She had specific, unpleasant memories of resurfacing to discover the true contents of Tess’s lake floating all around her and covering her from head to toe. Things were a little hazy from there. Someone—Stephen, probably—pulled her out, then she had stepped into a full-blown hallucination where Tess’s castle had turned into a dilapidated wreck and Stephen de Piaget had ignored her in favor of her sister.
She frowned. That had been a pretty damned vivid hallucination. She had serious doubts that even British chocolate could produce that sort of delusion.
She remembered panicking, screaming her head off, then bolting right into a brick post that hadn’t been there five minutes earlier. She had bounced off it, turned, and been caught by someone she had been fairly sure had said
eewww
.
Though that could have been her.
She turned away from that memory because it made her queasy. The sooner she was clean, the happier she would be, but she didn’t think she would enjoy her shower until she could stand up all the way through it. She reluctantly put off getting up for another moment or two, distracting herself with a few things she hadn’t noticed before. The mattress she was lying on felt as if it were a collection of twigs, and she thought there might have been things chirping in her pillow. Her blanket was scratchy and not really up to the task of warding off a chill that was listing toward arctic, though she supposed she couldn’t blame Tess for covering her up with something she could simply pitch when she was finished with it.
But none of that explained why she was still in her underwear.
She decided she would talk to Tess about that sooner rather than later, so she put her hand to her head and very carefully pushed herself back up into a sitting position. The floor was ice cold under her feet, but that was rather bracing in a useful way so she didn’t complain. She kept her hand pressed against her head and staggered across the floor, using first the footpost of the bed, then various bits of furniture to get herself over to the hearth. She managed to nudge a couple of pieces of wood onto the burning coals left there from the night before, then hung on to the mantel until the fire caught and her dizziness receded a bit.
She found her dress hanging on the back of a chair, but it was sopping wet so she didn’t bother to put it on. She did check the pockets for her thumb drive and collection of crystals. They were still there and would probably dry out in time, so there was no sense in taking them out to stash them somewhere else. She shuffled across the room and bumped her toes on a trunk sitting there underneath the window.
She sat on the trunk and looked around her—carefully, to spare herself any more spinning than necessary. The bedroom was much more rustic than she’d remembered any of Tess’s bedrooms being, though she certainly hadn’t had the chance to look through them all. For all she knew, she was in a place Tess had left in a more Middle Ages sort of state to remind her of the castle’s beginnings. Pippa sighed, then knelt beside the trunk and felt inside it. She was somehow unsurprised to find a pair of tights and a tunic inside instead of a fluffy, monogrammed bathrobe.
She stripped off her disgusting underthings and put on what she’d found. The shirt was huge and the tights less baggy than she might have liked, but there was nothing to be done about that. She rolled the tights at her waist as if they’d been dance gear and decided the tunic would have to do as it was. After all, she was just getting decent to go to the bathroom, not to make a formal appearance. She tossed her underclothes in the chair, put her feet in her shoes, and trudged over to the door, keeping her hand to her forehead and trying to keep her non-breakfast down where it should have been residing.
She fumbled with the latch, then braced herself against the doorframe and opened the door. Stephen was leaning against the wall opposite her, dressed in his medieval gear. She couldn’t see him as clearly as she would have liked thanks to both her squinting and the dimness of the torchlight, but maybe it was best they not have too close an encounter in her current state.
“Hey,” she said, wincing and declining to wave. Her tights weren’t cooperating, forcing her to keep one hand clutching them in place and the other over her eyes. The flicker of torchlight was particularly annoying, but she didn’t suppose turning the lights off would improve matters because then she wouldn’t be able to see anything at all. “I’m just going to run to the bathroom . . . to . . . um . . .”
She felt herself wind down like a music box that had seen better days, one note at a time with increasingly lengthy pauses between those notes.
Flickering torchlight?
Stephen de Piaget with hair that had suddenly grown a few inches and a sword that even in her feeble state she could see was lacking the bright, shiny newness that blanketed most things for sale at Renaissance faires?
