Roses in Moonlight

chapter 14





Derrick leaned his head back against the very lovely leather seat in the back of Cameron’s Mercedes sedan and wished he were back in bed. He wasn’t sure he was going to manage what he needed to do, but he knew if he went back to bed all he would manage would be to ingest more of Sunny’s brew that would knock him out for another day. Damn her anyway.

He glanced beside him to make sure his charge was still there. Perhaps charge wasn’t the right thing to call her. He had no idea, actually, what to term her. Captive, probably. He supposed any magistrate worth his wig would have called it an open-and-shut case of kidnapping. All the more reason to get to where they needed to go and get home before Samantha Drummond got the bright idea to flag down any bobbies.

He suppressed the urge to scratch the collar seam that was rubbing him raw. Emily had appeared earlier in the day with costumes he hadn’t asked for. Then again, considering he’d now been unconscious for a total of four days—against his will, as it happened—his family had had plenty of time to think about where he was going, prepare those who might still find the idea of time travel to be absolute rot, then plan for the worst. He was enormously grateful for all three.

He looked at Samantha. The servant’s costume had been a stroke of genius. How Emily had gotten her hair all the way up under that cap, he didn’t want to think about, mostly because he didn’t want to think about Samantha or her hair. At least the staff at the Ritz had only nodded knowingly at them as they’d left that afternoon, whispering things he could hear about days locked in their room practicing their roles. He had fallen into the Mercedes, trusted Rufus to get them where they needed to be, and hoped fervently that he wouldn’t lose consciousness at an inopportune moment.

At least he was dressed in rather substantial Elizabethan gear. People would think he was sweating from too much velvet and lace, not that he was so feverish he was on the verge of passing out. He clambered out of the car with Samantha, then looked around for a handy bench to sit down on for a bit. What he really wanted to do was to look back at the street, find Rufus waiting to ferry them elsewhere, and know that all he had left in front of himself was getting from where he was to the curb. Getting from where he currently stood to Elizabethan England seemed almost as doable as getting himself from London to the moon.

“Are you going to make it?”

He looked at Samantha and had to take a minute to get his eyes to focus on just one of her.

“Fine,” he said thickly.

“That wasn’t what I asked.”

“I’ll be fine.”

She looked doubtful. He felt doubtful, so in that, at least, they were in agreement.

Oliver appeared out of nowhere, startling him so badly, he almost fell over. Oliver put his hand on Derrick’s shoulder and steadied him.

“You look terrible, mate.”

“I’m fine.”

Oliver looked at Samantha. “Is he fine?”

“I think he needs to go to the hospital.”

“I’m fine,” Derrick said. Well, he supposed he had growled it, but there was only so much nursemaiding a man could stand. He looked at Oliver and, feeling rather pleased with himself, only saw one of him. “We need a distraction whilst we step into the gate.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

At least the fair was still in full swing. He could only hope that was the case on the other side of the gate as well. He walked with Oliver and Samantha to the appropriate spot, took her hand, then stepped into the circle of mushrooms. He supposed if he’d been thinking properly, he would have been relieved to find it still in the same place. He was obviously not at his best, but he would be damned if he would go back home and sit until he felt fully himself. He would make do.

He staggered a little at the smell, which told him he was definitely in the right place. Someone behind him—several someones, actually—gasped. He turned around and smiled as pleasantly as possible.

“Blinded by the glory of the sun?” he asked, pointing upward, “or mayhap the passing of Her Majesty’s barge?” He pointed toward the Thames and nodded knowingly.

A woman looked at him in alarm but started to nod to apparently keep up with his nodding, which he couldn’t keep up for very long at all. Fortunately some enterprising soul thought he’d seen something—Derrick sincerely hoped it wasn’t the queen herself—and had all sorts of people rushing over with him to have a look at that something. Samantha took him by the arm.

“This way,” she said. “Hurry.”

He didn’t have to hear that twice. It also crossed his mind that it was out of character for him to follow along so docilely, but he was, as he would have admitted almost freely, not at his best.

He supposed he should have waited to attempt the textile rescue until dark, giving himself a bit more time to get himself together, but he hadn’t felt as if he’d had any choice. The longer that lace languished where it wasn’t supposed to be, the more chance of it being found or ruined or stolen. And as long as he knew it existed in another time, he couldn’t simply leave it there. The truth was, the problem was of his making and honor demanded he be the one to see to the solving of it.

Besides, who else would he have sent? Oliver and Peter had no experience with traveling through time—if they even truly believed that such a thing was possible—and he couldn’t ask anyone else in his family to take his place. No, the responsibility was his. He regretted that he had to drag Samantha into it, but, again, he hadn’t had any choice. He was convinced, given the ease of their recent journey, that he never would have gotten through the gate without her.

