Chapter 13
Thirteen
Harriet paused at the edge of the village green and, not for the first time since her arrival in Shakespeare’s perilous back yard, questioned her sanity.
She was fairly sure that sneaking around in the dark wasn’t unthinkable for a medieval girl, no matter what Samuel de Piaget had to say about it.
While history was full of women who had done the very sensible thing and stayed safely by the fire, she imagined there had been more than a few gals who’d put on boys’ clothes, picked up a sword, and gone off to take care of business themselves.
At the moment, however, she sorely regretted not having said yes to her eldest brother’s offer of fencing lessons.
She also wished she’d taken Mac up her numerous requests to go with her and practice using fake stage swords.
Then again, her cousin would have been the sort of medieval gal who poached her brother’s clothes and his sword and rushed off into the sunset to make trouble, so perhaps her input wouldn’t have been all that useful.
It was definitely all academic at present. What she knew for certain was that her quarry had turned down an alleyway between two buildings, and she’d just watched two other men take the same route.
She really didn’t want to follow them. Her stomach concurred enthusiastically and her heart joined in that rush of something that could have been panic but was more likely her good sense shouting at her to stay out of things that were none of her business.
Sam was more than capable of taking care of himself without her help.
He was tall, buff, and could perhaps in a pinch even distract a thug with his dazzling smile.
Then again he might not have noticed his new friends following him. To spare him a mussing of his golden locks if things went truly south, the least she could do was keep everyone under surveillance and call out a warning if necessary. Surely that was nothing more than her chivalric duty.
She paused to reconsider that. Actually, her desire to take up her father’s sword and march into the fray had less to do with chivalry and much more to do with the way Samuel de Piaget had put his hands on her shoulders, kissed her forehead, and pulled her into the shelter of his embrace, perhaps not quite in that order.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have a wonderful life.
She had great parents, loving if not slightly stifling siblings, and a wide and varied array of jobs on her resumé that had supplied her with a deep well of experiences to draw on for her life’s work she hadn’t quite hit upon yet.
She’d also had a respectable number of encounters with the opposite sex, enough to know what it felt like to enjoy the attentions of a decent guy.
But never in all her twenty-eight years full of admittedly lovely things had she ever stepped into the arms of a man and had her heart sigh, as if it had been waiting all those years for just that moment with just that man.
The sweetness of such a simple thing had almost finished her.
Which was exactly why she couldn’t let that same man go off into the dark on his own, not when she could be of some use to him.
She’d been utterly unsurprised that Sam had slipped out the front door of the inn, looking as though he might be checking on things he likely shouldn’t have.
She’d seen him, of course, because she’d been tailing him like a pro.
She was beginning to think she’d been born to be a spy.
She was also starting to think Sam needed a keeper, what with the way he blithely trotted past things without noticing them.
Perhaps he’d never had to keep that infamous weather eye out, or, more likely, he’d grown up in a very nice neighborhood where he hadn’t had to worry about even dings on his car.
He did seem to realize that he wasn’t alone, but why he thought continuing down the alleyway was a good idea, she didn’t know.
She followed the entire crew, of course, because what else was she going to do?
She kept her new cell phone in her hand, her hand in her pocket, and her eyes peeled for new threats.
She watched Sam and his cabooses exit the far end of that very tight passageway and keep going past where she could see them, though she could definitely hear words being exchanged.
She ran down the alley, fueled by both a righteous anger and an intense desire to see him not be mugged, then came to a skidding halt as she too exited what turned out to be a too-short tunnel to a little grassy space next to the church.
She half expected to see one of Theo’s villains come striding out of the shadows, swathed in a robe and bearing a chalice full of poison.
She absolutely did not expect to see Old Blue Eyes himself standing there under the light of a charming street lamp, resting a sheathed sword against his shoulder.
His sword wasn’t the fencing sort that her brother used, nor was it the foam kind she’d seen LARPers in the park sparring with.
Maybe it was one of the dull-edged metal ones Mac had told her they used on stage.
It might leave a mark, but at least Sam wouldn’t die.
She listened to Sam and her former London sidewalk companion talking to each other in French—and not the polite sort of French she imagined the staff spoke at the Louvre.
She was absolutely going to have to pin Sam in a corner and write down all those words he was using.
Then again, if she’d been facing off with a guy who looked as though he could have starred in any action movie about men one wouldn’t want to mess with, she would have been snarling out a few less-than-high-brow curses as well, immediately before she turned and ran away.
She felt her stomach lurch when the dark-haired man drew his sword and threw away the scabbard as casually as if he’d done it once or twice before, then pointed that sword directly at Sam.
She stumbled forward only to run directly into the back of someone who had basically materialized from the shadows and put himself in front of her.
She realized abruptly that she’d forgotten all about Thug Number Two, then identified the new menace as none other than the blond guy who’d argued with Sam’s stalker in front of The Squealing Piglet.
He was still wearing his black leather jacket and still giving off that mess-with-me-at-your-peril vibe.
He also had another sword.
“Samuel.”
Harriet watched Sam turn, catch the sword that was tossed at him, then fling aside the scabbard and raise that blade in time to keep her note-stepper-on-er from chopping his head in two like a ripe melon.
She was going to have to stop reading TD Piaget’s books.
She was starting to use his descriptions in her everyday life and that was alarming—especially since he wrote about medieval knights engaging in life-or-death battles while she had plans to chronicle the adventures of chubby tabbies whose bad deeds were limited to squashing houseplants and knocking fine china cups to the floor.
She felt as if she’d stepped either onto a first-rate medieval movie set or into a terrible nightmare.
Sam’s enemy, if that’s what he could have been properly termed, was terrifying.
She wouldn’t have lasted two seconds against him, but Sam was apparently made of sterner stuff because he didn’t back down.
It occurred to her as their fight wore on that perhaps that gorgeous guy with lovely eyes and the good-citizen impulse to pick up trash might be less interested in killing Sam than he was in just roughing him up a bit.
Somehow that didn’t improve things in her opinion.
She was tempted to tell him he’d done enough, but before she could get the words out, her fair-haired companion had said something, also in French, that had Sam turning and cursing him.
It was at that moment that Sam apparently realized she was standing twenty feet away from him.
He slipped.
She would have pointed out to him that he was making a bad habit of that sort of thing, but she was too busy rushing out to try to save him—
Only to run directly into the arm of the man who had tossed Sam his sword. He turned and smiled at her.
“Excuse me, miss.”
She took a step back in spite of herself. “Who are you?”
He smiled again and gestured to a place behind her. “There’s a lovely bench right there by the church wall. Why don’t we sit for a minute and let the lads be about their sport by themselves? I’ll introduce myself properly when we’re out of harm’s way.”
Harriet wasn’t sure going off to sit on a bench next to that guy was going to be any safer than staying where she was, but what did she know?
She was in the wilds of England, in the dark, listening to the renewed ring of swords and more swearing in a version of French she hadn’t a clue how to translate.
She wrapped her arms around herself, then realized abruptly that she’d begun to do that with alarming regularity.
Then again, she was chilled, and that had nothing to do with time of night.
She looked up at the extremely handsome if not completely terrifying man standing in front of her. “Why should I trust you?”
The man held out his hand. “I’m a business associate of Zachary Smith’s,” he said. “Oliver Phillips.”
She shook his hand out of habit. “Harriet Brewster,” she said, then she felt her eyes narrow. She pulled her hand away. “Business associate? That sounds nefarious.”
He took off his jacket, then paused. “May I?”
“Is it a straitjacket?”
He smiled deeply, put his coat around her shoulders, then gestured toward the bench. “Shall we?”