“Damned right I will.”
She laughed a little, uneasily. “You’re a bully.”
“Nay,” he said quietly, “I am the man who loves you, and I’ll keep you safe from your modern sensibilities if I have to lock you up to do so whilst we’re lingering in this very brutal time. Is that clear enough?”
“Is this you being nice to me?” she asked a little breathlessly. “Or am I misreading you?”
He took her hand, then stepped past her and pulled her into the guard tower. He nodded briskly to the men there, then continued on, towing her along after him as if she’d been a very naughty fifth-grader on her way to the principal’s office.
She followed him—well, she was given no choice about it, actually—into what turned out to be Jennifer’s solar. He looked at his sister-in-law.
“We’re borrowing your alcove for a bit of privacy,” he said shortly.
Jennifer waved him on. “Don’t mind me. I know how it is.”
“At least she’ll be able to hear me scream,” Tess said with an uneasy laugh.
“You won’t have breath for screaming.”
Tess looked at Jennifer, who only laughed at her. She supposed there was no hope of help from that corner. She found herself soon standing in a little alcove that sported benches and a lovely window that was unfortunately too small to jump out of. She looked up at John only to find his expression one of concern. She rolled her eyes and sat down on the bench.
“All right. Go ahead with the lecture.”
He sat down next to her with a sigh, then took her hand in both his own. “No lecture. And I wouldn’t lock you in the dungeon.”
“The solar instead?” she asked.
“It has a fireplace and comfortable seats,” he said, leaning his head back against the stone behind them. He looked at their hands together for several moments in silence, then slid her a sideways look. “And to show you that I’m not a complete beast, you choose our afternoon’s activity. We can stay here all afternoon and snog, or brave the chill and have a riding lesson.”
“Snog,” she repeated in disbelief. “What presumption.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
Mostly.
She realized her eyes were closed only when she felt his mouth on hers.
And then, in spite of her rather healthy sense of self-preservation, she just flat out lost track of time. She put her arms around John’s neck at some point, because it seemed like the safest way to keep herself from embarrassing herself by falling off the bench. She also realized, at a certain point, that kissing him had been a very bad idea indeed.
She opened her eyes, looked at his mouth, then met his eyes.
“This isn’t good,” she said weakly.
“Not at all,” he agreed hoarsely.
“It was
your
idea.”
“It seemed preferable to throwing you in the dungeon to keep you compliant.”
She opened her mouth to express her indignation, then realized his eyes were twinkling. She pursed her lips. “You’re an awful man.”
“But you love me.”
“No more than you love me.”
He slipped his hand under her hair and smiled sweetly. “Let’s discuss that at length at another time. We have other business now.”
She wanted to tell him that not only was kissing a very bad idea, it would only make matters worse when they had to say good-bye, but she quickly found that thinking was beyond her, much less trying to get in any decent conversation.
“Awfully quiet back there,” Jennifer said at one point.
Tess heard John groan against her mouth, then he lifted his head and looked at her.
“I can’t shout at my sister-in-law. I love her too much.”
Tess fanned herself. “She probably saved you an encounter with your brother’s sword. And while you’re being relieved about that, why don’t you open that window so I stop looking so flushed?”
He examined her critically. “You don’t look flushed; you looked kissed.”
“Even worse.”
His expression was suddenly serious. “Is it?”
“Don’t be daft,” she said in her best medieval Norman French, but she shooed him away just the same. “We can’t do that anymore.”
“Can’t we?” he asked, rising to throw open the shutters.
They most certainly couldn’t, because it was going to be difficult enough to do what she needed to do. She made John sit on the bench facing her and wished she could do something besides simply drink in the sight of him. Gorgeous, medieval, chivalrous.
And apparently in love with her.
She took a deep breath and looked at him seriously. “I’m not sure I’ll survive you,” she said honestly.
He returned her look just as seriously. “Give it a go, would you?”
She studied him. “You’re trying to distract me from other things, aren’t you?”
“Nay,” he said quietly “I just want to keep you alive so I can spend the rest of my life making sure you feel properly herded. There might be wooing involved as well. And if that wooing keeps you distracted from other things, so much the better.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m not prone to the vapors, you know.”
“Well,” he said with a smile, “except for the other day when you fainted in my arms.”
“I was under great duress.”
His smile faded. “I’m afraid, Tess my love, that great duress might last a bit longer than we fear.”
She nodded, looked out the window for a bit, then back at him. “What now?”
“Nick and I do a bit of nosing about, you stay safely inside the keep with my sister-in-law, her children, and a dozen very skilled guardsmen, and we see how the wind blows for a bit. And you and I snatch what brief moments together we can.” He put his hands on his knees, rose, then reached down and pulled her up and into his arms.
Tess stood in that divine embrace for far longer than was good for either her peace of mind or her heart, but she couldn’t bring herself to pull away. She closed her eyes and didn’t protest either the occasional murmured endearment or the more frequent, sweetly stolen kiss. By the time the solitude of Jennifer’s solar was breached by several young lads wanting their mother, Tess thought her heart might break.
But she couldn’t talk to John about what weighed on her the most, which was whether or not he wanted to stay in the past.
She supposed she would find that out soon enough.
Chapter 24
T
wo
days later, John stood in the lists, shaking with weariness and wondering what in the hell he’d been thinking to come anywhere near the Middle Ages.
