Chapter 3
Three
Harriet stood in the kitchen of her parent’s charming English cottage and stared at the small collection of items spread out on the counter.
They were, as it happened, the entirety of her earthly possessions at the moment.
The only reason they were still within reach was because they’d been safely stowed in the backpack she’d been clutching like a life preserver from the moment she’d landed in London several hours earlier.
She was beginning to suspect that she had issues with luggage in general, but perhaps that could be investigated after she’d come to terms with the current disaster.
The good news was that she had three pairs of emergency panties, two dispensers of dental floss, and one wallet with the cash her father had conveniently converted into pounds for her.
The notebook and fancy pen Mac had given her were still in pristine condition, though the scrunchie she’d found languishing in the bottom of her backpack had definitely seen better days.
The bad news was that she hadn’t hallucinated taking everything else out of said backpack and shoving it into her suitcase to lighten her load.
Along with her outrageously soft puppy-patterned pajamas, her suitcase now contained her laptop with its charger, the push-up bra Mac had insisted she buy last year on the off chance the opportunity to attend a swanky soirée arose, and her very worn notebook containing her master list of Perils to Avoid in Bucolic English Villages.
That might not have mattered so much if her suitcase had been sitting on the floor next to her, but it wasn’t. Sadly, her luggage had once again gotten away from her, this time in the unwitting possession of one of her father’s grad students who’d been kind enough to pick her up at the airport.
Mitch had obviously failed her father’s Talk to Females with Confidence masterclass because he’d greeted her with a slobbering kiss on the back of her hand, straightened, then squeaked in fear.
She wasn’t sure if she had inspired that terror or if she had a couple of feisty guardian angels who were determined to see that she never dated.
She was absolutely certain the hint of plaid fabric she’d seen in the back seat where she’d refused to be stuffed had come directly from her sleep-deprived imagination.
The subsequent journey was a complete blur.
The only thing she remembered with any clarity was sitting on the wrong side of the car driving down the wrong side of the road, jamming on non-existent brakes every time they came too close to other cars, hedges, or sharp curbs where curbs should not have existed.
She thought she might have uttered a few salty words, but maybe it was best to put that behind her and move on.
What she knew for sure was that Mitch had dropped her at her parents’ cottage and she knew that because that was where she currently found herself.
She remembered that he’d made certain her key worked, then hit the proverbial trail without so much as a cheers, mate tossed her way.
Her suitcase had gone off with him where it would be doomed to wander the Scottish Highlands on his vacation for the next three weeks.
She imagined he would discover the freeloader in the trunk only after it was too late to do anything about it.
Jetlag was, as she fully planned to tell her parents while they were in the throes of it, terrible. Then again, her mother would likely have come prepared with sort of herbal mixture to ease the transition and her father would have taken a sleeping pill. They would probably be fresh as daisies.
She patted her cheeks in an attempt to wake herself up, then mentally pulled herself up by her bootstraps. Clothes could be purchased and a new list started. It could have been much worse.
She turned to survey the living room and felt a little thrill rush through her at the sight of her parents’ black trunks they’d had sent ahead sitting next to the fireplace.
With any luck, she would find at least a cocktail dress she could borrow and perhaps even the promised posy socks.
Anything else including a brush was probably asking too much.
She dug a pair of bobby pins out of the emergency stash inside her backpack, then went to face the next challenge.
The suitcases were identical, so she closed her eyes, muttered a little nursery rhyme that she lost track of somewhere along the way, then decided she would start with the one closest to her.
She ignored the possible cosmic ramifications of choosing something on the left versus the right, checked the tags to make sure she wasn’t about to nose through someone else’s stuff, then set to the quotidian task of breaking into her parents’ luggage.
It took her longer than it should have, but she felt the lock give way eventually. She opened the trunk where it stood and a large collection of clothing spilled out.
Medieval clothing.
