One Enchanted Evening (41 page)

“What shall we do today?” he asked cheerfully. “Make a visit to the local pub?”

How about I clunk you over the head with that sword instead, bucko
was almost out of her mouth before she could stop it. More food? The man had a one-track mind and she was beginning to suspect she wasn’t even on the list of attractions to visit on his way to the nearest fridge.

“I’m not hungry,” she said shortly.

He looked at her with a faint frown. “I think you should eat. Your humors are unbalanced.”

Peaches laughed and stood. “Let’s go, Tess. I think we don’t want to be in the middle of this.” She patted Montgomery on the shoulder. “Good luck with her.”

Pippa watched Tess do the same thing, then walk off with Peaches. She waited until she thought she could bite her tongue sufficiently before she looked back up at Montgomery. Before she could edit any other verbal offerings, he had reached down and pulled her to her feet.

“I’ve neglected you this morning.”

“Of course you haven’t,” she said, trying to capture a cheerful tone. “I’m only surprised that you let Stephen off the hook so easily. Maybe he has cousins you could run through after you finish with him every day.”
For as many days as you’re here
she would have added if she’d had the guts, but she was a coward, so she kept her additions to herself.

He clasped his hands behind his back and seemed to be wrestling with something—no doubt how to tell her it’d been fun, but he was going to be on his way right after lunch.

“What would you say to making our journey north today?”

“I suppose there are plenty of places to eat on the way,” she said grimly.

He looked at her as if he had no clue what she was talking about. “I suppose so. I’m more concerned with seeing for myself what’s left of my father’s keep. Your pictures were reassuring, true, and Stephen says it has been cared for well, but his standards may be different from mine. I know they are when it comes to breakfast pastries.”

Pippa didn’t doubt it. She also didn’t doubt that an entire trip heaven knew how far away with a man who was more interested in snacks than he was in her might just do her in.

“My father started with nothing there, you know,” he added. “ ’Tis possible to build a keep from the foundation up and have it be a lovely, comfortable place.”

“Has your fiancée seen it?” she asked shortly, because she just couldn’t help herself.

He didn’t reply. She looked up at him reluctantly only to watch him purse his lips and take her hand.

“Persephone, you and I must have speech together,” he said. “Now.”

She supposed they must, and she was beginning to think she had a few things to say to him, beginning and ending with asking him why the hell he’d come all this way just to torment her. She also wanted a detailed description of that mousey wench he was set to marry so she could imagine him being saddled with her for the rest of his life—which wasn’t going to be a very long or a very comfortable one, apparently.

“Pippa,” he said in surprise, catching her by the arm.

She realized he’d had to do that because she’d almost gone down to her knees. She managed to avoid that, but somehow she didn’t manage to keep from bursting into trembles like another might have burst into tears.

It was PMS. That and the stress of just thinking about having to work under the burden of immense success for the rest of her life. It was no wonder she was beginning to crack under the pressure of just the thought of all the glory. It certainly had nothing to do with the fact that she’d just been wrapped in the arms of a rugged, chivalrous medieval lord who wasn’t going to see the far side of thirty.

“Pippa, what ails you?” he asked softly.

She shook her head and shook a bit more. She didn’t protest when he took her face in his hands and kissed her cheeks.

And her mouth.

That was enough to snap her smartly back to reality. “Miss Mousey would
definitely
not approve of that,” she said in surprise.

He looked particularly unrepentant. In fact, he was still looking at her mouth. He bent his head and brushed her lips again with his, very softly. “We must talk.”

She supposed they must, and the sooner the better. She didn’t protest when he took her hand and strode back toward the keep. She trotted along with him wherever he wanted to go partly because she was still floored by that unexpected kiss and partly because it had just become a bad habit. She was really going to have to get back in touch with her inner diva or the man was going to run roughshod over her for the rest of however long she knew him.

“Might we find water first?” he asked as he burst into the great hall, towing her along after him. “I don’t much care for the bubbling business for it tastes like dust, but I do like whatever tart thing that was you squeezed into my water last night at the restaurant.”

“Lemon,” she managed.

“Aye, lemon. Does your sister have one, do you suppose? I brought gold along—”

“Tess can spare a lemon or two to keep you happy,” she said, quite happy herself that he’d finally slowed down a little bit. “I’ll make you an entire pitcher of it if you like.”

He apparently liked because ten minutes later, he had gulped down a pitcher of unsweetened lemonade and was looking around surreptitiously for more. Pippa allowed Peaches to make the second batch because her hands were shaking too badly to do it. If Peaches noticed—which Pippa was quite certain she had—she at least had the good sense not to say anything.

Montgomery, however, was not so discreet. Pippa found him watching her with a very grave expression on his face. She scowled at him, but his expression didn’t change. He still watched her as if he had something terrible on his mind that he wasn’t quite sure he should talk to her about.

She had to look away. Maybe he regretted coming to the future; maybe he regretted having kissed her. She didn’t know and she wasn’t sure she cared. She wasn’t irritated with him; she was irritated with herself for having fallen, she realized, quite fully in love with him, she was annoyed that he’d come all the way to her time just to eat his way through Tess’s pantry, and she was furious that instead of punching him, what she wanted to do was find a corner, curl up in it, and bawl her eyes out.

Montgomery turned to Peaches. “If you’ll excuse us, sister, we’re off for a walk. I promise to drink all you’ve so skillfully prepared later, however, and relish every sip.”

Peaches simpered under the compliment like the bamboozled feng shui-er she was, but Pippa was unmoved. She jammed her hands in her jeans because that’s where they were most comfortable, ignored the arm Montgomery offered her, then limited herself to a bit of mild stomping as he led her out of the kitchen. He walked around the courtyard for a few minutes, simply looking around himself as if he strove to memorize what he saw.