The crowds were as they had been the time before, only this time he drew an entirely different kind of attention. Obviously clothes did make the man. Whether attention was better than anonymity, he couldn’t have said. There was nothing to be done about it. He would just have to get through as best he could and hope they weren’t robbed. He wasn’t sure he had the energy to fend off some twentysomething bent on mayhem.

Samantha led him along a path he knew he never would have managed on his own in his current condition. He followed her, trying to focus on his surroundings. If he’d only had one more night to rest and recover, he would have been fine—

Samantha stopped next to a building. Derrick heard a faint gardyloo but couldn’t even bring himself to look up and see if it might affect him. He wasn’t at all surprised to find it had. He looked down to see sewage dripping down his left arm, but he was past caring. All he wanted to do was sit down until the world stopped spinning so violently.

“It’s here,” Samantha breathed. “And my phone as well.”

He looked at her in surprise. “You’re kidding.”

“Completely broken, but it’s there.” She shoved the lace into her bag, then leaned over and collected the pieces of her phone.

“Is it all there?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “I think I have all we have time to get.”

He would have argued, but when he stepped forward to bend over and look at the ground, he saved himself from bashing his head against a wooden post only because Samantha was fortunately stronger than she looked. She pushed him back upright, then held on to his arm.

“You stink,” she said.

“Yes, I imagine—”

“Let’s go.”

He didn’t fight her, mostly because he couldn’t fight her. It was truly appalling how terrible he felt, but half the battle was won and there was no turning back.

“Hold on to me,” he said thickly.

“Are you going to fall?”

“No, I just don’t want . . .” He had to take a deep breath. “Don’t want to lose you back here. Hold on.”

She took hold of his arm, which he supposed earned them a few looks that he wasn’t paying attention to. He focused on the path in front of him, was grateful that the London of Elizabeth’s time was a very busy place, then plowed doggedly on. He attempted a supercilious look directed toward those who got in his way, but he was too ill to judge how that might have come off.

“We’re attracting a crowd,” Samantha said quickly. “Hey, stop that—”

Derrick looked at her and found that she was being assaulted by some hunched-over crone. He pulled her behind him and looked down at what he realized was not a granny but a man, wizened, cackling. He would have made a fine witch for the Scottish play. Derrick suppressed the urge to share that opinion and turned to push Samantha on ahead of him.

They hadn’t made it twenty steps before he found himself mobbed. It took him a moment or two to realize that they weren’t calling the city guards to come arrest him for traveling through time without permission, they were acting like fans. He frowned, then attempted to make sense of what they were shouting at him.

“Richard Drummond!”

He was not at his best, admittedly, but he was almost certain he was being mistaken for one of the greatest Shakespearean actors of that generation. He couldn’t even find the words to deny the moniker, not that it apparently would have made any difference to his misguided groupies.

He tried to keep Samantha next to him, but she kept being pulled away. He finally grabbed hold of her and laced his fingers with hers. He supposed it wouldn’t serve him to be rude, so he nodded and smiled and worked his way back to where they needed to go. And then, when he thought he could manage it, he made his move.

“The queen!” he bellowed. “Over there!”

The crowd turned to look and he pulled Samantha into the ring of mushrooms with him. He was more relieved than he wanted to admit to find himself not facing a crowd of adoring fans but a very wide-eyed Oliver Phillips. It was all he could do to keep himself from pitching over into Oliver’s arms. Actually given that Oliver’s hands were quite suddenly on his shoulders—rather painfully on the right—he wasn’t entirely sure he hadn’t already done some pitching.

“Let’s go,” he said, feeling increasingly dizzy. He had the feeling that weakness hadn’t come from his little journey through time. “Hurry.”

“Car’s on the way. Miss Drummond, if you could possibly—”

“Of course.”

Derrick felt Samantha put her arm around his waist. Oliver took his other side, his right side, and that almost sent him into oblivion from the pain.

“Sorry,” he managed. “Don’t mean to bleed on you.”

“I think you should stop wasting energy talking,” Samantha suggested.

He agreed, but he didn’t have the energy to say so.

He knew he had at some point gotten into a car—hopefully one belonging to Cameron—then out of that car—hopefully stopping somewhere he would want to stop. He had a vague thought pass through what was left of his wee small brain that it would be a shame to bleed all over the reception area of the Ritz, but that was driven out by Oliver’s loud disgust over the ridiculous lengths method actors were willing to go to. Samantha’s agreement was, he thought, perhaps a bit too enthusiastic to be considered polite, especially since it was his method acting they were disparaging, but it was getting him through the hotel lobby unquestioned, so he wasn’t going to argue.

He had no idea how they got him upstairs and down the hallway to their suite. Samantha opened the door and helped Oliver get him inside.

“A little help, my laird,” Oliver said, his voice fading into the ether.

So Cameron was there. Derrick wasn’t all that surprised. His cousin was always concerned about the state of his vassals.

