“Me?” he interrupted with a laugh. “Oh, nay, miss, I’m not the owner. He’s in the—”
“Enough, Bobby,” a voice said curtly.
Tess turned in time to see a shadow detach itself from the back of the shop. She had the impression of broad shoulders, long legs, and a lithe grace that seemed somehow completely out of character for an old geezer who’d taken on a shop where he could work on his vintage whatever it was he loved. She was half tempted to readjust her intimidation chignon, but she didn’t dare attract any more of Karma’s attention than she had already by just getting out of bed. She watched the man remain in the shadows for a moment or two before he ducked into what was probably his office and shut the door firmly behind him.
Bobby smiled awkwardly. “I’ll have it done in a blink, miss. Why don’t you take your ease in the pub? It looks like rain.”
She handed him the keys. “I have an extra mirror in the boot,” she said slowly. Actually, she had a box full of them, but he would figure that out soon enough.
“Even better, then,” Bobby said with a smile.
Tess left the shop before she got herself in any more trouble, then wondered how it had gone from a fairly fallish day to the depths of winter in such a short time.
And why had the shop owner not been an old geezer, like she’d been expecting?
There was something else about him that bothered her, but she couldn’t lay her finger on it. She supposed it would either come to her or it wouldn’t. For the moment, the best thing she could do was try to ground herself in her own century.
She sought refuge in the pub, then settled for a high-backed bench near the window. It seemed like a very reasonable thing to drink tea and watch the occasional car go by. There was no activity across the street, except Bobby, who didn’t waste any time in getting to work on her car.
She considered the shop’s owner. The truth was, she hadn’t expected to find a young man—young being a relative term, of course, when used to compare a man of eighty to a man of perhaps thirty—as the owner of that shop, but she couldn’t believe that hulking shadow to be anything else. Odd, though, that such a young man had decided on such a sleepy town so far away from anywhere else.
Then again, she supposed she could wonder the same thing about herself, but at least she headed up to the university now and then—
“Cheers, ducks,” said a rather sloppy voice. “Want some companies?”
Tess looked up from her tea to find a man sliding into the bench across from her. She didn’t recognize him, but she supposed that wasn’t unusual. Even after a year, she couldn’t say she knew more than half the villagers by sight and even fewer of them by name. The guy now leering at her from across the table might have been a local, but he wasn’t one she wanted to know better.
“I’m just finishing,” she said, vowing to stand outside in the rain if necessary to avoid any of the proffered companies.
He put his foot up on the end of her bench, effectively blocking her exit. “I think you should stay and have another cuppa.”
Tess finished the last sip of her tea, then set her cup down. “And I think you should move your foot while you still can.”
“A woman with a bit of vim,” he said with an indulgent chuckle. “I like that.”
Tess looked pointedly at his foot until he put it back on the floor, then grabbed her purse and shifted toward the end of the bench. She started to stand up only to find his hand suddenly on her arm in a grip that was, to put it mildly, unpleasantly firm.
“You’re hurting me,” she said loudly.
“You need a bit of taming,” he said in return.
Tess tried to pull her arm away, but he was having none of that. She was just contemplating how best to grab the teapot so she could slosh the still-very-hot innards on him, then clobber him with the pot itself, when she realized none of that was going to be necessary.
A hand was suddenly holding on to Mr. Friendly’s forearm in a way that made the aforementioned groper squeak before he covered it up with a very manly “no need to get testy, mate.”
Tess found herself freed from all unwanted advances. She looked up to find that her rescuer was tall, dark-haired, and very well built. She realized with equal clarity that she had just seen him, hovering in the back of the shop across the street.
She would have thanked him, or gaped at him, or blurted out a question about his name, but she was too busy being shepherded out of the pub by a man who would have put Ireland’s finest sheepdog to shame.
She managed to stop outside the pub only because she dug her heels in. She looked up at her rescuer, thanks on the tip of her tongue, only to have her mouth fall open.
It was her sister Pippa’s husband, Montgomery de Piaget.
Only it couldn’t be, because the man next to her was dressed in modern clothes and, she soon found, speaking in modern English.
“Your car’s finished,” he said, taking her by the arm and leading her off the sidewalk. “Looks like rain.”
It was December; of course it looked like rain. Actually, it looked like snow from where she was standing given the sudden chill that had washed over her. She wished she could have shut her mouth, but she couldn’t.
She looked around herself to make sure she was still in the twenty-first century, looked at the comforting tarmac under her feet, looked at the shop that rose up in front of her with her little red Ford sitting in front of it. She looked at the fingers curled around her arm in a way that wasn’t at all uncomfortable but definitely supportive, as if she’d been a woman of questionable balance who couldn’t be counted on to make it across the street on her own.
She took a moment or two to get hold of her rampaging and apparently quite unreliable imagination as she was escorted into the garage’s office. She didn’t see her escort’s face again because he kept it turned away from her as he held out his hand.
“Charge card,” he said briskly.
Tess fumbled in her purse for it, feeling not flustered, but floored. She was having a hallucination; that was it. It was broad daylight and she was having a hallucination. Or a paranormal, um, something. And it all involved that man standing on the other side of the counter from her, the one who looked like . . .
Well, never mind who he looked like. The truth was, he might have looked like someone she knew, but he couldn’t possibly be that someone because that man was safely locked away eight hundred years in the past.