Pippa wished quite desperately for some place to sit, but since she wasn’t sure she would make it to a chair, she settled for leaning heavily against the doorframe and having a good long look at a man who wasn’t Stephen, but couldn’t have looked much more like him if he
had
been Stephen.
Then again, he somehow didn’t look like Stephen at all. Stephen was tall and very nicely fashioned, of course, but this guy . . . well, she wished she’d been able to do something besides squint. She was certain she was missing quite a few details she might otherwise have enjoyed. All she could say with any certainty was that he had a face modeling agencies would have killed for and the homespun he was wearing did nothing to obscure broad shoulders, powerful arms, and a long, very muscular pair of legs—
“Good morning,
demoiselle
.”
She jerked her gaze back up from where it shouldn’t have been and focused on his mouth, a rather beautiful mouth, as it happened. Then she frowned, even though it hurt her to do so. He was speaking French, but it was done with a sort of accent she most definitely wasn’t familiar with, and she had had a different private French tutor each year during her incarceration at Aunt Edna’s Victorian Institution of More Painful Learning so she would be able to function in all sorts of polite society.
She considered, then frowned a bit more. There were actually quite a few things that just didn’t add up.
First, there was a guy standing ten feet from her with a sword belted around his hips and his foot propped up against the wall underneath him who looked as if he belonged on a medieval movie set not in her sister’s castle. He was showing off his quite buff self thanks not to a handful of fake torches, but thanks to what looked to be the real deal—
She felt her mouth fall open as she realized something.
It was
him
.
It was the medieval knight she’d seen years ago in that full-blown, daytime hallucination she’d had near Artane. She could hardly believe it, but it was the absolute truth. She had no idea why he was standing not ten feet from her when he should have been safely tucked away in her childhood dreams, and that was something she supposed she didn’t dare ask him yet. She tugged self-consciously on her shirt, wishing she’d had a decent push-up bra to give herself courage—Cindi swore by that sort of thing—and that she could see straight. Deciding that wouldn’t really help with what she couldn’t possibly be seeing, she did the only thing she could.
She stepped back and slammed the door shut.
She rested her head gingerly against the wood and waited until the new batch of stars stopped spinning. It took quite a while, which gave herself time to get a hold of her rampaging imagination. She felt fairly confident that she would open the door and see what should have been there, namely an empty hallway.
She took a deep breath, then made attempt number two.
Really, she never should have called the man gorgeous, because he wasn’t. He was actually so handsome, it almost hurt her to look at him. His face was perfectly proportioned, his cheekbones chiseled, his eyes the most remarkable shade of something that wasn’t brown but wasn’t blue. She supposed she would have to get a closer look at him to tell. She imagined when she did, she might be privileged to have a closer look at his mouth, which was very nicely done as well.
But somehow, in spite of all that male beauty, there was something just a little bit rough around the edges of his features, something that kept him from being pretty. Maybe it was that little crook in his nose that said that at some point in his life, it had been broken. Or that little scar that ran just above one of his eyebrows. Or the grimness that seemed to be settled around him like a cloak.
One thing was for sure: that wasn’t Stephen de Piaget.
And he was staring at her as if he’d seen a ghost.
She shut the door again, because she panicked. She looked for a lock, but there wasn’t one, so she had no choice but to lean back against the wood where she could take stock of her situation and keep herself safe at the same time.
She wasn’t sleepwalking, so chalking things up to waking nightmares was out. She wasn’t on drugs—unless one counted a night spent breathing Cindi’s brownie-laced breath as a contact high—so a drug-enduced stupor was out as well. That left the possibility of Tess’s castle having been taken over by marauders, marauders who looked like hunks from her teenage fantasies.
Well, her choices were obviously limited to escape or a quicker escape. She pushed off the door and staggered over to the window. She managed to get the shutters open, then leaned over to see what lay beneath her. Granted, she hadn’t really had time to check out the scenery yesterday, but she was fairly sure the bedrooms overlooked the moat. But there was no moat beneath her now.