Pippa almost felt sorry for him then. His version of Sedgwick was such a wreck. It had to have been difficult to look at it in all its twenty-first-century glory, with running water and flush toilets and stables that had obviously been built by a man with lots of money and a great affection for those going on four legs. Apparently Montgomery agreed with the last because he walked with her over to those stables and down the aisle. He stopped at an empty stall and leaned his forearms against it.

“We could leave now for Artane,” he said, finally. “If I could borrow Stephen’s automobile.”

“Over his dead body, probably.”

Montgomery shot her a quick smile. “Aye, that was what he said earlier when I suggested the like.”

She took a deep breath, then blurted out what she really hadn’t intended to say. “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

“This,” she said, waving helplessly between them.

He frowned. “This what?”

Could he really be that dense? Pippa was just sure he couldn’t, but then again, she wondered about herself sometimes, too. “I can’t do this thing where we pretend that we’re just friends,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Where we pretend that your stupid fiancée doesn’t exist, and where I continue to pretend the fact that you’re engaged to
someone else
doesn’t bother the hell out of me.”

There, she’d said it. He could do with it what he wanted, but it was out there in the air between them. Foolishly, unadvisedly, hopelessly perhaps, but out there where he could examine it for himself and hopefully fill in the blanks that it wasn’t just driving her crazy, it was breaking what was left of her heart. The craziest thing of all was how hard she’d fallen for him. He was out of her league and she was out of his time. It was the worst case of star-crossed non-lovers she had ever—

“I never lie.”

It took her a moment to have what he’d said register in her poor overworked brain. She blinked. “What did you say?”

“I do not lie,” he said. “Ever.”

“And what in the world does that have to do with any of this?” she asked incredulously.

He shrugged. “I thought you might find it interesting.”

Well, why not? She had spilled her guts, and he was changing the subject. She waved him on because if she’d opened her mouth again, she would have chewed his head off.

“I have,” he continued, “actually prided myself on and made my mother quite happy by never telling a falsehood. But I told one on the night your sister tried to drag me into that full- blown farce of a marriage.”

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what it was—

“I am not betrothed.”

That took another moment or two to sink in. When it did, she felt her mouth fall open. “What?”

He turned to lean his hip against the stall door. “I am not betrothed.”

“Then why did you say you were?” she asked in surprise.

“Because, apart from the fact that I did not wish to wed your sister, the truth is I love someone else.”

Pippa wasn’t sure what was worse, that he had been fake engaged, or that she’d wasted days and days being jealous of a fiancée who didn’t exist only to now find out that that mousey nonexistent wench didn’t matter because he was in love with yet
another
girl who wasn’t her.

She shouldn’t have been surprised. If she managed to survive the length of time it took to find that time gate and shove him through it so she didn’t have to look at him any longer and have her heart break with every glance, she was never, ever going to read another fairy tale for as long as she lived. She looked away, because she just couldn’t look at him anymore.

“Why aren’t you taking
her
to Artane?” she asked, before she thought better of it.

“I’m trying to.”

Pippa could hardly believe her ears. Not only could the lout stand there, bold as brass, and spend all that time with her when what he really wanted to be doing was taking the woman he loved . . .

Her silent rant slowed to an awkward halt.

Realization started to bloom, tentatively, a bit like a rose that wasn’t quite sure spring had arrived. It took a minute, but what he’d said finally sank in.

He was trying to?

She looked over her shoulder just to be sure, but no, she was the only one in the stable. She looked back at Montgomery, who was watching her solemnly and a bit hesitantly. She pointed to herself and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

He nodded.

She swallowed, hard. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I just did.”

She suppressed the renewed urge to punch him. He must have seen the thought cross her face because he laughed a little, then pulled her into his arms.

“ ’Tis madness, Persephone,” he said, holding her close, “and I am likely damned for having said anything at all. I just know what my life was like that se’nnight when you were gone.”

“That’s not encouraging, Montgomery, considering you were unconscious for most of that week.”

He buried his face in her hair. “Come to Artane with me,” he whispered. “I’m not asking for an answer now on anything else. I’m not sure I could bear to hear it even if you were inclined to give it, lest it be something less than I hope for.” He lifted his head and looked down at her seriously. “Please come with me.”

“I’m pretty sure Stephen won’t let you drive,” she said breathlessly.

“Then you drive. That will give me ample opportunity to lust after you.”

“Stop that,” she said, feeling her cheeks grow rather hot.

He smiled and took her hand. “Let us take it day by day. I may like it so much here in the future that I’ll wish to remain. Surely your sister could use a good stable lad.”

She shook her head. “You need your hall.”

“I need you more.”

She felt her mouth fall open, watched him laugh at her, then found herself trotting along obediently after him when he pulled her toward the great hall, as if she’d never had an independent thought in her head.

“We could take your sisters with us to the past,” he said as he opened the door for her.

“I don’t know if Peaches could give up chocolate-covered doughnuts.”

“Doughnuts?” he asked, looking intensely interested.

“We’ll grab some at the store on the way north.”

He looked absolutely thrilled by the idea. Apparently Montgomery de Piaget was on vacation and he had no plans to stick to his diet. She could only hope he wouldn’t fast food himself to death.

He asked Peaches to give him a take-away version of her lemonade, instructed Pippa to pack quickly, then headed off to make use of Stephen’s en suite facilities.

She tossed a few things in her backpack, took a deep breath, then went downstairs to wait for the man she wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t going to poach the keys to Stephen’s very expensive sports car and refuse to give them back.

Stephen was loitering near the lord’s table with Tess and Peaches, looking slightly unsettled. Pippa set her backpack down on the table.

“I think we’re going on a little trip.”