One Magic Moment(23)
Author: Lynn Kurland

 

It occurred to her that she was frantically searching for things to think about, anything to think about besides the fact that just the sight of the man in front of her was enough to simply rock her very foundations. It wasn’t his looks, or his background, or the fact that somehow, beyond reason, when she looked at him, she felt as if she’d been waiting her entire life to walk into her great hall and find him waiting for her there, in front of the fire, with a welcoming smile on his face.

 

It was all of those things put together.

 

He wasn’t wearing a welcoming smile now. She nodded to herself over that, taking it as a sign that she was losing her mind. He didn’t fit in at all with what she’d expected for herself. In fact, not only did he not fit in, he was completely wrong for it. She wanted a nice guy she could walk all over. She didn’t want one who herded her and protected her and worried about whether or not she’d had lunch.

 

She had very vivid memories of Montgomery pulling Pippa behind him and reaching for his sword every time he’d smelled danger in the air, but she shoved those aside before she got lost in them.

 

“Tess?”

 

She focused on him. “What?”

 

“Lunch?” he prompted.

 

She grasped for the fast-disappearing shreds of coherent thought. “I thought you were in London today.”

 

“I was,” he said.

 

“Finish early?” she asked in an effort to deflect attention from the fact that just standing two feet from him was having a ruinous effect on her common sense and ability to not feel faint.

 

“The brat had a cold,” he said, sounding faintly disgusted, “and couldn’t be bothered to show up. I provided her with a practice track or two and left about ten.”

 

“And drove here?” she asked, because she had to say something. Honestly, she didn’t want to know what he’d done after he’d left the studio. She didn’t want to see him. He said she bothered him, but that didn’t come close to describing what he did to her.

 

He looked at her for a moment or two in silence, then nodded.

 

“How did you know I was here?”

 

He looked slightly uncomfortable. “I saw your sister in the market yesterday.”

 

“And you talked to her because she wasn’t me,” she said before she could stop herself.

 

She would have taken the words back if she could have, because she didn’t want him to think she cared one way or another what he thought—because she had obviously been thrust back to junior high thanks to some weird quirk in the flux capacitor. She was beginning to think all time travel should be banned for those with any hearts to break.

 

He had the grace to look slightly ... something. Sheepish wasn’t it, nor was apologetic. He looked as if his conscience might have been giving him the slightest twinge of discomfort.

 

“Your sister doesn’t bother me,” he said, finally.

 

“Give her time,” she advised. “She will.”

 

The look he gave her almost singed on her on the spot. “I don’t think I’m in any danger there.”

 

Implying, perhaps, that he was in danger where she was concerned.

 

She almost turned and ran. It would have been the first sensible thing she’d done since she’d met him. Fortunately for her, she was very good at taking things only at face value, so she would assume he simply wasn’t moved to lyricism by Peaches, which had no bearing on his opinion of her, and stay right where she was. Well, that and her shoes seemed to have become stuck to the flagstones beneath them.

 

“Your sister said she wasn’t sure if you had either money or a hamper full of snacks,” he continued, as if the words were being dragged from him by a team of calm but relentless horses. “And since that was the case, I thought perhaps it would be prudent to see to both.”

 

“I have money,” she managed.

 

He met her eyes. “Then since that’s seen to, let’s go find you something to eat.”

 

“Is this a date?”

 

“Saints, nay—er, no,” he said quickly. He took a deep breath. “You’re too thin.”

 

She clenched her hands in her pockets, stung from the vehemence of his denial. All right, so he didn’t want to date her. Apparently he just wanted to drive through horrendous London traffic then lie in wait for her at University merely to torment her. For what reason, she couldn’t imagine. It couldn’t be because he wanted to date her, because he’d just said he didn’t.

 

“You know,” she said, when she thought she could speak without decking him, “a person can cross the line from politely protective to overly critical pretty quickly if one isn’t careful.”

 

He chewed on his words for a minute. “I talk too much.”

 

“Yes, that is definitely your problem.”

 

A corner of his mouth quirked up the slightest bit. “Are we going to stand here in the cold and discuss my failings all morning or are you going to let me feed you?”

 

“I hadn’t begun to point out your flaws for your edification—”

 

She glanced behind him, on the off chance there might be someone standing behind him with a white board and markers, ready to take her list down for her. But there wasn’t.

 

But doom was.

 

Doom, or maybe catastrophe, or the beginning of the end of John de Piaget’s safe, comfortable life in a century not his own. She wasn’t sure what to call it. She was even less sure how she was going to keep John’s doom, who was dressed quite nattily in trousers and a tweed jacket with a cashmere scarf tossed carelessly about his neck, from blurting out something untoward—and the list of what those things could be was almost as long as her yet-to-be-made list of John’s faults.

 

Or perhaps not. The man walking toward them with a smile was no one any more nefarious than a man whose class she had taken early on in her career at Cambridge. He had been a mentor first, advising her on academics and providing a listening ear for everything else. In time, he had become a friend. In the end he had become something of a brother.

 

The problem was, he also happened to be the eldest son of Edward de Piaget, the current Earl of Artane.

 

“Oh, I say, Tess,” Stephen de Piaget said, walking up to her with a broad smile. “So good to see you. I’ve been in London all week, humoring my grandmother, and didn’t realize you were here.”

 

Tess would have held out her hands to stop the train wreck before it started, but she couldn’t. She could only stand there and have complete sympathy for a deer caught in headlights. She watched, mute, as John stepped aside and turned to make a little triangle of disaster with the three of them. He looked at Stephen and froze.