One Magic Moment(39)
Author: Lynn Kurland
He laughed a little, which was almost enough to do in what was left of her last vestiges of sanity, then took her hand. “Let’s go. We’ll just pay like regular rabble, and I won’t poke at you about it.”
Tess let him pull her across the solar, then shoved the letter at Peaches on her way by. “Read that.” She shot her sister a very brief look of warning she was sure Peaches didn’t miss.
There was silence as they walked the great hall, then a gasp.
“I’m not trading places with you anymore!” Peaches hollered.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” Tess threw over her shoulder, though she hoped Peaches wasn’t serious. Having a double came in handy now and again. She looked up at John. “I don’t want to think about this.” Hopefully, he wouldn’t want to, either.
“Perhaps today we could both put aside things that trouble us,” he said gravely.
“Are there things that trouble you, John?” she asked, happy to turn the scrutiny away from herself.
“Besides you?” he asked with a grave smile. “Yes. A thing or two.”
“Going to tell me about them?”
“Not yet.” He nodded toward the door. “Let’s be off on our escape before the thought overwhelms us both.”
She had already left the hall in Peaches’s care, so she concentrated on doing her best to not think about the complete improbability of walking through the courtyard of her keep with a man related to one of the early lords of Sedgwick. And now she found herself wearing the female version of that title.
She was definitely going to get in touch with Lord Roland and find out just what he’d been up to while sunning himself on some beach.
She settled herself in the absolute luxury of John’s car and watched him as he got in, started it up, and backed out of her car park without thought. She continued to watch him as he drove away from the keep and turned onto the main road leading through the village. If he slowed down to eye his shop on the way by, she couldn’t blame him. He frowned thoughtfully and continued on without saying anything.
Something was definitely up.
She didn’t imagine she would have any answers about it, though, so she simply watched him and wondered how he felt about having left his own nobility card eight hundred years in the past. She imagined that somehow he just didn’t care. Then again, he was driving a pretty nice car, so maybe he did care about a bit of status more than he wanted to let on.
He glanced at her, then did a double take when he realized she was studying him, apparently intently enough to make him nervous.
“What is it?”
“Just thinking.”
“That, my lady, is a very dangerous activity.”
“I thought you weren’t going to poke at me about this,” she said. “This thing that I’m not at all sure is legal or binding.”
“The crown apparently thinks differently,” he said mildly, “else Bess wouldn’t have had one of her flunkies send you a letter. Best accustom yourself to the deference, I imagine.”
“Are you going to be deferential to me?” she asked.
He only lifted an eyebrow and watched the road. “I thought I already was.”
A noise of disbelief escaped her before she could stop it. He laughed a little, but said nothing. She settled into her seat more comfortably still and watched him, because she knew he knew she was doing it, and she knew it made him slightly nervous.
“You, woman, are about to earn an afternoon of my ladys,” he warned.
She smiled. “Why is it, do you think, that we just can’t seem to keep ourselves from annoying each other?”
He shot her a look. “You don’t annoy me.”
“I bother you.”
“Entirely different things, my lady.”
She watched him a bit longer, wondering how it was he had such perfect teeth—then again, so had Montgomery, so at least Pippa wouldn’t be regretting the lack of orthodontics in the thirteenth century—and had accustomed himself so well to the current day. She wondered how it was he decided which part of his past to allow anyone to see, and what his past had been like, and if he missed it. She wondered how he’d found himself in the future, if he’d known what to expect, if he’d been completely freaked out for as long as it had taken him to get a grip on things.
And she wondered why he hadn’t tried to get back home.
For all she knew, he had, though Montgomery certainly hadn’t said anything about it, nor had any of the usual suspects like Kendrick or Gideon. Did he miss his family, or wonder about them, or look them up in history books to see what had happened to them?
She wondered if, as Peaches had suggested, he was lonely.
“You’re thinking entirely too hard,” he said mildly, at one point.
“I’m curious about you.”
“The saints preserve me,” he said with feeling.
“French again, John.”
He blew out his breath gustily. “My family spoke it,” he said briskly.
She didn’t bother to point out that his version of French wasn’t exactly what she would have heard while slumming in Versailles. She also decided to refrain from further pointing out that it actually sounded a good bit like the medieval Norman French she’d studied at University. She shifted so she could watch him more closely.
“What do you do?”
He shot her a quick look. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, what do you do? You own a garage, yet you don’t seem to work in it.”
“I work,” he protested. “Occasionally. I restore old things.”
“At the peril of hands that make money playing heavenly music,” she mused. “What are you restoring now?”
“A ’67 Jag and an old MG.”
“Even if you sell them, that’s hardly enough to afford this, is it?”
“I’m not going to make you pay for lunch, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
She smiled. “I wasn’t worried.”
He shifted and concentrated more fully on the road. Tess watched him draw stillness around him like a cloak, but since she’d watched him do that half a dozen times before, she wasn’t offended. She was prying, which likely wouldn’t have bothered anyone else, but she understood why it bothered him. She was only surprised that he hadn’t pulled over and shoved her out the door to avoid any further discomfort.