One Magic Moment (16 page)
“I was going to talk to you about that.”
She started to glare at him, then she smiled, apparently quite reluctantly. “Is this the new you who’s nicer to me?”
He finished the last pair of bites on his plate, then had a long sip of some nonalcoholic rot before he looked at her.
“I’m not off to a very good start with it, am I?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “You’ve held open all the doors for me today.”
“That seems a paltry offering.”
She leaned back and stirred honey into her tea. “Then what else do you have in mind? The divulging of uncomfortable personal details?”
“Nothing so interesting,” he said quickly, lest she think too much about the former. “Let’s talk about you instead. How did you come by Sedgwick?”
She lifted a perfectly arched eyebrow. “Thinking to make me an offer for it?”
“Saints, nay,” he said without thinking, realizing only as he’d said it that he’d blurted it out in French. He decided without hesitation that the only thing he could do was pretend he hadn’t heard himself.
Coming to Cambridge had been a terrible idea.
“You aren’t going to leave me here, are you?”
He blinked. “What?”
“Your keys are in your hand.”
He realized with a start that they were. He took a deep breath, then let it out whilst he put his keys back in his pocket where they belonged. Then he looked for something to say to explain the action he hadn’t realized he’d taken, but latched upon nothing but the truth.
She frightened the hell out of him.
She set her spoon down. “I was at a conference,” she said, as if nothing untoward had just happened, “and Lord Roland came up to me after my presentation and asked if I’d like a tour of his castle.”
“The bloody lecher,” John managed.
She laughed a little. “He was—is, actually—every day of eighty, so I wasn’t imagining he had anything lecherous in mind. I did take a friend, if you’re curious—”
“I was,” he said.
“And the minute I walked inside the front gates—” She took a sip of her tea. “Well, it was love at first sight. It isn’t an enormous keep, I suppose, like Artane or Windsor, but I think it’s beautiful. I understand Roland’s ancestor, Lord Darling, did extensive renovations to it in the nineteenth century.”
He flinched at the name of his father’s hall, but he supposed she hadn’t noticed it. “Did he?” he asked. “Clever man.”
“Lord Darling had purchased it from the last of the Sedgwick family,” she continued, “and for a song, or so I understand. Wrested the title to it away from the crown, as well. I don’t think the seventeenth century had been particularly kind to the inhabitants of the keep. Politics and all that, I imagine.”
“I daresay,” he said. He couldn’t have said he’d done any research into Sedgwick or its inhabitants, but he’d done more than his share of reading about the history that didn’t concern his family. He could say with complete sincerity that he’d been more than happy to leap over the centuries and miss several unpleasant things. The Black Death, Henry the VIII, the absolute boredom of Regency manners and mores to name just a few. If he’d had to put on a cravat and limit his activities to hunting and drinking, he would have gone mad.
“And so the next thing I knew,” she said. “I had the big brass key to the front door and knew the secret of dropping the portcullises.”
“It seems a fitting thing for you to own,” he said politely, “given your obvious knowledge of medieval England.”
“Thank you,” she said, blushing slightly. “I try to be as accurate as possible.”
“You were—” He shut his mouth with a snap. “I thought you sounded as if you knew what you were talking about,” he amended quickly. “For all I know about it.”
“What’s your degree in?” she asked.
“Life,” he said without hesitation. “I was, ah, privately tutored for most of my youth. By the time I left home, I had other interests than University.” He paused. “I read a bit now and then.”
“Your time has been well spent, then.”
“As has yours.”
She laughed briefly. “You’re being excessively polite. And don’t say I had best enjoy it while it lasts.”
He leaned his elbows on the table. He wanted to ask her why she found herself in England, but he suspected it might have been Fate getting involved, but he wouldn’t have said that if tongs destined for his tender flesh had been warming in the fire. The thought that he could have ignored his first instinct and thereby passed on the garage, or she could have decided that French literature had been more to her taste and wound up in Paris—
He realized she was holding out her hand.
He reached out to take her hand only to find he was holding his keys in that hand. He met her eyes.
“Old habits die hard.”
“Have you bolted often in the past?”
He opened his mouth to tell her it was none of her business what he’d done in the past, but the words disappeared almost before he could think them—certainly long before he even thought to blurt them out. He looked at his keys, then very deliberately put them into her hand. He folded her fingers around them, rested his hand on hers for an excruciatingly brief moment, then pulled away before he did something monumentally stupid. He wasn’t sure what it would have been, but he supposed the list of possibilities was very long indeed.
“We could go,” she said, very quietly. “If you need to.”
“Nay,” he said quickly and perhaps with a bit more force than necessary. “Nay,” he repeated, then realized he was again falling back into habits he’d thought he’d long since rid himself of. Third bloody time was a charm, or so they said. “No,” he managed. “I am well.”
“Sure.”
He looked at her. “You bother me.”
“I’m not trying to.”
“I’m not complaining, though that might not be as clear as it should be.”
She smiled and put his keys on the table well out of his reach. “I won’t ask you anything else personal today, which I’m sure will just glue you to your seat. Have I told you that I have a beauty queen for a sister?”
He had to agree that she hadn’t, but he invited her to do so at length. He spent the rest of an hour, when he could do something besides stare at her by the light from the window and wonder why it hurt his heart to do so, asking her about herself. He heard tales of her five sisters, her parents who had stopped just short of tiedyeing themselves, and her time at her aunt’s house where she had learned to pull weeds with vigor and love the austere self-discipline her aunt distilled upon everything within her reach.
