One Magic Moment by Lynn Kurland Page B

away quickly, and the moment was gone. If John felt anything, he didn’t show it. He merely stood back, looked anywhere but at her, then shut the door when she’d moved away from it.
    “Thank you again,” she managed.
    “You’re welcome,” he said politely, but he didn’t move. He simply stood there, waiting, not watching her, until she’d managed to get herself moving forward. She walked into the train station without looking back. She waited for her train without allowing herself to think about anything at all. It was only as she sat down by a window and the train began to move that she looked at the card she still held in her hand.
    The business side had the name of Grant’s garage, then nothing more than the shop number and John’s cell number under it with just his first name.
    Odd.
    She turned it over and found an address written there in a rather lovely hand, all things considered. Then again, he was a lord’s son. She imagined his education had been extensive and consisted of quite a bit more than just swordplay.
    She shook her head. She hadn’t considered that part of his life. Was he as skilled as his brother?
    Did she care?
    She wasn’t sure she could bear to even begin to think about that.
    She put the card into her bag, shut it purposefully, then concentrated on the lovely English countryside passing by her, countryside that was full of farmland, the occasional groupings of oasts, and not a single castle for miles.
    Thankfully.

Chapter 4
     
    J ohn cursed his way to London.
    It was perhaps the first time in what seemed at the moment to be an exceptionally long life that he found himself grateful for all the languages he’d taken the time to learn—or been forced to learn by his father. He’d started his current tour of curses in tatty old English, worked his way through French, German, Italian, then ventured into Portuguese and Russian. The last gave him a bit of a headache, so he’d turned to things a bit more familiar like Old English and Norman French.
    And the Latin he’d conjugated during mass every morning of his first nineteen years of life to keep himself awake.
    That hadn’t but gotten him to the M25 where he unfortunately needed the foul language the most. He usually had enough patience to negotiate morning traffic, but he wasn’t at his best presently. He settled for news on the radio and a deliberate and purposeful dredging up of the last of his reserves of patience.
    Damn that Tess Alexander.
    He knew his present discomfort wasn’t entirely her fault, but a decent bit of it was and he was fully prepared to blame her for it. If she hadn’t come into his shop, if she hadn’t blown a tyre, if she hadn’t with every breath she took left him dazzled and distracted . . . well, actually it was entirely her fault that he was affected.
    He paused, then blew his hair out of his eyes. To be entirely fair, he could have done something besides follow her so closely that morning. He’d known it was her car, which should have left him whipping his own car about and taking a different route north. By nay, he’d had to follow her, then he’d had to help her, then he’d done the most irrational thing of all by giving her one of his cards and telling her to come find him.
    And then he’d touched her hand and been lost.
    He cursed feebly, because that was now all he could manage. He was daft, that was it. He’d suffered a momentary weakness, but he might not pay for it too dearly. Perhaps she wouldn’t use his card, which would save him from more discomfort. He would make sure to duck out the back when she came into his shop in the village, which would finish the tale once and for all.
    A pity the memory of the feel of her hand in his was something he couldn’t seem to put behind him.
    He snapped back to himself just before he plowed into the car in front of him, then forced himself to concentrate on what he should have been doing in the first place, which was driving.
    It took him