One Magic Moment Read Free Page A

making up, and Moonbeam and Valerie were both employed in very useful work of their own across the Pond.
    That left just Pippa . . .
    Tess pushed the door open, dropped her backpack, and was halfway across the hall before she realized that the sister coming toward her was not her younger sister, but her twin.
    “Tess,” Peaches said, breaking into a run suddenly and catching Tess by the arms, “what is it?”
    “I narrowly escaped . . . an assault . . . by Mr. Beagle,” Tess said, hoping that would be enough to justify how she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. “And when I talked to you this morning, you were in Seattle. So I thought Mrs. Tippets might have been talking about—well, never mind what I thought.”
    “I called you from your kitchen,” Peaches said with a faint frown. “I said as much.”
    Tess pushed away from her sister. “I wasn’t listening.”
    “Apparently.”
    “And I’m fine,” Tess said, trying to sound as if she hadn’t just had the wind knocked out of her.
    “I didn’t say you weren’t,” Peaches said, her frown deepening. “But now that you bring it up—”
    “I’m okay,” Tess repeated. “Really.”
    “Then where have you been for the last month when you led me to believe you were here at the castle?”
    “I was at Cambridge,” Tess said. “Doing, ah, research. Important, time-sensitive research.”
    Peaches’s frown turned into an expression of profound skepticism. “Tess—”
    “I just needed to get away for a few days,” Tess interrupted, pasting a bright smile on her face. “That’s all. So I went and passed many delightful hours in a musty old library.”
    “If you say so. I’ll go make you some green juice.”
    Tess thought she might have needed something a little stronger than one of her sister’s ultra-healthy concoctions, but she wasn’t going to argue. She retrieved her backpack from where she’d dropped it by the front door, then made it halfway across the great hall before she found herself standing in one place, unable to go any farther. That had happened to her regularly over the past year of owning the castle, so she didn’t suppose anyone would think it strange if she just stood there and gaped.
    Sedgwick was, she had to admit, spectacular. The hall wasn’t an enormous thing such as one might have found in a more substantial castle such as Artane, but its height made her feel small and fragile just the same. The tapestries that lined the walls and the enormous fireplaces were enough to convince her that she’d walked back in time hundreds of years.
    Only in her castle there were rugs on the floors, a fridge big enough to hold all her party platters, and a lovely Aga stove to warm her toes by in the kitchen. She didn’t want to think about the fact that while she had a glorious castle that had been lovingly restored decades ago thanks to a man with buckets of money and enormous amounts of time on his hands, her sister Pippa had a castle that wasn’t in such nice shape.
    Never mind that Pippa also had a knight with spurs on his heels to keep her safe in that castle and that the only thing running in her sister’s castle was men away from her husband’s very sharp sword. It was tempting to stand on the edge of that great hall and wonder if Pippa might be at that very moment standing on that very spot eight hundred years in the past—
    But she refrained because the thought was just too ridiculous to take seriously. People didn’t travel through time, sisters didn’t fall in love with men who were centuries older than they were, and England was not full of paranormal happenings she couldn’t explain.
    She studiously ignored the fact that she’d seen ghosts in her hall—particularly a red-haired, bekilted Scotsman who seemed to be most often found lingering near the little room near the gatehouse she used as a prop room for those who wanted to take the experience of walking around her castle to new and dangerous levels of