He was in the lists because it was, as it happened, the only place he had any peace for thinking. That was saying something given that he was sparring with his eldest brother and being critiqued by the next one in line. He would have preferred to be inside, wooing Tess, but the inside of the hall was overrun by not only family—which he was happy to see—and a pair of very eligible medieval misses—which he was less than happy about. He wasn’t sure how anyone had gotten wind of his presence at Wyckham, but he supposed Robin wasn’t above putting the word out simply to annoy him.
Those gels were not at all what he was looking for even if he had been looking, which he wasn’t. He wasn’t sure why their mothers even bothered once they’d had a good look at Tess. She was well spoken, gracious, and so beautiful he could hardly look at her. Her French was even astonishingly good, though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. The slight accent she was still trying to iron out lent her a slightly exotic flair that he found quite riveting—
“You’re not heeding me,” Robin said in a singsong voice.
John dragged his attention back to his brother. “I was thinking.”
“I won’t ask about what,” Robin said with an eyebrow raised. “And if you’re curious, she’s sitting over there with a gaggle of children piled atop her to keep her warm.”
John realized that was true. That he wasn’t precisely certain when that had happened said much about the quality of Robin’s swordplay.
“I don’t know why she finds you so interesting,” Robin said with a yawn. “Your swordplay is dreadful.”
Nick laughed and walked away.
John refrained from comment. He had enough to do to merely keep himself from becoming skewered on his brother’s sword. It was, he had to admit, a little strange to be standing in Wyckham’s lists, fighting Robin and feeling as if not a day had passed from the last time he’d done the same.
Only, things weren’t the same. He knew too much about too many things.
That utter incongruity had only been exacerbated by having so much of his family arrive over the past two days. It was gratifying to know they’d all made the trip to see him in such haste, though finding beds for them all on short notice had been a difficult job in itself. He’d watched Tess help Jennifer, keeping herself as much in the background as possible.
He’d wondered about that.
But he hadn’t had any time to find out the particulars because, again, he hadn’t had a bloody moment alone with her since Robin and Anne had arrived three days earlier. He’d been besieged by family—which had been a joy—and interviewed by prospective fathers-in-law—which had been an utter waste of his time and left him limited to simply catching views of Tess only on occasion. The more he considered it, the more he suspected it had been Robin to issue those particular invitations. Why, he couldn’t have said. Surely Nicholas had sent missives that had included tidings about Tess.
He remembered vividly watching Nicholas fight off their grandmother’s efforts to see him wed to very powerful medieval gels with impeccable pedigrees instead of the woman he loved. He wished he’d taken notes to see how Nick had managed to rid himself of those lassies. The only thing in his favor was that at least Joanna wasn’t there to orchestrate the whole fiasco.
Robin reached over suddenly and flicked him between the eyes. “Stop thinking so much.”
John rubbed his forehead crossly. “I have many things to contemplate.”
“Such as?”
“Life is perplexing.”
“But love isn’t.” Robin tilted his head in Tess’s direction. “Why haven’t you asked her to wed with you?”
“Because when we were loitering in a time far, far away, she didn’t know the details about me I thought she might need to,” John said. “Well, that isn’t exactly true. She knew who I was from the moment she saw me, having seen Montgomery, but I didn’t know she knew until we were here. I’ve hardly had a bloody moment’s peace with her since in which to even begin to woo her properly. Now, ’tis utterly impossible. How I’m to do it now with a houseful of twits—whom I’m convinced you brought along to vex me—I don’t know.”
“Me?” Robin asked, putting his hand over his heart. “You can’t think I would want to grieve you. Not when I was so overjoyed to learn you hadn’t fallen into a pile of manure and suffocated.”
John glared at him. “I told you what happened.”
“Which I’m not sure did anything to improve my opinion of your wits.”
John put his sword point-down in the very hard ground and looked at his brother seriously. “ ’Tis done, Robin, and I cannot take it back, which you well know. You did your own share of foolish things in your youth, things I could remind you about, but I won’t because
I
know when to keep my mouth shut.”
Robin considered him. “Well,” he said finally. “I suppose that’s true.”
John dragged his sleeve across his forehead. “Any other words of wisdom to offer?”
“Woo that lovely gel there.”
“When?” John asked shortly. “Before or after I’ve thrown your pair of irritating wenches out the front gates? I’ll never have a moment’s peace until they’re gone, you know.”
“Well, you could teach Tess a bit of swordplay. That would give you some time to talk.”
“She would only use that as an excuse to trot off into the gloom and vanquish ruffians.”
Robin smiled. “She sounds a bit like Mandy.”
“Nay, Tess looks before she leaps,” John said. “And her assaults on my good sense are much more insidious.”
Robin looked to his right. “I can see why you’d want her,” he said frankly. “Not only is she beautiful and clever, she was perfectly willing to examine at length this morning a handful of maggots Kendrick unearthed from some cask somewhere. The children adore her already. Especially Kendrick.”
“Your son’s a menace,” John muttered.
Robin only grinned. “Isn’t he, though? I’m profoundly proud of him, if not a bit unnerved by his cleverness.”
John wondered, briefly, if the Kendrick who loitered in the Future remembered Tess from having met her currently at Wyckham, or if those memories had been lost to him, or if time truly did fold back on itself thus.
Or maybe he was just completely losing whatever few wits he’d clung to over the years.