Her hands, though, had been positively frigid when he’d pulled off her gloves to see how they’d survived her first lesson. That had come, he’d suspected, from more than just the chill, as profound as it was.
He’d taken her inside and spent the afternoon and evening making sure she and Jennifer were well-fed and always sitting closest to the fire. The conversation in Nicholas’s solar that evening had been carried on partly in French, partly in English, and had involved a wide range of topics that had been as innocuous as possible. Tess had mostly listened gravely. John had caught the single, questioning look Nicholas had sent him, but had only been able to shrug in return. Tess was thinking about something, but he was damned if he knew what.
That morning he’d marched out to the lists with his brother, indulged in a brief lunch with Tess, then announced that it was time for her to try a little ride outside the castle walls. She was plucky, he would give her that. Facing medieval times head-on instead of from the comfort of a library had to have been daunting, but she’d done it without hesitation.
Silently, of course, but without hesitation.
All of which left him where he was, leaning back against a tree with a sword at his side, freezing his arse off so he could have ten minutes of privacy with the woman he loved.
The woman who seemed to be about three heartbeats from bolting, truth be told.
She looked like something out of a painting, standing there in a deep blue cloak with its hood pulled up around her face and her stillness a tangible thing. Wyckham sat in a particularly lovely part of the country, which only added to the perfection of what he was seeing. He regretted having left his phone back at the keep. He would have happily taken a picture to remind him of the moment.
Tess turned and looked at him, and he lost his breath. He supposed he should have been accustomed to the sight of her, but he found he wasn’t. She was beautiful, and brilliant, and courageous.
But she also looked still fragile enough that he reached out toward her without thinking. She looked over her shoulder at the guardsmen who surrounded them at a discreet distance, then shook her head at him.
“I’m fine,” she said quickly. “I wouldn’t want to ruin your reputation.”
“I fear it would be the opposite,” he said seriously, “so I will forebear.” He took off his cloak and started to put it around her, but she balked.
“You’ll freeze.”
“We won’t stay long.”
He covered her cloak with his own, then fastened it at her throat. He hesitated, then put his hands on her shoulders.
“How are you?” he asked seriously.
“I’m fine,” she said, nodding as if she strove to convince herself of it. “And since we have all this frigid privacy, you could see your way clear to telling me a few of the details about yourself that you couldn’t seem to lay your fingers on eight hundred years from now.”
He studied her in silence for a moment or two, then decided perhaps standing out in the middle of a winter wonderland was not the place to delve into thoughts and feeling she might not want to share. He couldn’t imagine she wanted to discuss his past—either in the present or the Future—but perhaps it was the easiest thing for her to talk about. He looked for someplace to sit, but there was nothing that wasn’t covered in four inches of snow. He looked at her.
“We’d best make this quick.”
“You’re the one talking.”
He had to take a deep breath. “I think I might have to sit down in truth.”
“You can’t. It’s snowing again.”
To his surprise, he found that was indeed the case. “Very well. Ten minutes, then we go back.”
“That will give you just about enough time to tell me how you went from 1233 to the Future without losing your marbles. I’ll save the rest of my questions for when we’re in front of a hot fire.”
He suppressed the urge to shift uncomfortably. “I’ve never told anyone the particulars.”
She closed her eyes briefly, then looked at him. “And you don’t have to tell me,” she said quietly. “Not really. I know it’s a private thing—”
“No, I want to,” he interrupted quickly. “Just don’t bloody my nose if I hesitate.”
She looked at him for several moments in silence, then sighed deeply. She closed the distance between them and put her arms around him. “I won’t,” she said, very quietly.
He wrapped his arms around her without hesitation. He wasn’t sure if she was trembling from the cold or something else, and he didn’t dare ask. Perhaps they could blame it all on the cold, for he was shivering as much as she was.
“How do you want this sordid tale?” he asked, trying to remove himself as far as possible from the emotions of it. “English or in the appropriate local vernacular?”
“English, since you have a choice. Just make it short. It’s colder than I thought it would be.” She took his cloak and wrapped it around as much of him as she could. “What were you doing that you shouldn’t have been where you weren’t supposed to be?”
He took a deep breath. “I was in Nick’s solar, nosing about in his private trunk. There were rumors, you see, of things pertaining to Jennifer’s dowry that Montgomery and I had speculated on, though I’ll point out he didn’t have the stomach to investigate with me. Likely afeared he would find a faery inside,” he finished in disgust.
“Your brother has grown up,” she said with a smile. “In case you were curious about that.”
“Has he?” John mused. “I’m afraid he’s fixed in my mind as a dreamy, tenderhearted lad of ten-and-nine.”
“Stephen might have a different opinion—at least about his sword skill—but we’ll leave that for later. So, you ventured where your brother feared to tread, then what?”
“I saw a map, with all manner of red Xs littering it.”
“Time gates?” she asked faintly.
“I suspected the like. It was a poorly kept secret within my family that my sister Amanda’s husband was from the Future and I suspected the same thing of Jennifer.” He had to take another bracing breath of arctic air. “That isn’t entirely true. I saw her simply appear out of thin air, so I knew, once I saw those Xs, just exactly what they meant. I had to investigate.”
“Your poor parents.”
“I daresay.” He sighed. “I certainly wasn’t about to tell my father that I intended to try one of those gates to see where it took me, so I simply informed him that since I had my spurs clanking so prettily at my heels, I was ready to venture off into the world and make my fortune and would he see his way clear to giving me a bit of my inheritance so I could.”
