Slightly Sinful (21 page)

When he did finally fall asleep, his rest was disturbed by confused dreams that seemed vivid until he tried to recall them upon awakening. There were the familiar ones about the letter and the woman waiting for him at the Namur Gates. But now there was another one too. All he could remember of it during his waking spells, though, was a fountain shooting water thirty feet or more into the air from its marble basin in the midst of a circular flower garden. The water caught the sunlight, which turned the droplets into a sparkling rainbow. Try as he would, he could not place the fountain and garden into any wider setting. At first he thought that perhaps it was the front of Chesbury that he was remembering, but then he recalled that there was only a long parterre garden there.

But if it was a remembered scene, he supposed that coming into the country might have provoked it.

What a stupid and pointless dream it had been, he thought as he made his way out to the stables, using his cane though he tried not to lean too heavily on it. But then so were the other dreams, or fragments of memory or whatever the devil they were.

He was early, but he wanted to look over the horses before Rachel came and pick out suitable mounts for them both. More important, he wanted to discover if it was going to be possible to get himself onto a horse's back. His left leg was still not fully back to normal. Reluctantly he had asked Sergeant Strickland to come out here to join him.

There was only one groom up, and he was doing nothing more energetic than standing in the doorway of one of the stalls, staring vacantly off into the distance and scratching himself when Alleyne and the sergeant stepped into the cobbled stable yard. He looked at them and yawned before ducking out of sight within the stall.

"There is the same sort of look about the stables as there is about the kitchen," the sergeant said. "It is like there is no one to crack the whip, sir."

It certainly seemed that no one had been cracking any whip in the vicinity of the stables for some time, Alleyne agreed. It looked to him as he explored that the horses had been kept fed and watered, though none of them was looking particularly well groomed except for one sleek black stallion that he discovered later belonged to Chesbury's steward, Mr. Drummond. And the stalls looked and smelled as if they had not been properly cleaned out for several days at the least.

"Have these two horses saddled and brought out into the yard," he instructed the groom, who had ambled into sight as soon as it became obvious to him that they were not about to leave him alone to his reveries and his scratching. "This one with a sidesaddle."

"And have the stalls properly mucked out and covered with fresh straw by the time they come back," Strickland added.

"I takes my orders from Mr. Renny," the boy said cheekily.

Alleyne's valet was suddenly transformed into the army sergeant he had once been before the boy's surprised eyes.

"Do you, lad?" he said. "And if Mr. Renny is still asleep on account of he was working so hard yesterday, you will take your orders from whoever will set you to doing your proper work what earns your wages from the baron here. Stop worrying your flea bites now and stand to attention."

Amazingly, the boy did, just like a private soldier under the critical eye of his sergeant.

"Look lively now, lad," Strickland said amiably, "and find them saddles."

Alleyne chuckled, though he sobered almost instantly. It must be Weston's whip that had stopped cracking, he thought. The man's illness had caused a slacking off in the stables and apparently in the kitchen too. He could well believe it, judging by the quality of the dinner last evening-a meal that Weston had merely pecked at, he had noticed. It was doubtful he had always run a sloppy estate. There was no air of long neglect about the place.

Mounting the horse five minutes later proved every bit as difficult as he had anticipated. After a few abortive attempts and a refusal to allow the sergeant to hoist him up, he solved the problem by mounting awkwardly from the right side of the horse and therefore having to do little more with his left leg than swing it over the horse's back. Fortunately, once he was mounted, the leg felt almost comfortable.

"Do you realize, Strickland," he asked as he gathered the reins into his hands, "that this must have been the very last thing I was doing before I fell off in the Forest of Soignés and knocked my wits and my memory clear out of my head?"

"But it is clear to see that you was born in the saddle, sir," Strickland said, standing back as the horse, which doubtless had not been ridden for a while, pranced and sidled and snorted skittishly.

Alleyne had not even really noticed that the animal was not standing still and docile. It was true, he thought, cheered immensely. He had responded to the horse and controlled it without conscious thought, as if he had reached deep into long familiar skills acquired during his other life.

"Wait here," he said. "I'll just take a turn outside the yard."

It felt so astonishingly good to be on horseback that he knew riding was something he had been doing all his life. He took the horse out behind the stables and cantered across a wide lawn there, trying to picture himself riding with other people, racing with them, jumping fences and hedges with them, hunting with them. He tried to picture himself riding into battle-at the head of a cavalry charge or directing an infantry advance. He tried to recapture those final moments in the forest, when his leg would have been hurting like a thousand devils, when he would have been worried both about the letter and about the woman waiting for him at the Namur Gates. He tried to picture what it was that had caused him to fall off and bang his head hard enough to dislodge everything that was inside it.

But all he had succeeded in doing, he thought as he made his way back to the stables, was give himself a faint headache.

Rachel was there, talking with Sergeant Strickland and eyeing the other horse with obvious apprehension. She was wearing a serviceable blue carriage dress and a hat that was tipped pertly forward over her swept-up golden hair. She was standing in a patch of sunlight, and without the hat she would again have looked like his golden angel.

He felt a twinge of discomfort. Yesterday had not proceeded quite as he had visualized it. He had a nasty suspicion that Weston was not the cold monster Rachel had described and that she was not as indifferent to him as she pretended to be-or as perhaps she really thought she was.

"Good morning." He doffed his hat and nodded to her.

