She shook her head slowly. “I was just wondering how
you
were.”
He supposed no one would understand his French, so there was no reason to be discreet. “I can’t say I’ve ever cared for London,” he admitted, “though I have been here far more often and for longer periods of time than I would have liked.”
“Hobnobbing with the king?” she asked politely.
“As it happens, aye.”
Her mouth fell open. “I was kidding. Do you really know him?”
“My father first pressed me into the service of representing him at court,” he said with a shrug. “Eventually, I made the required visits for myself.”
“That must be strange,” she murmured. “To be in the same place you were before but find it so different.”
He smiled. “I imagine you understand.”
“I suppose I can,” she agreed. She leaned closer to him. “So, what do you think so far? What do you like the most?”
“You,” he said without hesitation.
“Be serious.”
“I was. You are by far the most entertaining thing I’ve seen all day. Then I find myself fond of your sisters, my nephew, and water carried conveniently in a bottle.” He paused. “And chocolate.”
She smiled at him. “Stephen wants to take you to Harrods after dinner. From what I understand, you could probably kill yourself by the abuse to your tender medieval tummy you’ll find in their food court. There’s an entire spot there just for chocolate lovers.”
He wasn’t sure why food should hold its own court anywhere but France, but perhaps the London of Pippa’s day was more sophisticated than the one of his time. But as he listened to her describe the reputed splendors of Harrods, he began to wonder if he had underestimated modern London’s appetite for luxuries. Perhaps ’twas little wonder that so many souls from so many places sought refuge there. He had heard, just whilst walking down the street, a handful of languages he recognized and another he didn’t. A man might spend his lifetime roaming those streets and still not be familiar with everything there.
The truth was, he could think of many other things he would rather spend his time doing, such as haunting his lists, or sitting in his solar watching Pippa by the light of his fire, or riding for leagues with nothing to listen to but the wind in the trees.
Perhaps he had been born in the right century after all.
Supper was lovely, and the conversation pleasant, though he spent the walk back to the car dividing his time between reaching for his sword and glaring at lads he thought looked too long at Pippa and her sisters.
Some things obviously had not changed.
The journey back to the castle was less unsettling than the earlier one had been, though seeing his keep—his intact keep—flooded with lights that certainly hadn’t come from torches made him gasp before he could stop himself.
Stephen walked with him across the bridge, looking faintly amused. “Surely the castle can’t be that different in your day.”
“It has more holes in its walls,” Montgomery grumbled, “but the general shape is the same.”
Stephen laughed. “I am keen to have the details,” he said, “but I may be fighting Pippa for your time. Do you have any idea how long you’ll stay?”
Long enough to convince Pippa she might someday learn to love me
was what he thought, but he avoided saying as much. In truth, he hadn’t given it much thought, mostly because there were too many things associated with it that he wasn’t prepared to consider, such as if Pippa actually wanted anything to do with him and if she did, where—and when—they would live. He returned to thoughts of fairy tales and princes doing the impossible to win their ladies—even crossing centuries.
Even, he supposed, giving up his past if it meant she could be his future.
He gave Stephen a noncommittal answer, because he honestly didn’t know. Though ’twas tempting to consider staying in Pippa’s time, it wasn’t a thought he could entertain seriously. For better or worse, he was lord of Sedgwick and he couldn’t walk away from that responsibility.
He looked again at Sedgwick as he entered the courtyard. He couldn’t say that there wasn’t a small pang of envy that coursed through him at the sight of his keep’s perfection in future years, but perhaps he should consider it a beacon of hope for what could be done. After all, his father had built his keep from absolutely nothing and Artane had turned out to be a magnificent place.
He stopped suddenly as a new thought occurred to him. What if he took Pippa to Artane and showed her what his father had built? If she could see what was possible, perhaps—
Well, perhaps she might be more amenable to his suit than she might have been otherwise.
“Pippa,” he said as they made their way back to the kitchens, “would you be interested in a small journey?”
She looked up at him in surprise. “Where to?”
