The More I See You (42 page)

It was a lie and she knew it, but she had no other choice.

Besides, she missed Godiva chocolate, Häagen-Dazs, indoor plumbing, and central heating. She missed glamour magazines, television, and obnoxious commercials. She missed her grand piano. She missed her comfortable bed. And, she actually did miss the subway in New York. Peace and quiet became irritating after a few months.

I love him. Please let me go home.

She felt something shudder. She opened her eyes and looked to her left.

She blinked.

A road. A house in the distance.

She looked to her right and there stood Richard still, surrounded by his men. Hugh still had his hand in her hair, but the knife had fallen away from her neck. Jessica spun away from him, but he seemingly gathered his wits and came after her, his arm raised, the knife glinting in the sunlight.

Jessica stumbled and fell backward.

“Jessica!”

She closed her eyes and waited for the pain. But it never came.

She opened her eyes.

She was in a field, much like the one she’d been in a split second before.

But she was alone.

Richard watched Hugh throw himself at Jessica and he thought his heart just might stop. But before he could leap across the distance and rescue his lady, he realized that his brother had fallen upon nothing.

Nothing but the winter grasses.

Jessica was gone.

Hugh jumped to his feet, then threw his head back and howled.

Richard looked at his men. To a man, they were making the sign of the cross and looking as if they’d just seen the jaws of Hell opening up before them with the singular intention of ingesting them whole. Richard actually couldn’t blame them. He’d believed Jessica, aye, but there was nothing like seeing something in truth to remove all doubt.

And then he realized what he’d seen.

She was gone.

He cried out and stumbled forward, his hands out-stretched.

“Jessica!”

He dropped to his knees. There was no mark where her feet had been, no bent blade of grass, no disturbed bit of
dirt. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought he’d dreamed her.

Nay, the agony in his chest was a perfect reminder of just how well he’d known her.

He put his face in his hands and wept.

He knew his men were behind him, but he also knew they would not aid him. He’d trained them all too well. No one would touch him, no one would say anything, no one would offer comfort.

And the one person who consistently ignored all his fierce growls and snarls was hundreds of years away.

Where he couldn’t have reached her had he wanted to.

•   •   •

Hugh de Galtres stood several feet from his brother and trembled. He wasn’t a coward by nature, but he had just witnessed what he could only believe was magic. One moment Jessica had been standing there, the next she had disappeared.

It was true, then.

She was a faery.

Hugh ignored his brother kneeling there, weeping. Not even knowing that he had driven Richard to this humiliation was enough to bring Hugh from his stupor.

“You.”

The raw brutality of that voice, however, was.

Hugh came back to himself in time to see Richard heave himself to his feet. He backed away, but not quickly enough.

“You did this,” Richard rasped. “You bastard.”

Hugh couldn’t even defend himself. He was far too unnerved by what he’d just seen.

“The faery—”

He managed no words past that. Richard’s hands around his throat cut off both his words and his air.

“Go home,” Richard said, “speak no word. And think on how fortunate you are to still have your life.”

Hugh knew Richard was close to breaking his neck, so he closed his eyes in agreement and found himself quite
suddenly sprawled on the ground. He took several deep breaths, indeed grateful that he was still alive to do so, then blurted out his most burning desire.

“My aid,” he gasped.

“You’ll have it,” Richard snarled. “But never let me see your sorry visage again. And never, ever say aught of this.”

Hugh doubted he would ever forget what he’d seen that day or how deeply it had disturbed him, but he also had the feeling that he wouldn’t be saying anything about it.

No one would have believed him.

But as he heaved himself to his feet, he couldn’t help but feel a bit vindicated. The creature had sprung up from the grass and he had been the one to force her home. In time perhaps Richard would even come to appreciate that and see Hugh rewarded properly for his deed.

Hugh looked at his brother and decided, however, that such a time was not likely to arrive in the near future. He slunk off as quickly as he could and prayed with all his might that Richard would make good on his promise of aid.

