One Magic Moment

  “Have any of your clients had a sister—and I can hardly believe I’m saying this—time travel back to the thirteenth century to marry a guy whose twin looks to be living down the road—” She held up her hand. “Never mind. You don’t have to answer that.” She took a deep breath, then stepped forward and put her arms around her sister. “She loved you more than she loved me, but in spite of that, this is killing me.”

  “She loved us both equally,” Peaches said. “And if it makes you feel any better, it’s killing me, too.”

  Tess released her sister in surprise. “You haven’t said anything.”

  “I’ve been too worried about you.”

  Tess could only shake her head. “I haven’t even managed to ask you why you came back to England or what you’ll do with your business in the States while you’re here.”

  “I thought I might like an extended stay in your luxurious castle. I think I can force myself to take care of business over the phone while I’m fondling your tapestries. But mostly,” she said with a grave smile, “I just came to make sure you weren’t losing it.”

  “Thank you,” Tess said quietly. “And forgive me. I’ve been incredibly selfish to worry more about myself than you.”

  “And yet I still love you,” Peaches said. She turned Tess toward the door and gave her a little push. “Go to London and forget about him. I’ll answer the phones and keep the marauders at bay for you.”

  “I owe you,” Tess managed.

  “And the price will be very high,” Peaches promised.

  Tess doubted that, but she would have paid it just the same without hesitation. She went to get her coat and keys, grateful for a reason to get out of the castle for a bit and think about something besides medieval things.

  Or medieval men.

  Not that she needed to worry about those sorts of guys. Not really. The odds of again seeing John de Piaget—who despite another set of odds she didn’t want to calculate couldn’t possibly be the medieval brother of Montgomery de Piaget—were indeed very slim. She could conduct all her business in the village by phone and she could certainly manage to avoid losing any more side mirrors for a while. Maybe John would get tired of the provincial nature of the village and decide he should move somewhere else with fancier cars to fix. She was perfectly safe.

  Within minutes, she was on her way toward the station. Unfortunately, she’d only been on the main road for a couple of minutes before she discovered that someone was tailing her. It was that black sports car again. She was tempted to give the guy the finger, since that’s what he was accustomed to from her—

  Her tire blowing startled her so badly, she yelped. She looked quickly for a place to pull over. She’d never been more grateful for anything than she was for a little farmer’s turnout that allowed her to get herself off the road.

  She jumped again when she realized her friend had pulled in so tightly next to her that the driver was going to have to crawl out his passenger door to get out—though why he’d stopped she couldn’t have said. It wasn’t possible that some rich guy in a suit would want to help her. Maybe he was going to scold her for her bad behavior earlier in the week. Well, she had a thing or two to say to him about his driving habits, so maybe they could just have it out right there in a patch of nettles. She girded herself for battle and crawled out of her car.

  She watched the Aston Martin’s far door open, then saw a dark head emerge. And she thought she just might have to sit down.

  John de Piaget straightened, then walked around the back of what was apparently his car and then hers.

  “Ah,” she attempted.

  “Spare tyre?” he asked briskly.

  “In the boot,” she managed, clutching her keys as if they’d been all that kept her from falling into some bottomless abyss. And when he held out his hand for those keys, she had to force herself to surrender them. “I can fix it myself,” she said in a lastditch attempt to save herself and her sanity.

  “I imagine you can,” he agreed, walking around to the trunk of her car, “but I’ll do it instead.”

  She pulled the hood of her slicker up over her head to ward off what was less of a rain than it was an early morning mist and went to see what he would find to use. Her car wasn’t new and it hadn’t been hers until she’d moved into the castle, but it had served her well enough. The truth was, she’d never had to look in the trunk for rescue tools.

  John was simply staring down into her trunk. She peeked around the trunk lid and saw that there was definitely no spare tire inside. There was, however, her box of new side mirrors. He stared at them for another minute or two, shook his head, then looked at her.

  “Need anything from inside your car?”

  She had a hard time concentrating on his words. She was just too darn distracted by his face. “What?”

  “Your gear from inside your car,” he said, sounding as if he were dredging up a fair amount of patience.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t think you want to wait here until I can get a new tyre for you. What do you need for the day?”

  “Ah, my bag,” she began.

  He only waited, as if her next move should have been obvious. It might have been, if she could have done something besides stand there and stare at him, mute.

  He sighed, then eased past her to rummage about in her car. He handed her bag to her, then took her car key off her ring and locked the door with it. He then tossed the key into the trunk.

  “Wait—” she blurted out as he shut the trunk lid. She looked at him in surprise. “I needed that.”

  He handed her the remaining keys, took her by the elbow and led her over to the passenger side of his car. He opened the door and got in.

  “Are you going to leave me here?” she asked in surprise. “Without my car key?”

  He looked up from where he was sitting in the passenger seat. “I hadn’t intended to, no.”

  “You can’t mean to take me with you,” she said, realizing as the words were out there that she’d attached a look of horror to them.