“Artane,” he said, trying to make it sound as if it were nothing of particular interest. “I thought it might be interesting for us both to see it in its current state.”
She paused. “Are you sure you want to?”
“Is it destroyed?” he asked in surprise. “I thought not, given that Stephen’s father lives there still.”
“Oh, it’s still intact,” she said. She smiled faintly. “Want to see a picture?”
He’d seen pictures before, on a little box Stephen had called a phone. He supposed seeing his father’s hall captured in the device wouldn’t trouble him any more than all the other miracles he’d seen over the past day. He managed a nod, then accepted an invitation for a small bowl of ice cream before they retreated to Tess’s solar to look at pictures and Pippa’s designs both.
He watched her surreptitiously as they ate. She was very quiet, but perhaps she was overcome by what she’d seen at the fashion show. He couldn’t blame her. He would be long in forgetting the absolutely appalling lack of cloth he’d seen covering models who had terrified him with their frowns.
A small journey was definitely the cure for what ailed them both, a journey to a place of comfort and security might soften her heart where he was concerned. And if not, he would lay siege to that heart and see if that provided him with better results.
He was, after all, a medieval knight.
There was no sense in not using his skills, even, the saints preserve him, in the twenty-first century.
Chapter 24
P
ippa
sat in the kitchen and tried to inconspicuously ingest a rather crunchy piece of cold toast. She would have looked around for Karma lurking in the shadows, but she knew better than to do that. There had been enough monkey wrenches thrown in her path in the past month without begging for any more. So she kept her head down, continued to pretend to make inroads into a breakfast that tasted like dust, and forced herself to face the facts, as uncomfortable as they were.
She was, she could honestly say, in the midst of a crisis.
She should have been thrilled with her life. She had toilet paper, British packaged snacks, and racks that instantly cooled her toast so she couldn’t possibly burn her mouth on it. She had the possibility of endless supplies of any sort of fabric she wanted, the potential funding for her meteoric rise to fashion world superstardom, and electricity to power all sorts of machines that would save her hours of hand sewing.
But none of it set her heart aflutter as it should have.
She had realized that as she’d sat in the front row of a very exclusive design show next to a man who had gasped a little and averted his eyes every time he might possibly have had to look up a model’s very short skirt. She might have found that slightly amusing, but she’d been busy with the other realization that had pounded at her mercilessly.
She didn’t want Manhattan.
She wanted Sedgwick.
Or, more accurately, Sedgwick’s lord.
It was all complicated by the fact that Sedgwick’s lord had come across eight hundred years with apparently no other goal in sight than to improve his nephew’s swordplay and sample all sorts of future cuisine, damn him anyway.
“You look like you’re going to throw up.”
Pippa looked up from her half-eaten toast to find Peaches standing five feet from her, assessing her. She tried to smile but failed. “I’m having a midlife crisis.”
Peaches pulled up a chair and sat down next to her. “Tell me more.”
“I might scare you if I did.”
Peaches looked down at her hands for a minute, then lifted her head. “Would you live with him? In 1241?”
Pippa had a hard time catching her breath. She had considered it, looked hard at what it would mean giving up, but she had never discussed it with anyone. She wasn’t sure she could even voice the thought aloud without feeling like she was having an out-of-body experience.
“I don’t know,” she said finally, because she realized Peaches was waiting for an answer. She had to take several decent breaths before she could say what else she had to. “I just wish I could have you all in the same place.”
Peaches blinked a time or two, rapidly, then cleared her throat. “Does he have a brother or two available?”
“Not that I know of, but he has some cousins who could use some serious reorganizing of their personalities.”
“I like to limit my projects to people’s closets and filing cabinets, not their psyches,” Peaches said dryly.
“What about Stephen de Piaget?” Pippa asked. “I bet his closets are a disaster. If you don’t believe it, look at the mess he’s made in Tess’s office.”
Peaches shook her head. “He’s dating the daughter of a duke. Actually, I think he might be dating two or three of them. I don’t think he’s ready to settle down.”
