One Magic Moment(35)
Author: Lynn Kurland
“You know,” he said finally, continuing to stoke her back, “you might weep fully, if you cared to.”
She shook her head and pulled away—with a great deal of regret, but she didn’t think she should accustom herself to being in his arms. It was hard to tell when he would want to run the other way again. Better that she at least put a little distance between them while she still could.
“I’m okay,” she gulped. “Really.”
He frowned. “There are times when it is understandable to shed a tear or two. I wouldn’t think less of you.”
She shook her head and put on a happy smile. Well, she attempted to put on a happy smile. She imagined it looked more like a grimace, but John was apparently too polite to say anything.
“Don’t need to,” she said firmly. “This sort of thing happens all the time and people get over it. Which I will do. And speaking of things I should do, I should probably go work on my face.”
“If you work on your face any more, Tess Alexander,” he said seriously, “I won’t be able to look at it.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “We should also rescue your sister from the louts inside, I daresay. I would like to believe your suitor was the only imbecile in the hall tonight, but I fear that isn’t the case.”
She would have smiled, but she realized something that had seemed just a little strange. “You’re speaking French, you know.”
If she hadn’t been watching for it, she supposed she wouldn’t have noticed that very brief look of panic that flashed in his eyes. It was gone immediately, which led her to believe he’d spent years—probably the last eight of them—perfecting the ability to listen to the most outrageous things and not react to them.
“Private tutors,” he said.
The liar.
Tess shivered, and it wasn’t precisely from the cold.
He tugged her—well, shepherded her along because he was a de Piaget lad, after all—back toward the hall. “How much longer are we to be enjoying these reenactment delights?”
“They’re booked at least until midnight,” she said. She looked up at him. “Sorry about the musicians.”
“I’ve heard worse,” he said politely. “I don’t suppose you would care to dance a bit more.”
“I’ve exhausted my repertoire of dances I know,” she admitted, “but I think I can fake others if you don’t mind a bruised toe or two.”
He smiled, just the slightest bit. It almost knocked her over.
“’Tis a small price to pay for the view.”
“The hall is lovely,” she agreed.
“I wasn’t talking about the hall.”
She felt her mouth fall open, then she shut it with a snap. “Knock that off,” she said with an uncomfortable laugh. “I think I like you better when you’re snarling.”
“Do you?” he asked, tilting his head just the slightest bit.
She walked away from him. “You bother me.”
He caught up to her without effort. “In a good way or a bad way?”
She looked up at him. “Do you really want to know?”
He lifted his eyebrows briefly. “I’m not sure.”
“I didn’t think you would be. Let me repair the damage, then I’ll dance with you. And now I won’t feel bad if I step on your toes.”
“It’s why I wore boots.”
She gaped at him only to feel the need to do so again when she saw his eyes were twinkling. He had a dimple, the lout.
She was in big trouble.
The next time he suggested they not see each other for a week, she was going to hold him to it.
Chapter 10
John leaned back against the wall in Sedgwick’s great hall and found himself assailed by thoughts he couldn’t seem to fight off.
First, it was altogether too ironic to find himself in a hall he’d frequented in his youth only to find himself in that same hall several hundred years later, no longer in his youth but dressed in about the same sort of clothing. All he was missing was his sword, but he didn’t need it to, as they said in the Colonies, take care of business.
Second, there was something poetically just about finding himself in said hall because of a woman he had tried his damndest to forget.
Unsuccessfully.
He had danced with her as often as she would humor him, but for the most part, he’d simply stood with his back against the wall—a habit from his past he apparently hadn’t managed to break, he supposed—and watched her. Watched over her, rather. She was an excellent lecturer, but he realized she was just as good at her current sort of thing. Perhaps managing college lads had been of more use to her than she could have anticipated. She moved effortlessly between keeping a few of the more exuberant knights under control and discussing more academic things with an ever-changing collection of admirers. John gave himself the task of managing the less well behaved of those pretend lords.
The evening should have seemed endless, but somehow it didn’t. John supposed that was to be expected when one was spending most of his time trying to keep the past from intruding on the future.
He wondered, absently and after almost four hours of trying to fight off the speculation, who had taken over Sedgwick after Denys’s death. Boydin, no doubt, unless he’d been done in by one of his siblings. No one from Artane would have been stupid enough to venture south and sentence himself to the place for the rest of his life. He was actually rather glad he didn’t feel free to sneak off to Tess’s library, else he might have been tempted to wander casually into it and do a little thumbing through her historical texts.
Nay, it was probably better to stay where he was.
He spent the next hour suppressing his yawns. He was, he could admit without shame, enormously glad when the last of the revelers had been escorted out the front door. Tess went off to see to the caterers, leaving him sprawled in a chair across from Tess’s astonishingly pretty sister.
Whom he wasn’t at all interested in, it should have been noted.
“It was nice of you to stay,” Peaches said, smothering a yawn herself.
He wasn’t at all sure how to respond. Did he tell her that there was no way in hell he would have trusted her and her sister to lock up properly, or did he tell her that he’d met lads like that blond fool before and hadn’t wanted Tess to enjoy a second encounter with him?