She stumbled backward in horror, grasping frantically for something to hold onto, but the only thing she succeeded in doing was tripping over the coffee table behind her, knocking a stack of magazines to the floor, then landing in an undignified sprawl on the couch.
She pushed herself back upright then paused, momentarily distracted by the softness of that particular piece of furniture.
If she reached out and gave a pair of throw pillows a friendly pat, then bounced a time or two on the seat cushions to assess the potential for a decent nap, who was to know?
She stopped just short of stretching out to take the whole thing for a brief test run, which she thought showed a remarkable amount of restraint on her part.
She crawled to her feet, stepped over the coffee table, then looked down at what the trunk had just vomited out onto the floor.
Apparently some sort of cosmic force had decided that since she was in the wilds of England where those sorts of get-ups might be readily seen, the time had come for her to face the memory of The Day That Could Not Be Forgotten.
To be fair, it hadn’t been an entire day. It had been seven excruciating minutes that had been seared into the very matter of her brain, never to be expunged. She sat down gingerly on the coffee table and allowed herself to be mentally transported back to the summer of her seventeenth year.
There she’d been, innocently walking down the hallway to her childhood bedroom, fully intending to use an unexpected afternoon off from her job at the local mom and pop soda shop to pack up a few mementos and lighten her load for her upcoming college move.
Her parents’ bedroom door had been open, but there hadn’t been any noises coming from inside that might have indicated that they were home and perhaps comparing notes about begonias.
What had suddenly come from their room instead had been a shout that had rung through the house with the dulcet tones of an entire orchestral brass section.
“Point me to the dragons, fair lady, and I shall slay them!”
She’d skidded to a halt on the throw-rug-sized piece of avocado green shag carpet that her mother refused to get rid of and almost knocked herself out on her parents’ doorway. She’d clung to the doorframe and gaped at her parents who were likewise frozen in place.
Her mother had been wearing a heavily embroidered velvet gown, little curly toed shoes, and an enormous cone-shaped hat from which had flowed a diaphanous bit of veil that she’d been holding quite flirtatiously over her mouth.
The outfit had been completed with a long, possibly era-appropriate fan that she was with equal coyness in the middle of using to tap her companion on the shoulder.
Harriet thought she might have made an inarticulate sound of horror, but she was still a bit fuzzy on that. What she did remember with unfortunate clarity was turning her attention to her father without any desire at all to discover what he’d been wearing lest the sight cause her to pass out.
He had been clothed, perhaps fortunately but definitely unsurprisingly, in full knightly gear. Chainmail, gauntlets, fancy coverings over that chainmail, baggy tights, and boots. He’d also been holding aloft a sword. Not a fake plastic one, nor a foam one, but a shiny silver one.
A hush had fallen, as it likely did upon all tableaux where one of the parties—namely her—was facing the truth that the other party—her supposedly very normal parents—had taken complete leave of their senses and had become involved in the unthinkable.
Cosplay.
She hadn’t been opposed to it a general sense.
She’d been involved in her fair share of theater growing up and she’d done a brisk bit of business hiring out as a birthday clown on weekends during high school.
Her decent repertoire of magic tricks had come in handy on those afternoons and she’d fully intended to parlay the same into regular paying gigs while away at college.
That had been one thing.
Watching her mother flirt with her father while they were both dressed as medieval people had been quite another. A little adorable, true, but otherwise completely cringe-worthy.
Harriet dragged herself back to the present moment and realized she was listing quite seriously to the left while lost in those unsettling thoughts.
She shook off the memory, stacked travel magazines back onto the coffee table, then packed clothing back into the trunk as quickly as she’d hustled away from her parents’ door eleven years earlier.
She shut up the trunk and renewed her vow to never, ever speak of anything to do with that day again. Her parents had never mentioned it and she’d never caught them dressing up again, so—
She realized she’d somehow become frozen in place yet again as her thoughts ground to an uncomfortable halt. Her mother’s flower show and her father’s scheduled pub chats with historians weren’t cover stories for attending, say, a medieval re-enactment faire … were they?