"Good morning," she said. But as he rode closer and his horse loomed over her, he could see her eyes widen and her face turn pale. "Oh, no, I could not. I really could not. It is no good. If I had learned as a child, I might have been a tolerably accomplished horsewoman by now. But I cannot start learning at the age of twenty-two. Anyway, it is time you got down from there before you hurt your leg again."

Incredible as it seemed to him that she could have lived her whole life without riding, he realized that he could not simply expect her to hop up into the sidesaddle on the other horse and ride off into the sunrise. She might not even get up onto that horse alone today. But she would ride. By Jove she would.

He discovered a stubborn streak in himself.

"You need to see life from the perspective of a horse's back," he said. "And then you will feel such exhilaration that you will know there is nothing to compare with it."

"I believe you without feeling the need to prove it," she said. "Now I am going back to the house."

He sidled his mount to block her way.

"Not until you have proved to me that you are no coward," he said. "You will ride up with me first. You will be quite safe. Despite what I did to myself in Belgium, I will not let you fall. I promise."

"Ride up with you?" She tipped back her head and their eyes met and held.

Ah, yes, he could see her point though she had not put it into words. Holding her hands against his chest last evening had raised his temperature a notch. Knowing that she was sleeping in a room separated from his own by three doorways but no doors had kept him awake half the night. And now he was inviting her to ride up with him? Actually he had gone beyond inviting her, though. He had challenged her.

Well, so be it. He had decided that she was going to learn to ride, and so learn to ride she must.

"Normally I would suggest that you set your foot on my left boot so that I could lift you up here," he said. "But, alas, I am unable to display such manly strength for your admiration today. Strickland, do you feel able to lift Lady Smith up here?"

She uttered something that seemed like a strange combination of a shriek and a squawk.

"I do, sir," the sergeant said. "If you will forgive me the liberty, missy. Mr. Smith-Sir Jonathan, I should remember to say, just as I ought to have remembered to call you Lady Smith. Sir Jonathan will keep you safe once you are up there. It is plain to see that he was born in the saddle, as I just told him a while ago. And I daresay you will enjoy it once you are up."

Since Sergeant Strickland himself regarded her in something of the nature of an angel, it was doubtful he would have proceeded further against her express wishes. But fortunately-or perhaps unfortunately-he acted fast, and even while she was opening her mouth, doubtless to protest, he was hoisting her upward with two large hands splayed on either side of her waist, and depositing her on the horse's back before the saddle. Alleyne's arms closed about her to steady her.

"Oh," she said. "Oh." And she clutched at him in panic.

"Relax," he said, tightening his hold on her. "The only danger can come from your fighting me. Relax, my love." He grinned into her wide, dazed eyes.

"There you go, missy-Lady Smith," Sergeant Strickland said. "You don't look like you was born in the saddle, but you do look like you was born to be in Sir Jonathan's arms."

He was chuckling over his own witticism as he turned away and disappeared inside the stable building-probably to harass the grooms and whip them into shape, Alleyne guessed.

In the meantime some of the tension had gone out of Rachel's body, though she sat very still indeed. Even her head did not move as she stared straight ahead.

"You are probably pretending," he said, "that you are sitting in a parlor, trying to decide whether to pick up your embroidery or a book."

"I will never forgive you for this," she said, her voice prim and tense.

He chuckled as he turned the horse out of the stable yard again.

He might never forgive himself either. He could feel her body heat all along his front. He could smell gardenia.

W HEN ONE LOOKED UP WITH ONE'S FEET FIRMLY planted on mother earth, a rider did not look so very far off the ground. But when one was that rider, or at least sitting up before the rider, which was more or less the same thing, the ground looked alarmingly distant.

Rachel was horribly aware of empty space ahead of her and below her, and also of the same amount of empty space at her back. If the horse had stayed very, very still, she might have gathered her wits about her after a few moments, but of course it was not in the nature of horses to stand still. It sidestepped and pranced and snorted.

And then it moved even more. It swiveled about with much clopping of hooves on the cobbles, and proceeded on its way out of the stable yard.

At any moment, she was convinced she was going to pitch forward or topple backward, and someone was going to have to come and scrape up her mortal remains. Or perhaps she would wake up somewhere several days hence with a lump the size of an egg on the side of her head and no memory-not even of this, her first ride in sixteen years.

Jonathan's chest looked reassuringly solid, she thought, seeing it with her peripheral vision only a few inches from her left arm. She could lean against him if she chose and feel relatively safe. But she disdained to show such weakness. She consciously straightened her spine. One of his arms was wrapped about her waist, she realized for the first time. Even if she leaned back, he would stop her from falling off. His other arm was holding the reins, but it touched her at the waist in front and felt like a solid enough barrier between her and the ground below.

In fact, she could feel his body heat and smell his cologne or his soap or his shaving soap.

And there was something else preventing her from slipping backward. It was his right thigh, she understood suddenly, pressed to her derriere. The inside of his left thigh was pressed against her knees.

It was strange how she became aware of the man long after the horse and the danger. Though not so very long, actually. They were only just outside the stable yard, and they were turning again, away from the front of the house, along beside the lake, and onto a long back lawn that stretched to a line of trees in the distance.

"This is all quite pointless," she told him. "You will never make a rider of me."

"Yes, I will," he said. "I have decided that you will learn, and I have also decided that I must be a stubborn man who imposes his will on all around him. I must have been a general, or a colonel at the very least. Perhaps I was a close comrade of Colonel Leavey and Colonel Streat."

She did not turn her head-she dared not-but she knew he was grinning. He was enjoying himself, just as he had yesterday, with not a care in the world.