“If this is a coma dream,” she muttered, “at least the production values are?—”
“What in the name of all the saints are you doing in my garden?”
The voice was rough honey poured over broken glass. Rachel spun, nearly face-planting in the mud, and found herself staring at what could only be described as Peak Knightly Brooding.
He stood in the garden path like someone had commissioned a statue of repressed anger and then brought it to life through sheer force of scowl. Black hair fell past his shoulders, rain-darkened and practically screaming for conditioner. A scar cut through one eyebrow—the kind romance heroes got from defending virtue or fighting wars or whatever knightly types did between plagues. Black leather that had seen better centuries. Hand on an actual sword.
But his eyes—oh my, his eyes. Blue like winter frost, like judgment day, like every purple prose description she’d ever mocked in her romance novel reviews. Currently narrowed at her with suspicion that could have peeled paint.
“I said,” he growled, stepping closer, and wow, they grew them tall wherever she was, “what are you doing here? Who sent you?”
Rachel’s brain, still processing the whole ‘I’m not in my apartment’ situation, struggled to understand him and then form words. “I’m—I’m lost?”
“Lost.” He said it like she’d claimed to be a unicorn. His gaze traveled from her mud-caked Docs to her soaked shirt, pausing at the text across her chest with visible confusion. “What manner of...” He gestured at her entire person. “What are you wearing? What do those symbols mean?”
“It’s about coffee,” she said weakly. “It’s a joke. About coffee and books.”
His expression suggested he found neither coffee nor books particularly amusing. “You’re a thief. Or a spy. Which is it?”
“I’m a food blogger!”
Silence. Even the rain seemed to pause for effect.
“A what?”
“I write about food. On the inter—I mean, I’m a cook. Sort of.”
Something shifted in his expression, dangerous in a whole new way. “Someone sent a cook. To mock me.”
“No one sent me! There was this cookbook and lightning and I woke up here—” She stopped. She sounded insane. She sounded like someone who believed in crystal healing and Mercury in retrograde.
He moved faster than someone that large should be able to, his hand closing around her upper arm. Firm but not painful. This close, she could smell him—leather and rain and, unexpectedly, something that made her think of kitchens. Cinnamon. Pepper. The ghost of good bread.
“You’ll come with me,” he said, already marching her toward the castle. “The others will want to see this.”
“Others?”
That’s when she noticed something in his other hand. Something small and rectangular.
“Is that—is that my phone?”
He held it up like evidence at a witch trial, which, considering the circumstances, might not have been far off. “This fell from your... garments. Some sort of talisman? It bears strange symbols and captured light before it died.”
“It’s not a talisman, it’s technology, it’s—” She stopped. How could he not know what an iPhone was?
“Sorcery, then.” He said it with the tired tone of someone who’d had a really long day and just discovered it was getting longer. “Of course. Because this damnable day wasn’t cursed enough.”
As he dragged her toward the castle, her dead phone clutched in his hand like evidence of witchcraft, Rachel had a single, crystal-clear thought.
She should have given Brad a second chance. Boring was suddenly looking pretty good.
CHAPTER 3
England—Greystone Castle—July 1475
The garden had always beenTristan’s sanctuary, even in its current state of wild abandon. He’d risen before dawn as was his custom, unable to shake the restlessness that had plagued him through another sleepless night. The summer air was thick with the promise of rain, heavy and sweet with the scent of roses that had long since forgotten their careful training. Wild lavender brushed against his boots as he walked the overgrown paths, releasing its sharp perfume into the morning mist.
Here at least, no one whispered of his disgrace. Here, the herbs didn’t care that he’d once been Sir Tristan de Valois, Knight of the Realm, favored of King Edward—before Guy’s treachery had stripped him of aught but his name and this crumbling pile of stone his ancestors had once called home.