“Why England?” he asked finally, because she had his keys and he thought he could bear to hear how close he had come to never having clapped eyes on her.
“Castles,” she said without hesitation. “Grooves in stairs where scores of feet have gone up and down them millions of times. Rocks that are covered with history.”
“And the grubby leavings from fingers of Year Five boys on school outings,” he said with a snort.
She smiled. “You’re a cynic.”
“Realist.”
“Why are you in England?”
He blinked. “Because I am an Englishman.”
She leaned her head back against the pub bench. “You are full of national pride.”
“Do you have none?” he asked.
“Oh, I do,” she answered easily. “I’m a Yank, through and through.”
“Despite your rather crisp consonants and lovely vowels.”
She smiled, one of the truer smiles he’d ever had from her. “Thank you. I’ve tried to mitigate the effects of a brush with a Midwest twang.”
He felt himself relaxing—an alarming realization in and of itself—and thought that perhaps he shouldn’t relax too much. There was no way to predict what sorts of perils he would plunge himself into if he did. He looked at his watch. “Shall we go?”
“If you like.”
He didn’t, but he
was
a realist. Too much more time sitting companionably with her and he would be letting things slip he didn’t want to.
was
a realist. Too much more time sitting companionably with her and he would be letting things slip he didn’t want to.
He walked with her out to the car, took his keys from her and saw her inside, then drove her to her mate’s house where she collected her things. He put them in the boot of his car with his own he’d packed earlier from his hotel, then slid in under the wheel and was very grateful he was driving and not looking forward to several days’ worth of travel to get to Sedgwick.
He was also happy to do nothing but drive until they were on the motorway. It never ceased to amaze him how easily a car with a bit of horsepower could accelerate to speeds he never would have dreamed of in his youth. More amazing still that he could be the master of that car and those speeds.
The Future was an amazing place.
And at the moment, it was made all the more pleasant by the addition of a beautiful woman sitting next to him, though that wasn’t what drew him to her. It was simply that she was Tess and there was something about her that he couldn’t look away from. She wasn’t what he’d expected, but he realized she could have been nothing else.
He grasped quickly for the last shreds of his common sense. The truth was, it was too soon, he had too many secrets, she was too fragile—
Nay, the last wasn’t true. She looked fragile, but he suspected that underneath that exterior that had recently suffered some sort of shock, she was tough as spring beef.
He wondered what sort of shock it had been.
Still, she looked tired. And she was too thin. He didn’t mean the skeletal emaciation that he saw in films and on the covers of gossip rags. She was too thin for her frame, something he suspected came from whatever shock she’d endured. When he’d said as much the day before, he hadn’t meant to be critical; he’d simply wanted to remedy the situation.
Which had driven her out on a non-date with the future Earl of Artane.
Lesson learned. He would keep his bloody mouth shut the next time.
T
he
afternoon was waning by the time he walked Tess to her front door. He wanted to take her hand, or pull her into his arms, or say something meaningful. As it was, he could only stand there and look at her.
he
afternoon was waning by the time he walked Tess to her front door. He wanted to take her hand, or pull her into his arms, or say something meaningful. As it was, he could only stand there and look at her.
“Thank you for the day,” she said simply. “It couldn’t have been convenient to spend the night in Cambridge.”
“It was nothing,” he said with a shrug. But it wasn’t nothing; it was something and far more of something than he was comfortable with.
“The gate’s open.”
He blinked. “What?”
“You’re halfway toward it as it is. I just thought you might want to know it wasn’t keeping you here.”
He blew his hair out of his eyes. “I’m not sure we should see each other very often,” he said bluntly, before he thought better of it. “Just to keep this thing from moving too quickly.”
“This thing?”
He suppressed the urge to blush. “Perhaps I am venturing where I shouldn’t have. I have presumed that you wanted to see me again, which perhaps you don’t.”
“I never said that,” she said mildly. “And those were very nice rhetorical flourishes you just offered—no, don’t glare at me.” She attempted a smile. “It’s been a very long fall and I’m not quite myself.”
“Hence my desire to feed you at every turn.”
Her smile faded. “Is that all you want to do with me, John de Piaget?”
“No,” he said shortly, “it unfortunately isn’t, which is why I think we shouldn’t see each other very often.”
“What’s your definition of often?”
“Every day.”
“That
is
often.”
is
often.”
He didn’t bother to say that by every day, he meant all day, every day. No sense in frightening off the poor wench unnecessarily.
“You’re very comfortable dictating the terms of things,” she remarked casually.
He clasped his hands behind his back. “Then you dictate.”
“No,” she said slowly, “I think I like it better when you do. Very chivalrous.”
“And despotic.”
“I wasn’t going to say that,” she said with a very small smile, “but yes, that, too. My oldest sister would be appalled by it, but I don’t think I mind. What do you think?”
He thought that if he had to talk to her much longer, he would either attempt to kiss her senseless or drop to his knees and beg her to be his—neither of which he could do at present. He backed down a step.
“I think we should see each other next week, then.” He said that because it sounded sensible. “On Friday.”
“If you like.”
He started to nod, then realized that was well over a week away. He frowned. “Thursday, perhaps.”
“That’s good, too.”
“You could ring me sooner, if you like.”
“I don’t call boys,” she said primly.
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