  He lifted a shoulder in a half shrug. “It seemed polite.”

  “But I don’t want to go with you,” she said, feeling slightly alarmed at the thought of being in an enclosed space with him.

  He shot her a look. “I don’t think you have much choice, unless you want to stand out in the rain all morning.” He slid over the gearshift into the driver’s seat, then leaned back over and looked up at her. “Get in.”

  Tess felt her mouth fall open. “You ... rude . . .” She was obviously not at her best because she couldn’t come up with a single truly cutting thing to call him. “You’re bossy.”

  He blinked, then smiled so quickly she would have thought she’d imagined it if the very sight of that knee-weakening smile hadn’t been burned onto her retinas.

  “Please, Miss Alexander, do me the courtesy of getting into my humble carriage before you catch your death either from the inclement weather we’re experiencing or from the fool who will no doubt eventually come along behind us and plow first into my boot and then into your very fetching self and cause us all a great deal of unnecessary trauma.”

  “Well,” she said, feeling a very uncomfortable heat in her cheeks, “that’s a little better.” She sat with as much dignity as possible on a seat that was better suited to a luxury mansion than a stupid car. When John leaned over her and pulled the door shut, she realized she was in deep trouble. “I have places to go,” she said quickly, because it made her feel more in charge to say it.

  “Anywhere in particular?” he asked.

  “The train station.”

  “Going to London?”

  “Yes, actually, I was.”

  She made the grave mistake of looking at him. He had gray eyes. She supposed she should have known that given that his brother did as well, but she realized that she hadn’t really done all that much looking into Montgomery de Piaget’s eyes.

  She wished she could call Pippa, just once.
Just to tell her that she wasn’t the only one Karma had been gunning for. To ask her how she was, if she was happy, if Montgomery had turned to fat and turned his swordsman’s duties over to her.

  She supposed Pippa would have only laughed at the last.

  “Are you unwell, Miss Alexander?”

  The kindness in John’s voice, damn him, almost undid her right there on the spot.

  “I’m fine,” she said, more hoarsely than she’d intended. “Just late.” She had to pause and dig for something nice to say. “I appreciate the rescue.”

  “I’m for London as well,” he began slowly, “if you’d rather not take the train.”

  Heaven help her, that was the very last thing she needed. It was going to be bad enough to be in the same car with him for the five minutes it would take to get to the station. “No,” she managed, “I’ll be fine. Thanks just the same.”

  He shrugged and pulled out his mobile. A very brief conversation with Bobby resulted in a promise that her car would be waiting for her at her castle, good as new, when she was finished with her business.

  “But you locked my car key in the trunk,” Tess reminded him.

  “Bobby won’t need it, but he’ll fetch it out for you and leave it at the keep.”

  “I’m not sure I want to know the details.”

  John almost smiled again, she was sure of it. She was very glad he hadn’t. She was still trying to erase the memory of the last one.

  She managed to get herself buckled, then leaned her head back against the seat and tried to ignore the fact that she was in a car that had to have cost a cool quarter million pounds if it’d been a hundred quid. She couldn’t say she was up on too many current events—it wasn’t her preferred century, after all—but she did love cars, and she had found over the years of teaching that a little knowledge of what a college-aged boy might be interested in had tended to earn her a few brownie points.

  The question was, how had John de Piaget possibly afforded the kind of car she was riding in?

  And how was it he was driving as easily as if he’d been doing it his entire adult life?

  She looked out the window, watching the dark gray of the morning give way to something only slightly less gloomy. She waited until John had stopped outside the station, then put on her most polite, uninterested expression.

  “Thank you very much,” she said, not caring that it sounded rather more prim than it should have. “I appreciate the rescue.”

  He looked at his hands on the wheel. “My business will take a good part of the day,” he said slowly, “but I’ll ferry you home, if you like.”

  “Peaches can come get me,” she said, then she stopped when she realized that wasn’t true. Her sister was booked again for the whole of the afternoon and into the evening with more client consultations. The perils of doing business with people living eight hours behind her.

  Well, it didn’t matter. She would call a cab, or take a bus, or walk. If worst came to worst, she could hike across country and get home as the crow flew. She didn’t have to allow the man sitting next to her to give her any help.

  All in keeping with her determination to avoid him at all costs, of course.

  He pulled out his wallet, removed a card from it, then wrote something on the back. He looked at it for several excruciatingly long moments, then held it out toward her, not looking at her.

  “If you wrap up your business early and are up for a bit of explore, come find me here,” he said. “If all goes well, I’ll be finished about three. My mobile number’s on the front. “

  “Are you in class?” she asked, taking the card as if it had been a live thing.

  “Something like that,” he said abruptly. He turned away and immediately got out of the car.

  Well, he obviously wasn’t much for personal questions. She didn’t bother to wonder why not because the answer was staring her fully in the face. Beyond reason, beyond any sane rationalization, beyond anything reasonable, she was having her door currently opened by a man who she absolutely knew wasn’t what he was pretending to be.

