Kendrick’s words, not his.
Kendrick tossed away the sheath to his sword. “I promise to leave a bit of you left for Pippa to rub horse liniment into this afternoon.”
“Good of you,” Montgomery said sourly.
Kendrick only laughed and raised his sword.
The
sun was at its zenith before he looked closely at his nephew to see if Kendrick was as ready as he to be finished for the day. Given that Kendrick was peering at him in like manner, there was no shame in leaving the battle for another day. Montgomery exchanged a few final insults with a man Robin would have been terribly proud of, then looked over to find Pippa sitting on a bench pushed up against the wall, gaping at him.
“Has she never seen you with a sword in your hands?” Kendrick asked with mock horror. “What, too busy plying your lute to pick up a bit of steel?”
“Shut up.”
Kendrick only laughed and went to gather up his sons. Montgomery had already worked each of them for a brief time that morning, so he felt no guilt in concentrating on his most important task, which was wooing the woman who was looking at him as if she’d never seen him before. He walked over to her, then dropped down onto the bench next to her, trying not to drip sweat on her. He dragged his arm across his forehead, then looked at her.
“What is it?”
She only gestured toward the field. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out.
He frowned. “Did I fight poorly?”
“Good heavens, Montgomery,” she managed. “I’ve never seen you fight like that at
all
.”
“I would say that I hadn’t wanted to terrify my garrison,” he said, “but then I would sound like my eldest brother, which I simply couldn’t bear.”
She leaned back against the wall and smiled faintly. “Is Kendrick like Robin?”
“Exactly like him,” Montgomery said without hesitation.
“I’m not sure how his wife bears him, but then again, I’m not sure how Anne tolerates Robin, so I am perhaps not the one to be offering an opinion.”
And he wasn’t. He had had the pleasure of meeting Kendrick’s wife, Genevieve, and their daughter, Adelaide Anne, the afternoon before, offering her his condolences over being trapped with his nephew for the rest of her life, then paid for his comments in the lists just as he’d known he would.
Some things never changed.
“She seems very happy,” Pippa offered. “Genevieve, I mean. And her French is very good.”
“So is yours, my love,” he said, reaching for her hand and kissing it. “I have to wonder, however, if the comforts of the Future soften the blow of having to live with a medieval blowhard.”
Pippa laughed. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“Then are you telling me the men in my family are tolerable?” he asked.
She squeezed his hand. “You know I am.”
He looked at her hand in his for a moment or two, then met her eyes. “Let me clean up, then why don’t we go for a walk along the strand?”
“Wouldn’t you rather go for a drive?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.
“We’ll do that tomorrow. Today, I want to focus all my energies on you.”
“Heaven help me.”
He laughed and rose, then pulled her to her feet. “Maybe a small journey in the car first,” he conceded. “To that chippy in the village. I concentrate better when I’m not hungry.”
“I’m afraid, my lord, that you’re becoming far too accustomed to fast food.”
He agreed, then walked with her back to the keep. Though it was a delicious luxury to simply be in a time that wasn’t his own, without responsibilities, without impossible tangles to unravel, he knew he couldn’t avoid forever the subject that stood between him and Pippa.
He waited until they were standing outside the hall doors before he stopped. “I think,” he began slowly, “that we should discuss a thing or two.”
She looked rather less comfortable than he would have liked. “That sounds serious.”
“I think proposals often are.”
Her mouth fell open. “What?”
“I’m doing this badly,” he said with a wince. “Let me try again. Will you, Persephone, come to the shore with me today and allow me to kiss you as often as I wish? I could woo you with chocolate, if you’d rather.”
“Well,” she said thoughtfully, “that’s a difficult choice.”
He laughed a bit, because he could see she was teasing him. He reached out and tucked an errant curl behind her ear.
“You decide what your perfect day might contain and I’ll do my best to fit it all into this afternoon. Then I think we should perhaps retreat somewhere quiet and discuss what our perfect future might contain.” He hesitated, then cast caution to the wind. “And where that future might be carried out.”
“Oh, Montgomery,” she said quietly.
He shook his head. “Let us not speak of it yet. We’ll take the afternoon for our own, then we’ll speak of other things.”
She looked away. “You know, I don’t have anything to use for a dowry—if that’s the sort of thing we’re talking about.”
“You are enough, Pippa.”
Tears sprang to her eyes. “I’m about to throw my arms around you and not let you go.”
“Let me shower first,” he said, feeling as if he should have been appalled at how quickly he’d become accustomed to the simple pleasures of the Future. “Then I wish you would make good on that threat.”
She nodded and walked with him inside the great hall. Genevieve and Megan were sitting in front of one of the hearths with their girls playing at their feet. Montgomery saw Pippa settled with them, hoped they would give their de Piaget husbands good marks, then ran for his borrowed bedchamber and washed up.
It was only as he was running back down the stairs that he ran fully into reality. It was one thing to imagine what he was asking her to give up for him; it was another thing to ask her to do it. The Future was so marvelous, so full of ease and delights—
He sighed. He wasn’t one to envy others overmuch, but he could honestly say at the moment that he envied Kendrick. His nephew had his lady, his children, and all man’s modern inventions in the same place. He didn’t have to worry about the weather, or the harvest, or what sort of sauces his cook was using to cover the taste of rotting meat. Kendrick had warned him the night before that things weren’t always as they seemed and that the Future held its own dangers. He’d promised Montgomery to send him home with a book or two that would make him appreciate the ease and simplicity of medieval life.
Montgomery wasn’t sure that was possible.
But as he walked across the floor and caught sight of Pippa sitting with his nephews’ wives, then found himself the recipient of a look that bespoke her pleasure at seeing him, well, the rest of it seemed less important than it had but a moment before.
