He almost ploughed into a bairn of some sort who had come flying out his mother’s gates toward the street. He caught the little brat out of habit—damn that chivalry and all its incarnations—and put him back into his mother’s frantically outstretched arms without comment.
Bairns, he noted with a knowing nod. Yet another thing to avoid like the plague. He had more than enough to keep himself occupied with without the burdens of a wife and children and a place to put them and keep them safe. It was all he could do to keep others from dinging his car. He wasn’t interested in taking on anything else.
He put his head down and continued on his way, praying he wouldn’t encounter anything else unsettling before he’d done his duty and could retreat to his cozy cottage where he could keep the world at bay.
He walked behind the shop and opened one of the garages there. In times past, he knew old Grant had stored his prized collection of vintage Jaguars in those bays. He’d filled those slots with his own collection of things he’d had shipped down from the north: two Jaguars, a sweet little MG, and a rather less-than-discreet black Aston Martin. He considered, then decided that perhaps discreet was more the order of the day. He chose the Jag that was running, then managed to get himself out of the village without losing a hubcap or running afoul of any overzealous traffic wardens.
He’d never driven to Sedgwick, as it happened, and he missed the turnoff—to his disgust. He flipped a U-turn in an appropriate place, then retraced his steps. He forced himself to simply watch the road without putting any thought into the watching. He would have preferred to avoid looking at the castle in time as well, but he couldn’t. He turned off his car in the car park, leaned his head back against the seat, then let out a slow, unsteady breath.
The keep was spectacular.
He hadn’t paid attention to many castles over the past few years. He’d lived and worked in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle for a pair of years, true, but he was an Englishman, not a Scot, so their puny bit of stone perched up atop that bluff had troubled him not at all. He had avoided, again like the plague, visits to any other keeps of note.
He wondered, briefly, if he might have been a bit hasty about that.
The last time he’d seen Sedgwick, it had been overrun by Denys of Sedgwick’s ill-bred and mannerless children who had seemingly taken great pleasure at crawling in and out of the holes in their father’s foundations—
He opened the car door abruptly, putting an end to thoughts he wouldn’t have allowed on his mind’s stage if he’d been thinking clearly. He crawled out of his car before he could think too much about what he was doing, then locked the door and walked toward the bridge that spanned what looked less like a cesspit and more like a lovely, serene lake.
He hesitated at the end of the bridge, though he wondered why. It was a private house, true, but there had been no sign that he could see telling him that only certain hours were maintained and would he mind keeping his sorry arse off the property outside those hours.
He continued across the bridge, realizing only as he was doing so that he was keeping a wary eye out for lads leaning over the parapet with unfriendly arrows pointed his way. He resisted the urge to clap his hand to his forehead to hopefully dislodge what good sense he’d started the day with and continued on into the barbican gate with its trio of portcullises that were no doubt still hiding in their nooks thanks only to prayers and a bit of duct tape. He was happy to leave them behind—
Until he walked into the courtyard.
He stumbled to a halt, then simply looked at the woman who was standing there with her arms wrapped around herself, staring off at things he couldn’t see. She was so still, she might have been made of stone. He froze, lest he disturb her.
She was dressed as she had been earlier that morning, in jeans and a sweater. Her hair was either very short, or caught up in some sort of business at the back of her head. There was a light rain falling, but she didn’t seem to notice. What she was thinking, he couldn’t have said, but it seemingly occupied all her energies.
He had the feeling it was a melancholy sort of subject, which struck him as particularly wrong. She should have been waiting in the courtyard for the man who was hers, waiting to be loved, cherished, protected—
She turned her head suddenly and looked at him, as if she’d known he’d been standing there.
His first instinct was to make an abrupt dash for the nearest exit, but he didn’t run from things that were dangerous.
He paused. He might have not been faulted for scampering away when his heart might have been involved, but since that happened so rarely, he wasn’t sure he could use that excuse at present.
Immediately on the heels of those thoughts came the one that he was truly going to look like an idiot if he simply stood there and gaped at one of the most beautiful women he’d ever seen. Not beautiful in a gaudy, flashy, expensive sort of way. Beautiful in a quiet, lingering sort of way that had him almost turning in truth and fleeing indeed whilst what was left of his good sense remained.
That he didn’t might have been, he conceded reluctantly, the hand of Fate clutching the back of his coat so he couldn’t do aught but walk forward, but he wasn’t going to examine that closely enough to find out.
Tess Alexander only stood there, watching him with enormous eyes, as if she’d just seen a ghost.
He suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder in truth that time, on the off chance that she had it aright. He wasn’t unaccustomed to things of a paranormal nature, though he preferred to keep them behind him where he needn’t look at them. He continued on toward her until he was standing but a foot away.
“You forgot your charge card,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse in his ears.
“You shoved me out of your office,” she said faintly.
He paused. “I can be a bit of an arse.”
She held out her hand.
John was halfway to taking her hand in his before he realized she was merely waiting for him to put her card into it. He fumbled in his coat pocket for it, then handed it to her. She took it, then clutched it as if it were some sort of lifeline.
“Thank you . . .” She trailed off.
“John,” he supplied.
“John?”
“John de Piaget,” he said, though he rarely gave his last name unless it was required. He had, actually, given a few false names over the years, when he’d been working under the table in the north and hadn’t particularly cared for anyone to know who he was.
Not that anyone would have cared, surely. It wasn’t as if his family was notorious or noteworthy. He knew his father’s hall was still standing because he’d seen a picture of it in a newspaper once. He hadn’t seen the castle itself since he’d put it behind him years ago, and he’d had no interest in finding out who lived there or if the whole place had been turned over to the National Trust because his father’s descendants hadn’t managed to hold on to it. In the end, his name would mean nothing to anyone. Still, old habits died hard, which was why he generally just went by John and left the rest to the imagination.