Her delusion—and she was perfectly happy to term him that and be done—didn’t seem at all inclined to look at her, which was just fine with her. Maybe he’d seen how the first sight of himself had freaked her out and decided that one view of his admittedly gorgeous face was enough.
She watched his back as he ran her credit card, then at the dark hair that shadowed his face as he pushed the slip across his counter for her to sign. The moment she’d finished, he shoved her keys at her as if he couldn’t wait to be out of her presence, then ushered her out of his office.
He pointed in the direction he wanted her to go, then disappeared into the darkness at the back of the garage. She looked at the door where she’d last seen the man who definitely wasn’t Montgomery de Piaget but couldn’t have looked any more like him if he
had
been him, then turned and stumbled out of the shop.
She ran bodily into Bobby before she realized he was giving her new mirror a last-minute polish. She looked at him and wondered what he thought of his boss, how long he’d worked for him, if he knew any pertinent details about him.
“All ready to go, then?” Bobby asked with a friendly smile.
“Sure,” Tess managed. She stepped back as Bobby opened the door but hesitated before she got in. “Could I ask you a question?”
Bobby shrugged. “As you will, miss.”
She nodded toward the back of the shop. “Is that your boss?”
“Aye, miss.”
“Does he have a name?” she managed.
“John,” Bobby said simply, “and just John. He don’t like to be talked about so I don’t unless he says to. I fancy you can imagine why.”
Yes, because he would probably draw his sword and skewer you on it,
was the first thing she thought, but that thought was so ridiculous, wild horses couldn’t have dragged it out of her. Of course she hadn’t seen what she’d just seen because Montgomery de Piaget was safely tucked away with her sister in 1241. He wasn’t hanging around a garage in the village ten miles from her castle.
“And you won’t tell me his last name?” she managed.
Bobby shifted. “As I said, miss, he don’t care to be forthcomin’ about details, if you—”
“Bobby!”
Tess jumped at the call, which wasn’t quite a shout but was definitely a warning. Bobby snapped a salute at her, grinned, then hurried back into the shop to see to who knew what. Maybe the whole thing had been a serious deviation from reality and she was operating under rules she didn’t understand. Bobby’s boss, John, was perhaps a ghost and Bobby his undead servant. For all she knew, they were vampires, or werewolves, or whatever other paranormal things the south of England could conjure up.
Perhaps she needed a little lie-down before she lost it completely.
She let out her breath slowly, then got into her car. She had to have a few more bracing breaths before she took hold of herself, put the keys into the ignition, and got herself out of the parking lot.
Half an hour later, she was walking back across her bridge to her very own castle where she could lower the portcullises, bar the door in her great hall, then lock herself in her solar and not have to face anything that made her uncomfortable.
Peaches looked up as she stumbled finally into the solar and managed to get herself into a chair in front of the fire without looking as if she’d fallen there.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost—wait a minute.” She turned back to her phone call. “Tiffany? Hang on for just a second, would you? I have a situation here.” Peaches put her thumb back over the phone. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” Tess managed. “I’m good.”
“You don’t look good,” Peaches said. “Maybe you should go upstairs and lie down.”
“I had a nap last week.”
“Have another one today.”
Tess took a deep breath. “I can’t. I have clients coming today.”
“That’s tomorrow. I checked your schedule.”
“Then I have phone calls to make.”
Peaches frowned at her, then shrugged slightly and turned back to her conversation.
Tess checked her calendar, then realized she did indeed have a phone call to make. She decided she was grateful she hadn’t blown off what could be a potentially large party after the new year. She would have to trot out all her best manners and coherent conversation.
It would keep her from thinking about things that
really
made her crazy. There were people who resembled their ancestors to such a degree that it was spooky, weren’t there? She’d seen it countless times in history books. Maybe John the garage owner was somehow related to the de Piagets and all their good genes had found home in him.
It could happen.
It could also happen that there were strange and mysterious things going on within a twenty-mile radius of her house.
She knew she shouldn’t have been surprised.
Chapter 2
H
e’d
always known it would be steel to kill him.
John de Piaget kept the engine balanced on the hoist long enough to look to his right to make certain he had enough space to roll out from underneath it before it slipped its moorings and crushed him. Finding that side of his garage floor comfortingly empty, he took a deep breath, then flung himself to his right the split second before the engine overbalanced and landed on the floor where his empty head had recently been.
He pushed himself up until he was merely sitting on the floor, shaking like a woman, instead of lying there, shaking like the fool he was. He never made mistakes like the one he’d just made. Fortunately, he knew just at whose feet to lay the blame.
That wench who had interrupted the peace of his shop not an hour earlier.
He looked at Bobby, who had been talking to him just before he’d almost killed himself. “She forgot what?”
“Her credit card.” Bobby paused. “Want help with the engine?”
John looked at his lone employee, an experienced mechanic who Grant had taken on just before he’d sold John the shop. He didn’t like to ask for aid, but in this case he couldn’t do anything else. He nodded, then accepted help with righting the block and settling things as he should have to start with.
It took less than two hours to put the entire Jaguar back together. He thanked Bobby briskly for his aid, cleaned his hands, then went into his office to phone the owner to tell her she could send someone for her car anytime she liked. He fished her husband’s card she’d given him out of his wallet, then froze.