  He held out his hand to help her out of the car.

  And time stopped.

  She wasn’t one to indulge in thoughts of magical moments or slices of time where Karma was doing what she did, but she was left with no choice but to acknowledge that she was, unwillingly and with a good deal of unease, facing one of those moments. The world had gone still and quiet, as if it along with time held its breath for something monumental to happen.

  Tess didn’t dare look at John to see if he was wrapped up in the same bit of stardusty sort of stuff she was. She simply took a very careful breath and put her hand into his.

  As if she’d done it a million unthinking, unremarkable times before.

  Only she hadn’t.

  Time sighed.

  She took a deep breath, then allowed John de Piaget to help her from the car. And as she did so, she reminded herself that she wasn’t unaccustomed to dating powerful, intelligent, or important men. She was equally practiced in encountering on a business level extremely intimidating, brilliant, and famous men. If she could handle all that, she could surely deal with the touch of John’s hand. It didn’t have to mean anything.

  A pity that, despite her protests, it did.

  She pulled her hand away quickly, and the moment was gone. If John felt anything, he didn’t show it. He merely stood back, looked anywhere but at her, then shut the door when she’d moved away from it.

  “Thank you again,” she managed.

  “You’re welcome,” he said politely, but he didn’t move. He simply stood there, waiting, not watching her, until she’d managed to get herself moving forward. She walked into the train station without looking back. She waited for her train without allowing herself to think about anything at all. It was only as she sat down by a window and the train began to move that she looked at the card she still held in her hand.

  The business side had the name of Grant’s garage, then nothing more than the shop number and John’s cell number under it with just his first name.

  Odd.

  She turned it over and found an address written there in a rather lovely hand, all things considered. Then again, he was a lord’s son. She imagined his education had been extensive and consisted of quite a bit more than just swordplay.

  She shook her head. She hadn’t considered that part of his life. Was he as skilled as his brother?

  Did she care?

  She wasn’t sure she could bear to even begin to think about that.

  She put the card into her bag, shut it purposefully, then concentrated on the lovely English countryside passing by her, countryside that was full of farmland, the occasional groupings of oasts, and not a single castle for miles.

  Thankfully.

  Chapter 4

  John cursed his way to London.

  It was perhaps the first time in what seemed at the moment to be an exceptionally long life that he found himself grateful for all the languages he’d taken the time to learn—or been forced to learn by his father. He’d started his current tour of curses in tatty old English, worked his way through French, German, Italian, then ventured into Portuguese and Russian. The last gave him a bit of a headache, so he’d turned to things a bit more familiar like Old English and Norman French.

  And the Latin he’d conjugated during mass every morning of his first nineteen years of life to keep himself awake.

  That hadn’t but gotten him to the M25 where he unfortunately needed the foul language the most. He usually had enough patience to negotiate morning traffic, but he wasn’t at his best presently. He settled for news on the radio and a deliberate and purposeful dredging up of the last of his reserves of patience.

  Damn that Tess Alexander.

  He knew his present discomfort wasn’t entirely her fault, but a decent bit of it was and he was fully prepared to blame her for it. If she hadn’t come into his shop, if she hadn’t blown a tyre, if she hadn’t with every breat
h she took left him dazzled and distracted . . . well, actually it was entirely her fault that he was affected.

  He paused, then blew his hair out of his eyes. To be entirely fair, he could have done something besides follow her so closely that morning. He’d known it was her car, which should have left him whipping his own car about and taking a different route north. By nay, he’d had to follow her, then he’d had to help her, then he’d done the most irrational thing of all by giving her one of his cards and telling her to come find him.

  And then he’d touched her hand and been lost.

  He cursed feebly, because that was now all he could manage. He was daft, that was it. He’d suffered a momentary weakness, but he might not pay for it too dearly. Perhaps she wouldn’t use his card, which would save him from more discomfort. He would make sure to duck out the back when she came into his shop in the village, which would finish the tale once and for all.

  A pity the memory of the feel of her hand in his was something he couldn’t seem to put behind him.

  He snapped back to himself just before he plowed into the car in front of him, then forced himself to concentrate on what he should have been doing in the first place, which was driving.

  It took him almost two hours to get into the city, which he supposed was better than it would have been if he’d been using just his feet. He pulled into the car park of the studio, leaned his head back against the seat and let out his breath slowly.

  Truly, he loathed London.

  If he hadn’t had business there that he enjoyed, he never would have ventured into its innards again. There were too many people, too much noise, too much confusion. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed it as a lad, either, though he was the first to admit things had changed a bit over the years. His dislike of the place, however, had remained steady.

  It was comforting somehow that some things didn’t change.

  He pushed himself out of his car and went to fetch his guitar out of the boot. He reached in and started to shove aside the mail he’d tossed atop the case that morning, then sighed and reached for it. No sense in not at least seeing what sort of rubbish his new shop was entitling him to.