She frowned. It wasn’t possible that someone could have drained that lake while she slept. Was it?
She started to shut the shutters then looked at them with dismay. Those were certainly not the nice, tight-fitting reproductions she had seen before. And there was no glass in the window. She turned around slowly and looked at the room. Austere was one thing—goodness knows all of her siblings were acquainted with
that
virtue—but this was taking it to an entirely new and rather
medieval
level.
Obviously, there had been a disaster of some sort.
She couldn’t help but wonder if that guy standing in the hall was responsible for it.
She felt a little lightheaded, as if she weren’t firing on all four cylinders, because she was starting to wonder if the entire castle had been overrun by bad guys. That wasn’t the sort of thing modern-day castle owners were prepared for. There was no one walking along the walls, ready to shout, “Drop the portcullis, Bob!” the moment he caught sight of a group of medieval-looking guys with mischief on their minds. Pippa half wondered if Tess even had a big key for that outer gate.
No, they were sitting ducks, and they had obviously sat too long.
She looked at Cindi and realized there would be no help there. Her sister was still sawing logs like a drunken lumber-jack. Pippa walked unsteadily over to her, then leaned over to look at her. There were crumbs on her pillow. Pippa picked one up, then sniffed.
Brownie.
She could only imagine what was in it. She would have frisked her sister for other contraband substances, but she thought that perhaps it was better to let sleeping show-stealers lie. Cindi certainly wasn’t going to be of any help should a crisis arise, though Pippa supposed the crisis had already arisen and its ringleader was standing out in the hallway looking every inch the appealing bad boy.
She considered jumping out the window and running to get help, but two things stopped her: one, the window was too small; and two, there was nothing beneath her but grass to break her fall.
She would have to go out the door.
It was her only choice. She couldn’t remain where she was, she couldn’t call for help on her nonexistent cell phone, and she saw no point in screaming given that Tess’s castle was so far out in the sticks, a signal fire probably wouldn’t have attracted any attention.
She would get out of the keep, then first try the gift shop. If that didn’t work, she would take off through the woods and hope she got far enough away quickly enough to get help before she was caught by the hunk in the hall and whomever he’d hired to help him trash Tess’s castle. Cindi was on her own. Hopefully she would wake up and screech too loudly for anyone to do any damage to her.
She took her courage and her tights in hand, then crept over to the door. She put her ear to the wood and listened carefully. She heard nothing, but that was no guarantee that the hallway was empty. She would just have to deal with what she found.
She jerked the door open and found that she was still not alone. Her captor, if that’s what he could be called, didn’t even flinch. He simply watched her, wide-eyed and silent. Pippa looked to her right and gasped. She pointed for good measure and gasped again. Apparently she’d done a fairly good job of faking because the man actually pushed off the wall and looked where she’d pointed.
She took off down the hallway in the opposite direction. She didn’t immediately hear heavy footsteps following her, so maybe she would get farther than she’d dared hope. She ran to the end of the hallway and practically leaped down the circular stairs that had somehow lost their very useful rope handrail at some point during the night.
She was unsurprised. Mr. Universe upstairs and his band of merry marauders were thorough, she would give them that.
She burst out of the stairs and was halfway across the hall before she skidded—literally—to an unsteady halt. She wished she could have blamed the sight that greeted her on her headache or on her former hallucinatory state, but she felt quite unfortunately in full possession of most of her faculties.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t say the same about the state of her sister’s great hall.
The place was a disaster. The floor was strewn with hay—and not very nice smelling hay, as it happened. The lord’s table was in the right place, but the chairs were rickety and the walls were devoid of those lovely tapestries she had admired. All right, she’d coveted them in a fairly dangerous way, but that was beside the point. The walls were bare, the furniture—what there was of it—wasn’t even worth taking to the thrift store, and the fireplaces were belching smoke as if they’d never had a good chimney sweep take a look at their innards. The people in the hall were just as unkempt.