“Which is why he’s hanging out here.”
Peaches shrugged. “He’s a guy. I have no insights into the way they think.”
“I don’t think it would help even if you did,” Pippa said, pushing her toast away. “I think I’m going to become a nun. I’m sort of at the point where I have to start my life over again anyway. No money, no fabric, no ten grand worth of embroidery machine waiting for me at home to keep me warm.”
Peaches choked. “How much was that again?”
“I needed it,” Pippa insisted. “Fashion world domination is expensive.”
Peaches reached out and helped herself to Pippa’s other piece of toast. “At least you wouldn’t need a serger if you lived—” She paused, and then grimaced. “I can’t bring myself to say it.” She took a deep breath of her own. “Honestly, Pip, I just can’t imagine Montgomery came all this way just to see how the other half lives.”
“Well, he’s certainly not tripping over himself to profess undying love, either, is he?”
“Maybe he’s comparing himself to the glories of modern life and finding himself coming up short.”
“Montgomery?” Pippa said incredulously. “Never.”
“Oh, he looks tough,” Peaches said, “but underneath I get the feeling he’s pretty softhearted. And I think he loves you.”
“He doesn’t.”
“You didn’t watch him watch you yesterday.”
Pippa got up and threw the rest of her breakfast in the trash, felt slightly guilty over it given the difficulty of even getting breakfast in Montgomery’s time, then turned to face her sister. “I don’t think I can think about this anymore.”
“Then let’s go get distracted. The boys are playing with toys over by the gift shop. Tess is already thinking about ways to use them as an advertisement for her parties, but I’m not sure either of them will go for it.”
Pippa nodded, went to grab a coat, then walked with her sister across the long bridge over Tess’s moat. She led Peaches over to a bench she was just certain couldn’t be in the same place as the log she’d sat on in 1241, then sat down next to Tess who was already there, ogling.
“You could have brought the video camera,” Peaches said to Tess.
“I was afraid I would miss something,” Tess said faintly.
Pippa could understand. She sat between her sisters and watched for several minutes before she realized they had put their arms around her, as if they just weren’t quite ready to let her go.
She was not a weeper, but she had to blink fairly rapidly a time or two. She loved all her sisters—even Cindi, to a lesser degree—but Peaches and Tess had been her bedrock, her endlessly comforting buffer against things she hadn’t been ready to face, then two pairs of loving hands shoving her out from behind that buffer when she’d needed to get on with her life. The thought of not having them as close as a phone call was almost more terrible than she could face.
She took a deep breath. She was probably imagining things that would never happen. Montgomery had likely suffered from a brief and fleeting desire to be noble and bring her shoes he no doubt thought she really liked. He would go back to his perfectly tractable fiancée, and she would once again discover her inner diva, purchase more shears, and get cutting on new and more marvelous creations than she’d created in the past. She would still have her sisters and no hole in her heart.
Well, except the one that Montgomery would leave when he left.
She sighed, rested her elbows on her knees and her chin on her fists, and thought Gloomy Thoughts. She wasn’t sure where Stephen had dug up more spare clothes, but Montgomery was dressed today in sweats with a T-shirt that should have been outlawed. He was instructing his very grateful nephew about the finer points of swordplay and not breaking a sweat. Stephen, however, couldn’t quite say the same thing.
Peaches and Tess made appreciative noises.
Pippa couldn’t begrudge her sisters the looking. It was a pretty impressive display for at least another hour before Stephen called it quits. He thanked Montgomery profusely for the lesson, then limped over to them.
“He’s all yours, Pippa,” he wheezed.
“I wish,” she muttered under her breath.
Stephen only smiled and walked away, looking as if he badly needed something strong to drink. Montgomery bounded over to her with all the enthusiasm of a medieval guy let loose in a modern sporting goods store. He looked faintly startled at what Pippa assumed was the sight of Tess and Peaches there together, then he seemed to pull himself together admirably.