“Forever,” she said with a smile.
He kissed her again, then crawled out of his car. Tess waited for him to open her door, then found herself helped up to her feet and into his arms.
“I love you,” he said seriously.
“And I love you,” she said, putting her arms around his neck. She took a deep breath. “I just don’t want you to regret your choice.”
“I never will,” he said seriously.
“Because I understand your past?”
“Because you are my future,” he corrected. He tightened his arms around her briefly, then pulled away and took her hand. “We’re exhausted. Let’s eat, go to bed, then wake up in our proper time and place. And then we’ll get on with our lives as my siblings have in the past. We’ll work, raise our family, and have glorious family reunions where we’ll share all the things that have bound us together.”
“And life will be sweet,” she said softly.
“It will, my love.”
She nodded, because she supposed there was nothing else to be said. She took his proffered hand, then walked with him across the grass, stopping in surprise at the sight of Mrs. Tippets standing at the end of the bridge. Even more surprising was to find Mr. Beagle sitting at attention with nary a snarl in sight. Mrs. Tippets inclined her head.
“Lady Sedgwick.”
Tess suppressed a smile. “Mrs. Tippets. And how nicely behaved Mr. Beagle is.”
“Obedience school,” Mrs. Tippets admitted. “And you’ll be pleased to know we turned a tidy profit in the shop whilst you were away. Your sister, Miss Peaches, said you’d gone off on a research holiday and thought you might like to see things humming along as they should after you returned.”
“It was a rather unexpected trip,” Tess said, trying to latch on to something reasonable to say. “I assume the events went on as planned?”
“Miss Peaches took over without so much as a hitch in her step,” Mrs. Tippets said. “Enlisted my aid now and again with a few things.”
Tess wondered why she hadn’t thought to do the same thing. “A very wise choice, of course,” she managed. “Is my sister at home?”
“She went to London this morning to meet a client,” Mrs. Tippets said. “Promised to be back tomorrow. She’s been chatting with Lord Roland quite often over the past fortnight.”
Tess suppressed the urge to look at John. At least Peaches would have known where they went. Tess made a bit more polite conversation, introduced John as her husband to complete shopkeeper approval, then walked with him across the bridge. She realized as she did so that she was looking up to see who might have been loitering on the battlements. She looked at John and smiled uneasily.
“I’ve been corrupted.”
“I do the same thing every time, if it makes you feel any better,” he said wryly. “Habit.”
She walked with him across the courtyard and up to the front door. She found it open, which was just slightly unsettling. John, true to form, set their backpacks down on the ground and pulled her behind him.
“And just what are you going to do?” she asked in a frantic whisper. “Your sword’s in the boot of your car!”
He pulled up his jeans and pulled a knife from his boot. “I think I can manage with this.”
She looked around his shoulder. “I wasn’t insulting your skill, you know. I just don’t want to lose you to a bullet between the eyes.”
He leaned over and kissed her softly. “You won’t, I promise. But stay behind me.”
She wasn’t going to argue. She’d been on a medieval battlefield and
never
wanted to repeat that experience.
She waited for John to ease open the door, then peek inside, his knife in his hand. He straightened abruptly, then fumbled for her hand.
“We have company,” he said.
He didn’t seem overly stressed, so perhaps the guest wasn’t an unwelcome one. He didn’t protest when she moved to stand beside him. She looked at the man sitting in front of the fire, then gasped. She knew him, of course, from the future. She also had just seen him not a fortnight earlier looking fifty years younger.
“Lord Roland,” she managed.
He rose and made them a low bow. “Lady Sedgwick,” he said politely. “Lord Segrave.”
John resheathed the knife in his boot, retrieved their gear from the front stoop, then set it inside the door. He took Tess’s hand and walked with her across the hall to stop in front of the fire.
“Roland,” John said with a huff of a laugh. “What a surprise.”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Roland said with an answering smile. “A surprise, I mean. I’m pleased to see you both back from your rescue mission in the past.”
Tess sat down in the chair John pulled up for her, then put her hand in his. “I think I’m very glad you worked out a few details over the past few years.”
“I imagine you are,” Roland agreed.
“I would like to know how you did the same,” John said politely. “Since you’re here to give them to us.”
“It’s why I kept a key to let myself in,” Roland said with a smile, “though I’ll leave it behind now that my work is done. And to answer your question, I’ll just say that your parting words to me on the field in front of Segrave haunted me for quite a while until I began to see what they meant. You perhaps won’t be surprised that I’ve had a hand in a few things. John buying the shop was a gift I didn’t arrange, though I would have found some other way to have you both meet. You, my lady, being here at the castle, though, was something I definitely saw to.”
“How many times over the years have you made the trip from the past to the future?” John asked. “And how did you become so bloody old?”
Roland laughed. “Since I have you to thank for the opportunity to have all these gray hairs, I’ll answer that happily. As I told you all those years ago, I’d been traveling back and forth quite a bit in my youth. As time went on and I understood what I needed to do, I lingered for a few years in Victorian England, directing the activities of a certain Lord Darling. After that, I settled on modern England, waiting and watching for Tess to arrive at Cambridge.”
Tess shook her head. “It’s just beyond strange to think you knew about us together before we knew about it ourselves.” She paused, then looked at him narrowly. “You didn’t influence me to choose medieval history somehow, did you?”
“Oh, nay,” Roland said with a shiver. “That would have been too much, I think. You love what you love, my lady, simply because you love it. I can’t say, though, that I didn’t contemplate the irony of your encountering our good John there from time to time. And I did interfere just the slightest in John’s musical career.”
