One Magic Moment(22)
Author: Lynn Kurland

 

She’d been in Cambridge for less than two days and to her utter surprise, she found she was ready to be finished and go home. It was odd, that sensation, given that she’d worked the whole of her life to get to where she was standing. From the time she’d understood in what sort of unstable situation she’d found herself in with her parents, she’d vowed that she would make something different for herself. Her chance had come at fifteen, when her parents had dumped her and her five sisters onto their aunt Edna and vanished without a backward glance.

 

Her older sisters, Moonbeam and Cinderella, had been already on their way out the door by that point and hadn’t been subjected to the full brunt of the Victorian-era-inspired living conditions. Her younger sisters, Pippa and Valerie, had had to endure it longer than she and Peaches had, but she hadn’t minded it at all. She’d had her sights set on Cambridge from the beginning and Aunt Edna’s Victorian Institute of Arduous Study by Candlelight had suited her. She’d graduated from high school two years early, then blown through her undergrad and graduate degrees in just under six years. She’d just begun to work her way up the academic ladder when the offer of a castle had come her way and completely changed her life.

 

She looked out into the courtyard steeped in history and wondered why it was she wasn’t still feeling that almost feverish urge to climb over everyone in her way to get to the top.

 

She put her hand briefly to her head. No fever. Maybe she was having a midlife crisis. She was tempted to call Peaches and see if that sounded reasonable, but she suppressed the urge. Losing a sibling was probably pretty high up on that Life Change list, so maybe she just needed to take it easy and roll with things for a bit.

 

She didn’t particularly care for rolling, truth be told.

 

She was going to have to make a few life decisions very shortly, whether she wanted to or not. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be teaching full-time, but she also wasn’t sure she wanted to own a castle and simply host parties, either. The truth was, she missed the smell of old libraries and the visions of medieval glory she found safely lurking only inside them. She missed teaching bright-eyed students who were as nuts about the Middle Ages as she was. She missed spirited discussions with other academics who were as passionate about their opinions as she was about hers.

 

She was also getting a little tired of catering to spoiled rich people who talked through an evening of the most amazing medieval music she had ever listened to, played in the appropriate setting by a man who knew a thing or two about what he was doing.

 

She pulled her coat closer around herself. She wanted to go home, but home had become a place that didn’t feel all that comfortable anymore. If it had been just continually wondering about Pippa and her life, she might have been able to put that behind her eventually. But now putting that behind her was impossible because ten miles away was a man who had moved into her village, a man she didn’t want to see again—and not just because he’d suggested it would be best that they not run into each other. No, it was more than that.

 

It was that he was her damned brother-in-law’s twin.

 

She wondered if it might be time to call Lord Roland’s lawyer and get his number. Roland had told her that she could, if she liked, call him any time she felt overwhelmed. At the moment, she was tempted to ask him if he wanted the castle back so she could move back into a minuscule flat near Cambridge and hide herself away in the library where she wouldn’t be troubled by shades of her sister, reenactment whackos, or the real deal driving a pricey black sports car.

 

She hadn’t seen the real deal in four days, a fact for which she was enormously grateful. Truly. He’d played for the party on Friday, then disappeared. She’d holed up in her castle for the weekend, only opening her door on Saturday to the decorators who’d come to turn it into a Yuletide fantasyland for the next round of parties on the following weekend. She’d exchanged greetings with Peaches on Sunday afternoon as she’d picked her up at the train station, then sent her home while she took the train north. Crashing on a friend’s couch had been a diversion, true, but only in that she’d had two days to try to work out the kink in her neck.

 

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?

 

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.