She pulled back and looked up at him. “What did he say?”
“He told me to go soak my head until good sense returned.”
“Did he know what you were planning, then?”
He smiled wearily. “I can’t say for certain. All I know is that the conversation deteriorated rather quickly from there. I think my reply to him included the words
stingy
and
whoreson
.”
“Oh, John,” she said with a pained smile. “I imagine it wasn’t a very pleasant afternoon.”
“Oh, it didn’t last all afternoon,” he said easily. “He threw a bag of gold at me—a very heavy one, as it happened—then threw me out of his hall. Bodily.”
She studied him for a moment or two in silence. “There’s more to it than that.”
“Aye, but it isn’t interesting, having to do with, as it did, other men’s lands and inheritances and things that were none of my business. I’ll tell you all one afternoon when we’ve absolutely nothing else to discuss. Suffice it to say that I had no idea my father knew so many vile words or that he could use them as so many parts of speech.”
“He must love you very much,” she murmured.
“We are, I fear, very much alike,” John admitted. “Bossy, unpleasant, short-tempered—”
“Chivalrous,” she corrected, “loyal, protective.”
He tightened his arms around her briefly. “All these medieval luxuries have clouded your vision, but I won’t argue with you. My father is all those things, as well as absolutely relentless in the safeguarding of his children which is why, I suppose, his reaction surprised me so greatly. I assumed he would gently attempt to dissuade me from trotting off to be a part of some illfated Crusade or join myself to Henry’s court, but . . .” He took a deep breath. “I didn’t expect him to throw me out of his hall. I fair broke my neck rolling down the front steps.”
“Maybe he thought it would bring you to your senses.”
He sighed. “Looking back on it now, I would say you have it aright. He no doubt though a night or two sleeping in a ditch—without a horse or gear, mind you, which he refused to allow me to take—would bring me to heel. I was too furious to think clearly, which will no doubt come as a surprise to you knowing how tractable and reasonable I always am.”
She only smiled and said nothing.
“I borrowed pen and parchment from the village alderman,” he continued, “scribbled a note, then looked for someone to carry it to Nick. I knew he would understand where no one else would. I gave it to Everard of Chevington, but apparently he wasn’t to be trusted.”
She shivered. “Chevington is a creepy place.”
“Isn’t it? I wouldn’t want to spend a night under that roof—what’s left of it.”
“What then? What did you do when you found yourself in the Future?”
“Found a job mucking out stables until I had enough money set aside—current pounds, of course, not the gold I’d brought with me—to stop mucking out stables. I bought a guitar and a bass, learned to play both, then bummed around playing bass in garage bands for a bit until I thought I’d had enough of the Future. I packed up my gear and started back toward Artane, fully intending to step on that very large X and make peace with my father.”
She was very still. “And?”
“It didn’t work,” he said lightly, though at the time he’d felt anything but casual about it. “The gate was, well, turbulent is the only way I can describe it. I think if I’d stepped into it, I wouldn’t have found myself in the right time. I tried another spot I’d memorized, was summarily gang-pressed into Victoria’s British Navy and only escaped because they marched me through my backyard, as it were, and I knew where to hide.”
She looked at him in shock. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not. I suppose ’twas naught but luck I was able to escape to the Future with both my swords. After cursing myself for being too stupid to plan for more than just a main gate and a backup, I walked back to Edinburgh to settle for what had become my life.” He paused. “I am, as you might imagine, not particularly keen on traveling through time. Apparently James MacLeod is, but he can keep the exhilaration.”
She took a deep breath and pulled away. “I think I need to walk. It’s too cold to stand still.”
He nodded, then took her hand. He kept pace with her, but couldn’t help but note her silence. Perhaps she was regretting having come with him—not that she’d had any choice in that—or regretting having met him in the first place.
But if she hadn’t and she’d been thrust back in time on her own . . .
“And so there I was,” he continued, because he couldn’t stomach where his thoughts had been leading him, “leading a very quiet life in the village when into my shop came a dark-haired angel who seemingly couldn’t judge the distance between her car and a brick wall.”
“It was my oak, which you know,” she said archly. “And I was knocking off mirrors on purpose, to give you business, which you also know.”
“I’ve never been more grateful for a bout of altruism, believe me,” he said with a smile.
She nodded, smiling in return, but there was something about that smile that didn’t quite ring true.
Odd.
He pressed on. “All of that leads us to our current place, where you can continue to imagine the unpleasant surprise I had in finding out how much you knew about the Middle Ages. And whilst you’re imagining that, I’ll describe for you if you like in great detail the torment I was in, knowing that growing too close to you would force me to reveal things I’d spent eight years hiding.”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t as if you did anything particularly medieval, like play the lute or sing in Norman French, or know where all the important doors were in my castle.”
“And if I hadn’t been my brother’s twin, would you have known?”
“I probably would have thought you just eccentric,” she conceded, “though you might have given yourself away that first time you came face-to-face with Stephen.”
“I suppose I must credit him with some discretion,” John grumbled. “At least he didn’t blurt out some sort of exclamation of surprise right there in a university courtyard.”
“He’s nothing if not discreet.”
“I suppose so,” John said, then he froze. One of Wyckham’s guardsmen was signaling to him, as discreetly as Stephen de Piaget could have likely wished. John forced himself to breathe normally as he had a look around himself. He saw nothing, but they were perhaps closer to the forest than he would have wanted to be at another time. He nodded slightly, then smiled at Tess. “I can no longer feel my toes, so why don’t we repair to a hot fire?”