If not, all Hugh’s efforts on Richard’s behalf would have availed him nothing.

He gave the middle of the grassy field a wide berth, then turned his face homeward.

•   •   •

Richard gathered his thoughts and the shards of his heart and turned to face his men. All three—John, Godwin, and Hamlet—looked at him with wide eyes. If Richard had had the heart, he might have been amused. Three warriors who had seen most everything there was to see in the world, rendered speechless and wondering by a woman, no less.

“She was no faery,” Richard said hoarsely.

His men made no answer.

“I cannot explain her appearance, nor her disappearance,” Richard continued. “But of the latter we will say no more.”

His men nodded as one—slowly and without complete surety, but they made the motion. Richard mounted, waited for them to do the same, then made his way back to the road. He paused and considered returning to Artane.

He turned his horse sharply to the right. He would go home. He never should have left. If he’d never left Burwyck-on-the-Sea to rescue Hugh the first time, he never would have found Jessica. And if he’d refused to go to Artane, he never would have lost her.

But if he’d never had her, then his life would have remained empty, and what joy he would have missed!

Though at the moment, with the bleak emptiness of the rest of his mortal journey facing him, he couldn’t help but wonder if he might have been better off never to have known her, never to have loved her, and never to have lost her.

He closed his eyes and wept.

Jessica stared out the window as the plane started its descent through the clouds to the airport near Seattle. It was gloomy on the way down and it was even gloomier once they landed. The rain mirrored perfectly the bleakness in her heart. Normally she didn’t mind the rain. Now it looked too much like tears.

She closed her eyes and let herself think back on what had happened over the past two months. Once she’d been able to get a grip on her hysterics, she’d walked to the house she’d seen in the distance. She’d placed a call to Henry and found herself retrieved within hours. The faculty excursion was over, but he’d offered her hospitality anyway. She’d faced a few police questions, excused her absence by lying about a case of amnesia, then packed her bags. The last thing she’d wanted was to be anywhere near Hugh’s castle. She’d thanked Henry profusely for his help, then headed back to New York.

Now it was almost hard to believe the events of the last two months had actually happened. Once she’d gotten back to New York, it felt as if she’d never left. Apparently time had passed, however, and she had found herself in a great deal of trouble over not having had her compositions
ready on time. She’d thrown herself into her work, finishing the final movement of her symphony in less than a month. It had poured out of her from someplace deep inside, finished as she had never finished anything in her head before. It was almost as if she was doing nothing more than taking dictation from her soul.

And the first time she’d heard it rehearsed all the way through, she had wept. Her love for Richard had been in every note, every phrase, every sweeping arc of melody. She’d finally left the concert hall, blubbering almost past reason.

At least she’d thought it had been the symphony to do it to her. It could have been hormones.

Or the morning sickness.

That was the only thing that convinced her that her time in medieval England hadn’t been a dream. She was carrying Richard’s child, his baby, whom he would never know.

But even that had started to feel far too normal. So she’d bought herself a plane ticket to Seattle, excused herself from sitting in on a week’s worth of rehearsals of her piece, and hoped that being with her mother and grandmother would restore her sanity.

The plane landed without incident, but even the slight turbulence on the way down had Jessica grabbing for the airsickness bag. She managed to keep from throwing up until the other two people in her row had gotten up, but even then it wasn’t pretty for those around her.

By the time she made it to the gate, she was sobbing and ready to lie down and give up.

Her mother was there, waiting. Jessica figured there was no sense in stopping the sobs to say her hellos. She suspected her mother would understand.

Two hours later she was sitting in the kitchen of her parents’ house, watching her grandmother tat and listening to her mother explain Jessica’s sudden arrival to the next-door neighbor to whom her mother had been explaining things for as long as Jessica could remember. Hot potato soup with homemade bread was next and Jessica couldn’t
remember the last time she’d had anything better.

But the moment of truth was coming, and she wasn’t sure how she was going to proceed.