“Was he wounded again?” came the voice from very far away.

“No,” Samantha said, sounding as if she were across town. “I think he probably should have stayed in bed another day or two.”

“Stubborn fool.”

Well, that was offensive, but Derrick couldn’t latch on to the words to say as much. In fact, he was having trouble holding on to anything. He did manage to look at the floor, but that was probably only because his head was too heavy to hold up any longer.

His last conscious thought was that, considering the velocity with which he was going to encounter it, that carpet, lovely as it was, was going to leave a mark on his face.

He suspected he would be too unconscious to care.

• • •

He woke to the sun streaming in through the window, which meant it had to be late afternoon. Again. He was starving, which he supposed meant that perhaps more than just a couple of hours had passed. He lay perfectly still, taking inventory of his body to see how it might betray him currently.

To his surprise, he felt almost human. Good was stretching things, but functional was not. He turned his head to find Samantha Drummond sitting in her usual spot in the chair pulled up reasonably close to the bed, her legs hung over the side, her fingers poking around on his computer.

“I’m going to have to change that password.”

She didn’t look at him. “As well as delete a few things.”

He frowned. “What few things?”

“Half a dozen romance novels, an equal number of mysteries, and a very interesting book on medieval healing practices.” She looked at him then. “You might want to hang on to that last one.”

He supposed he might. “Have you been using my credit card?” he asked sternly.

“Everyone thought I should. Was I wrong not to put my foot down and refuse?”

He studied her for a moment or two. “You’re different.”

“Using a strange man’s credit card while he’s unconscious and drooling will do that for a girl.”

“I never drool.”

“I don’t imagine you know what you’ve been doing,” she said, sounding far more smug than she should have.

He shifted uncomfortably but a thrill of fever didn’t go through him. Progress had been made, thankfully, but perhaps not quite as much as he would have hoped for. He started to move, but Samantha set his computer down on the table and jumped up.

“Here, let me help you.”

He wasn’t used to being the one in the bed, as it were, and it took all his reserves of politeness not to growl at her when she put a few pillows behind his head and helped him sit up just the slightest bit.

“Thank you,” he said briskly.

“Bet that was hard.”

He managed not to glare at her, but that was only because his discomfort at needing help was tempered by a quite proper sense of gratitude.

“I’m not at my best,” he allowed. “I apologize.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m about ten minutes away from chucking the remote at you and telling you to get your own damned soup.”

He blinked, then smiled. “That sounds like something Sunny would say.”

“It was something Sunny said,” she said. “Apropos, don’t you think?”

“Very.” He didn’t dare move his head too much, so he continued to look at her. “Have you checked the lace?”

“Yes. Would you like to do the same?”

He held out his hand and had a snort as his reward.

“Not on your life,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. “Lord Robert brought gloves, if you think you can get one on. And then, and only then, will you touch this lace.”

“You historians are bossy.”

She pursed her lips but said nothing in reply to that.

He accepted a glove, fumbled with it, then had help in becoming properly attired for the examination of priceless artifacts. He looked the lace over, then shook his head as he handed it back to her.

“Why he doesn’t keep it in a vault, I don’t know.”

“Because then he can’t walk past it every day and look at something someone was wearing four hundred years ago,” she said. “I don’t blame him at all.”

He slid her a look. “The historian speaks.”

“Temporarily,” she agreed.

“How’s the Victorian piece?”

“Not fabulous,” she said. “You can have a look at it and form your own opinion.”

He took it, then couldn’t help but watch how she handled the lace. He had to admit he wasn’t at all surprised at the care she took. Obviously she had been very well trained, but there was something in the way she folded it that spoke of more than simple training. Whatever else Samantha Drummond was, she was a lover of old things.

He completely understood.

“Well?” she asked, looking at him.

He glanced at the embroidery, then shook his head—gingerly. “I wouldn’t waste my time with it.”

“Not worth enough money?”

“No, actually, it isn’t. What do you think?”

“My mother wouldn’t bother, either,” she said with a faint smile. “I was just testing your snob meter.”

He started to deny that he had one, then decided there was no point. He was extremely choosey about what deals he agreed to broker, but it was never the amount of money involved. Well, almost never. He looked at her.

“What do you think?”

“Your meter is performing beautifully,” she said. “I guess the drooling hasn’t damaged it.”

“Are you trying to humiliate me?” he asked crossly.

She smiled. “Nah, just a little payback. Lord Robert said you would enjoy it, so, again, since he’s an earl and I’m just a peasant, I thought I should take his advice.”

“Did he have any other astute suggestions?” Derrick asked politely.

“He said to throw the remote at you, not hand it over, and to use your credit card a lot. I don’t think I can throw the remote at you.”

“But you’ve used my credit card quite a bit, is that it?”

