Read Online One Magic Moment by Lynn Kurland - Free Book Online

almost two hours to get into the city, which he supposed was better than it would have been if he’d been using just his feet. He pulled into the car park of the studio, leaned his head back against the seat and let out his breath slowly.
    Truly, he loathed London.
    If he hadn’t had business there that he enjoyed, he never would have ventured into its innards again. There were too many people, too much noise, too much confusion. He hadn’t particularly enjoyed it as a lad, either, though he was the first to admit things had changed a bit over the years. His dislike of the place, however, had remained steady.
    It was comforting somehow that some things didn’t change.
    He pushed himself out of his car and went to fetch his guitar out of the boot. He reached in and started to shove aside the mail he’d tossed atop the case that morning, then sighed and reached for it. No sense in not at least seeing what sort of rubbish his new shop was entitling him to.
    He tossed aside the junk mailings, then froze with a thin letter in his hands.
    His suddenly unsteady hands, as it happened.
    He recognized the handwriting, though he’d only seen it a few times. There was no return address, but that didn’t surprise him. There was only one way to get hold of the writer of the letter and that wasn’t through the Royal Mail.
    He blew out his breath, then opened the letter, steeling himself for all sorts of things he wouldn’t care to read. The scrawl there was as illegible as it always had been.
    John,
     
     
    Thought you’d be interested in this bloke Ian MacLeod’s contact info. He’s Cameron’s cousin by marriage and specializes in swords and that sort of rot.
     
    Cheers,
Oliver
     
    John leaned—gingerly, of course—against the fender of his car. Well, he might have sat down, but since he’d done it so carefully, perhaps no one would notice how unsteady beneath him his knees had suddenly become.
    Something untoward was at work in his life.
    If he’d been a more superstitious sort of lad, he might have thought Fate was stalking him. First a woman who had spent her academic life wallowing in the Middle Ages, then an unexpected note from a man he hadn’t talked to in months. He wasn’t sure he wanted to think about why he’d become acquainted with Oliver, but perhaps there was no harm in it now there was no danger of his falling upon his arse from undue stress over the memory.
    He had, a year or so into his current life, found himself a bit more strapped financially than he had supposed he might be, which had necessitated the relinquishing of a bit of his inheritance. He’d heard tell of a group, Cameron Antiquities, that specialized in very discreet purchases and sales of, ah, antiquities. Since that was what he’d had to sell, he’d made contact, then eventually made a friend of sorts of Oliver who had been the go-between between him and Robert Cameron. He’d preferred to keep his anonymity for his own reasons—and Cameron had been a Scot, which had been yet another reason to keep his distance—so he’d simply dealt with Oliver as the occasion arose.
    Oliver had never asked him where he’d come by his apparently never-ending stash of medieval gold coins and he hadn’t volunteered the information. He’d simply wanted his assets converted into modern sterling as quickly and discreetly as possible, and Oliver had obliged.
    Obviously, Oliver had been thinking a bit more diligently about why John had come by his inheritance than John had feared he might.
    Ordinarily, John would have done as he always did when dealing with nosy souls; he would have immediately severed all contact with Oliver and left him to his ruminations. But something stopped him. It wasn’t that he still had a decent amount of medieval gold stashed in a safe-deposit box in Zurich, or that he’d had a nagging suspicion that at some point in the future, he might actually want to have a brief chat with Robert Cameron over a pint.
    He supposed it