“All right,” her mother said, “you’ve been lying to me for two months. Where were you?”

Jessica took a deep breath. “I wasn’t lying. I said I was in England.”

“And I’m the one who got the phone call that said you weren’t,” Margaret said briskly. “Then you show up back in New York with no time to explain anything to me. You have time now. Spill the beans.”

Her grandmother nodded, her hands working ceaselessly. Jessica looked at the lace spilling down from her shuttle and wondered if that was the kind of knowledge she should have been acquiring all her life. Being able to make lace wouldn’t have been a bad thing in the Middle Ages. It made her wish she had spent more time in the library.

“Jessica . . .”

Jessica focused on her mother. “All right,” she said with a sigh. “But you’re going to have to use your imagination a little.”

Her grandmother looked at her from watery blue eyes. “I just wanna know who got you pregnant, girlie.”

“Mother!” Margaret exclaimed.

“Well, look at her, Meg. She’s pale as a ghost.”

Jessica sighed. “I got married.”

“What!”

Jessica was afraid her mother was not going to have a very good afternoon.

“I was standing in Lord Henry’s garden,” she said. “I somehow got sucked back in time to the year 1260, where I met a man named Richard. He was fixing a gash in my side that nearly killed me and we sort of got married to distract ourselves. Then we decided that it was what we wanted.” Jessica put her hand over her stomach. “This is result of that.”

Her mother’s jaw had slipped down a notch or two. “Back in time?” she repeated.

“1260,” Jessica supplied. “Ask me almost anything and I can tell you about it. Oh, this might prove it.” She pulled up her shirt and showed her mother and grandmother her scar. “See?”

Her grandmother Irene peered over her bifocals with keen interest.

Margaret, on the other hand, slipped from her chair in a dead faint.

“Not pretty,” Irene noted.

Jessica sighed. It certainly wasn’t.

•   •   •

Her mother walked around for two days, shaking her head. Jessica waited for her to come to terms with what she’d learned. It was the truth, no matter how hard it was to swallow. She couldn’t do anything to make it more palatable. Her mother would have to accept it or not by herself.

On day three, her mother came into the kitchen, where Jessica was playing canasta with her grandmother, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

“All right,” she said, rubbing her face, “I think I can take the whole story now.”

“It’s a good one,” Irene supplied.

“Thank you, Mother,” Margaret said with pursed lips. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy it as much as you apparently have.”

Irene looked at Jessica. “Kids give their parents that kind of sass back in those dark ages?”

“Not that I heard,” Jessica said, smiling.

“Hrumph,” Irene said, sitting back with her winning hand. “You lost anyway, Jessie. Go ahead and tell your mama the story. I’m going to go make a snack.”

Margaret sighed a long-suffering kind of sigh, then looked at Jessica. “Go ahead. I’m ready.”

And so Jessica told her mother everything, from Archie’s hauling her up the castle steps, to Richard’s doing the same thing a month later after she’d flipped him the bird. She described dancing guardsmen practicing their wooing and squires who didn’t want to be squires.
She told her mother about the poverty, the cold, the necessity of knowing how to camp.

And then she told her mother about Richard, about his rough exterior and his tender heart. She told her of Kendrick, of Artane, of the king’s visit, of meeting Abby. She left nothing out and found that in the telling of her story, she realized again just how much she missed the life she had led.

And the man she had left behind.

By the time she had finished with every detail, no matter how small or insignificant, it was well into the afternoon and she and her mother had moved to comfortable overstuffed chairs in the family room. A fire burned in the fireplace and Jessica sat curled up with her favorite blanket around her.

“Well,” Margaret said, when Jessica had finished.

Jessica nodded.

Margaret looked at her with a grave smile. “I don’t think he would have married Henry’s godniece.”

“Maybe not, but I didn’t have the luxury of sticking around to find out.”

“He probably could have gotten you away from Hugh.”

Jessica sighed. “Maybe, but to what end? He would have lost everything that meant anything to him.”