British Navy and only escaped because they marched me through my backyard, as it were, and I knew where to hide.”