One Magic Moment(5)
Author: Lynn Kurland
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
He’d always known it would be steel to kill him.