He thought about how quiet she’d been at the fashion show, about how wistful she’d been during her recounting of the tale of Cinderella, and how many things he would break his back to provide her did she but agree to consider his suit.
Jennifer was happy. Could not Pippa be happy as well?
He made the ladies a low bow, complimented them on the perfections of their daughters, then politely excused himself and Pippa on the pretext of needing to feed her. He walked with her across the great hall, then paused at the door.
“I don’t like to boast,” he began slowly.
She smiled. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“I thought,” he began uncomfortably, “that it might serve me to give you a list of my redeeming qualities, which will be very short, and another list of my monetary assets, which will be much longer.”
“Montgomery, you don’t have to sell yourself.”
“I think you should know what you’re purchasing, if you’re interested in that sort of transaction.”
“Shall I make a list, too, or are you already familiar with all my diva-like qualities?”
He decided she likely wouldn’t object too strenuously if he put his arms around her, which he did without hesitation. “I am already familiar, Persephone, with your beautiful blue eyes, your sweet smile, and your ability to sit with me in a drafty tower chamber and make me feel as if I’d wandered into a marvelous fairy tale. If I knew nothing else about you, that would be enough.”
She studied him for a moment or two in silence. “Montgomery de Piaget, did you come all this way to bring me my shoes?”
“It’s what Cinderella’s prince would have done.”
She managed a little huff of a laugh. “You’re a romantic.”
“Only for you—”
“Oh, by the saints,” a voice bellowed from the far end of the hall, “either kiss her or propose to her before we have to watch any more of these nauseating displays!”
Montgomery glared at Kendrick and had a hearty laugh as his reward. He did, however, take the opportunity to kiss Pippa briefly before he pulled her out the door.
“Food,” he said as they ran down the steps, “a long drive, then a longer walk along the beach. Without my family there to offer us any more advice.”
“They love you.”
“And you?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no, I’m not going first with that one.”
He stopped and looked at her. “Could you love me, Persephone?”
She threw her arms around his neck and held on so tightly, he could scarce breathe. He supposed that was answer enough, however, so he didn’t press her. He simply held her in his father’s courtyard and vowed he would do whatever was necessary to make her happy.
He could only hope that didn’t include going back to 1241 without her.
He
walked along the shore with her as the afternoon waned. He couldn’t remember a finer day, nor one filled with more simple pleasures.
Well, that and he’d gotten to drive Stephen’s car to Edinburgh and back. It had been, as he’d heard Nicholas mutter on more than one occasion, mind-blowing. He didn’t imagine it was possible to drive the bloody thing through a time gate into the past, but he’d been tempted.
“Montgomery, will Lord Edward let me into the shop, do you think?”
He pulled himself away from thoughts of speed and looked at Pippa in surprise. “I imagine so, if you wanted him to. What do you need?”
“I want to look through the books there,” she said. “Before we talk.”
He stopped and turned to look at her. He’d seen a hint of worry in her eyes over the past pair of days, but the worry had finally blossomed fully into distress sometime during the past hour. “Pippa, love, what is it?”
She put her arms around his neck and held him tightly. He couldn’t say he’d been counting, not truly, but if asked, he would have said she’d done that at least a score of times over the course of the afternoon. There had been no rhyme or reason to it. She’d simply embraced him fiercely as the mood seemingly struck her—not that he’d been inclined to protest.
He realized now, however, that it hadn’t been just affection motivating her. He put his arms around her and held her close.
“Pippa, I’m not going anywhere.”
She didn’t release him. “Have I told you today that I love you?”
“Nay,” he said quietly, “and I’ve been trying to pry the words from you since before lunch.”
Her laugh was unsteady. “You have not.”
He smiled against her hair, then pulled back and kissed her soundly. “I have. And I love you. I would have said it before, but I didn’t want to terrify you.”
“Why would it terrify me?” she asked.
“Because it means that I must either stay in the Future with you and somehow find a way to buy you a Mercedes like Stephen’s, or it means you must come back to the past with me and have patience whilst I turn Sedgwick into a place of comfort and beauty for you.”
She hesitated, then pulled away from him suddenly. “Books, first.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her, though he did find her insistence to be a little strange. He walked with her over the dunes, a slightly more arduous trek than it had been in his time, then looked at her in surprise when she dropped his hand.
“Let’s run,” she said.
He shrugged. “As you will, love.”
She was fast, he would give her credit for that, but since he was accustomed to running in boots, running in trainers made him feel like he was flying.
Which, he realized suddenly, he was, down into some unearthly sort of whirlpool that opened up in front of him before he could stop himself from running right into it. He felt himself falling endlessly.
And then he knew no more.
Chapter 28
P
ippa
tripped and went sprawling. She might have been profoundly embarrassed, but Montgomery had done the same thing, so she didn’t feel all that bad about it. She crawled to her knees to tell him at least they were equally yoked when it came to baseline dorkiness—
Only he wasn’t there.
She gaped. He had vanished.
She pushed herself to her feet and turned around in circles, looking for Montgomery, only to see nothing at all except that faint shimmer right there in the middle of the field. She started toward it only to have someone catch hold of her. She sighed in relief. Obviously she’d been so fixated on getting back to the keep that she’d simply misplaced him. She turned around, vastly relieved.
“Oh, Mont—”
It wasn’t Montgomery standing there.
The man holding her by the arm was tall, dark-haired, and fantastically handsome. She tried to pull her arm away, but he wouldn’t let her go. She was tempted to try to elbow him in the nose, but he honestly didn’t look dangerous. He just looked very concerned.
“Don’t,” he said quietly.
“Don’t what?” she asked him in surprise.
“Don’t step on that patch of grass behind you,” he said. “It isn’t safe.”
Pippa jerked her arm away from him, but he shook his head sharply.
“I’m not kidding.”