“Again, it’s the earl/peasant thing. I didn’t dare argue.” She smiled briefly. “And I’m not serious. I’ll pay you back for the ebooks.”

“Of course you won’t.”

“And the other cashmere sweater.”

“Not that, either.”

“And the dress. It was unfortunately quite expensive, but I couldn’t get Emily to take it back.”

He knew he should have pulled up his bank account and shown her just how little a dent she possibly could have made in it, but he wasn’t sure he had the strength. The best he could do was shake his head.

“I’ll make payments,” he lied. “If you did want to do something in return, you could order lunch.”

“If you like.”

“And stay and watch a movie with me.”

She looked more shocked than he would have expected her to. It wasn’t as if it was a date. He’d been drooling in front of her for heaven only knew how long. He wasn’t sure he could date a woman who had seen him in that condition.

“What sort of movie?”

“Anything, and I mean anything, that doesn’t involve period costumes.”

She smiled. “I’ll see what I can find.” She handed him his tablet, then rose and walked toward his door. “Any preference for an early dinner?”

“Anything that doesn’t involve broth.”

She smiled, then left him to himself.

He managed to get himself in a sitting position, then swung his feet to the floor. Getting to the loo and back to bed wasn’t nearly as taxing as he’d feared it might be. No puking, no fainting, no needing to call for aid with his trousers in an embarrassing location. He sat down on the edge of the bed and looked at the lace sitting there, tucked safely in its plastic covering and topped by that truly worthless piece of Victorian embroidery, and shook his head. So much trouble for something a noblewoman of the sixteenth century wouldn’t have thought twice about losing.

But Samantha understood Lord Epworth perfectly. The man had scores of treasures, but that piece of lace was something special to him. He never would have hidden it away in a vault.

Derrick wondered how Samantha Drummond could possibly have known that. Perhaps she was more attuned to the historically minded collector than she let on.

• • •

Two hours later, he was pretending to watch a modern-day romance starring two of the most vapid actors he’d ever been forced to observe whilst actually thinking about a few things that puzzled him.

First was a question about why Samantha Drummond wanted to turn her back on everything she’d worked for to that point. He wasn’t unaccustomed to taking on different personae when it suited his purposes, so he could understand it on a certain level. After all, he’d abandoned Scotland in his teens to embrace a career that his parents most definitely hadn’t approved of. That hadn’t worked out very well for him, but since that was something he never thought on when he could help it, he let that recollection slide right by.

Perhaps she hadn’t had a choice about her profession, though that gave him pause as well. Had her parents looked at their own vocations, flipped a coin, then whomever had won had chosen Samantha’s life’s work for her? If that was the case, he certainly couldn’t blame her for wanting to leave it all behind right along with her parents. It was a pity, though. She was, from what little he’d seen, good at what she did.

The second was how in the world a woman reached the age of twenty-six without having told her parents it was time she left the nest. He couldn’t say he’d exchanged many words with Gavin past curses, so he didn’t even have a conversation there to aid him in solving the mystery. Perhaps as the last child she’d felt responsible for their happiness. Perhaps she was a spineless waif of a thing who couldn’t bring herself to tell him to go to hell, much less her parents.

Or perhaps she was simply too kind for her own good.

He looked at her sitting in her accustomed spot—in the chair, not next to him on the bed, as it happened—somehow not surprised to find she was blinking rapidly.

“You,” he said distinctly, “are a theatrical pushover.”

She laughed a little. “I know it was garbage, but it was a romance. How can you not like a little romance?”

“Because it’s rotten stuff. Sickly sweet. Bad for the teeth and tum.”

“Cynic.”

“Probably.”

She looked at him then. “But you’re willing to go to great lengths for things not created in the twentieth century. How is that not romantic?”

He waved her on to the telly before he had to answer, though he smiled a little as he did so, because there was just something about the woman that inspired it. Which led him to the last thing that made him want to scratch his head.

She could have made tracks for more interesting locales at any moment, yet she’d chosen to stay and nursemaid him. Guilt over having left lace where it didn’t belong? A nefarious desire to watch him at his worst?

Or from the goodness of her heart?

“How about a spy flick now?” she asked cheerfully.

“I won’t last through it,” he warned.

“Are you too tired, or would it be too boring?” she asked. “You, with all your supersecret gear and getaway cars.”

“Too boring,” he agreed. “Been there, done that.”

“Nod off then, Sherlock, and let me watch another chick flick.”

He didn’t think he was going to have any choice but to oblige her, though he definitely was going to have to solve at least a couple Samantha Drummond mysteries before he let her go back into the wide world to do her art. There were also a few details about the lace to wrap up, but he would see to those in the morning. At the moment, all he wanted to do was close his eyes and ignore what he was sure was going to be a three-hankie tale of love lost and won back.

That would also help him ignore the woman who was obviously going to enjoy it thoroughly.

Mystery that she was.