“Did you?” John asked. “How?”
“Nothing too dire,” Roland assured him. “I had heard you play in Edinburgh once which had been completely a matter of happenstance. I put a bug in Dave Thompson’s ear, that’s all. It seemed a small thanks for my life.”
“Damn you,” John said weakly. “I knew that couldn’t have been coincidence.”
Roland smiled. “It actually was, if that eases you. He was there at the Festival listening to you with his mouth agape in a most unattractive fashion. As I knew you and recognized him, I simply told him your name, which of course meant nothing to him save something to plug into his diary and save for later use. Of course, I had no idea how it was you and Tess would meet given that you’d told me nothing of it in the past, so I will admit that I was fully prepared to orchestrate that if need be. I knew old Grant from my own loiterings here at Sedgwick, so when we encountered one another in a market in Provence and he told me to whom he’d sold his shop, I supposed all I needed to do was leave the rest of it up to Fate.”
“Dangerous,” John said wryly.
“Well, I didn’t leave
everything
to Fate,” Roland amended. “I can’t say I’ve been honest with very many people, but Doris Winston knows all about me, the lovely old bird. I hoped if things went completely awry, she would help me out.”
“But what if John hadn’t wanted anything to do with me?” Tess asked faintly. “What if he’d meant it when he told me that he thought we’d do better not to having anything to do with each other?”
John kissed her hand. Then he turned her hand over and kissed her palm. “Somehow,” he said with a slow smile, “I imagine that was the least of Roland’s worries. How could I not have fallen for you at first glance?”
Tess wondered if there would ever come a time where just the touch of his hand on hers didn’t leave her looking around to see if someone had thrown another log on the fire.
Roland laughed. “I believe I’ll leave you to your honeymooning.”
Tess tore her gaze away from her husband. “You won’t stay the night?” she asked. “We have rooms enough.”
“Well,” Roland said slowly, “if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’ll head back to France in the morning.” He rose, then paused and pulled something from his trouser pocket. “I forgot this. Since I gave you the castle, Tess, I started to feel guilty that I’d given nothing to your husband who had done such a smashing job saving my life.” He handed John a piece of paper. “Enjoy.”
Tess watched him walk across the hall, humming a jaunty medieval tune, then looked at John, who was watching her instead.
“You know you’re speaking French,” he said with a smile.
“I didn’t, no,” she said in surprise. “Habit, I suppose. What did he give you?”
John handed her a piece of paper. It looked quite a bit like the one she’d had from the crown, only John’s announced that the title of Earl of Segrave had been formally bestowed on him. Apparently, someone had done enough research to prove he was related to a certain John de Piaget, lord of Segrave in 1241. Tess looked at John in surprise.
“Well,” she said, nonplussed. “What goes around comes around, I guess.”
“For all the good it does me,” he said with a snort, “though my grandmother would be pleased. But I won’t be wasting any gold restoring that pile of stones, in case you were wondering.”
“Or buying it back from the crown?”
He shook his head. “There’s no land attached to that title any longer. In truth, Bess could have the land and title as well, but I won’t spurn the gift. We’ll picnic there every now and again and flash Burke’s Peerage at them to see if they’ll waive the entrance fee—which I doubt they will.”
She smiled. “What a cynic.”
“Realist,” he said dryly. He rose, folded the letter and put it in his pocket, then reached for her hand. “Let’s go have supper.”
Tess was happy to sit at the worktable in her kitchen and watch John putter around in jeans and a T-shirt. He made quick work of making them dinner, then sat with her and tucked into more saturated fat than they would have seen in medieval England in a lifetime.
“You know,” he said at one point, “we haven’t really had a proper honeymoon.”
“Where do you suggest?”
“I think there’s a particular keep on the edge of the sea in the north I might like to take you to.”
She smiled. “Will they let us in, do you think, or will they charge you a fee?”
“When Artane is your father, you find doors open to you that aren’t open to the average traveler,” he said with a wry smile. “Even the Artane of the current day.”
“And if not, you have a credit card?”
He laughed a little. “I didn’t want to say as much, but aye, I do.”
“You’d better call Gideon and let him know we’re coming,” she advised. “Kendrick as well, I’d imagine. I’m not about to.” She studied him. “Do you think he knows about us?”
“Tess, my love, he was at our wedding.”
“He was ten.”
“I imagine he has a very long memory. And he was inordinately fond of you. You’re the only aunt who would look at bugs with him. A lad doesn’t forget that sort of thing.”
She rested her chin on her fist. “He certainly didn’t say anything to me when I saw him several weeks ago.”
“He knows when to keep his mouth shut,” John said with a shrug, “being his father’s son and all.”
“What will Rose do with Segrave, do you think?”
“I shudder to think,” he said with a shiver. “That one . . . she frightens me.”
“I imagine she won’t hit sixteen without several hours of self-defense training under her belt, along with the appropriate amount of swordplay,” Tess said with a bit of a laugh. “Being her father’s daughter, as she is.”
John nodded, then rose, stuck their dishes in the sink, and held out his hand for her.
“We’ll do those in the morning,” he said purposefully. “Since we’ll be here to do them.”
“That’s why I put a stone over the gate at the end of the bridge.”
“We’ll uncover it in a couple of months and shove a care package through for Montgomery,” John said with a snort. “He was very disappointed I hadn’t brought anything tasty along for him.”
“Pathetic.”
He laughed. “He is, but you can hardly blame him.” He pulled her into his arms in the passageway and smiled down at her. “Come wait by the fire, my love, and I’ll make sure the doors are locked.”