Surrender Becomes Her

To some dear,
dear
American Shetland Pony friends:
PAT MICHIELSSEN for all the laughter and pony tales
we’ve shared over the years and JIM CURRY
for all the same, as well as advice and the WINS
we’ve shared.
American
Shetlands Rule!

And

To HOWARD, oh, just for everything!

Devon, England
Spring, 1795

“W
hy won’t you give it to me?” Isabel demanded, hands fisted on her small hips in a most ungenteel manner. “It’s not as if the money doesn’t belong to me. It’s mine! You have no right to hoard it.”

A shaft of late afternoon sun shone in through the long windows of the library, transforming her red hair into a halo of fire and Marcus was struck again at how often his seventeen-year-old ward reminded him of fire. Sometimes she resembled nothing more than an appealing, cheerful little fire and other times, as now, despite her diminutive stature, a dangerous tower of flames ready to burst into a conflagration that could leave him seared to the bone. Already feeling as if his skin was singed, he very much feared that today was going to end with a conflagration.

The discussion, if one dared to call it such, was taking place in the comfortable library at Sherbrook Hall, Marcus’s country estate in Devon, and had begun some ten minutes earlier when Isabel had burst into the house demanding to see her guardian. At once! Since Miss Isabel had run tame through the Hall all her life, the butler, Thompson, with unruffled aplomb, had promptly shown the young lady into the
library and gone in search of the master of the house. The instant Marcus had stepped into the room, Isabel had launched her attack and he had been attempting, not very successfully, to defuse another explosive situation with his tempestuous ward.

“I have every right,” he said patiently. “I am your guardian and as such it is my duty to see that you do not squander your fortune before you come of age or marry.”

Isabel stamped her foot. “You know very well,” she said hotly, “that my father never intended for
you
to be my guardian! Uncle James should be my guardian—not you.”

Which was true, Marcus admitted to himself. Isabel’s father, Sir George, had been nearly seventy when he had stunned the neighborhood by marrying a woman young enough to be his granddaughter and had promptly fathered a child. To Sir George’s joy, Isabel had been born a scant ten months later. His death at eighty, when Isabel had been ten years old, had come as no great surprise to anyone. It was the death of Marcus’s own father some four years ago that had come as a shock to everyone. At the age of fifty-nine, the elder Mr. Sherbrook had gone to bed one night full of rude health, never to awaken the next morning. Numb with grief and disbelief, he had been informed by his solicitor several weeks later that in addition to inheriting his father’s wealth and estates, he had also inherited the guardianship of Sir George’s only child, thirteen-year-old Isabel. Marcus had been aghast, assuming like everyone else that Sir George’s younger brother, James, would become Isabel’s guardian. But such was not the case. At the time the agreement had been drawn up, Sir George had not felt that James, a committed bachelor living in London, would make a good guardian for his daughter. A much better choice, he had decided, would be his dear friend and neighbor, Mr. Sherbrook. Unfortunately, Sir George had not distinguished between the elder Mr. Sherbrook and the younger Mr. Sherbrook and had made no provision for the death of Mr. Sherbrook senior. Consequently, though everyone knew Sir George had never
envisioned the son of his best friend being his daughter’s guardian, that is exactly what happened. Even now Marcus felt a wave of incredulity flood through him. He had been only twenty-three years old at the time. What had he known about being the guardian of a young woman?
Not much more,
he thought wryly,
than I know at this very moment.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Isabel said, when he remained silent. “You were not meant to be my guardian.”

“I’ll grant you that,” Marcus replied, “but since your father made no other provisions for your welfare before he died and no one expected my father to die so unexpectedly, I’m afraid that we are, er, stuck with each other.”

Isabel shrugged. “I know all that and, generally,” she admitted grudgingly, her quick temper subsiding a trifle, “you’re not so very bad. I just don’t understand why you have to be so, so
stubborn
about this one thing. It is not as if I am even asking for such a huge sum. Your new curricle and that lovely pair of blacks you bought cost more than I am asking you to give me.” Her eyes narrowed. “And it
is
my money. Not yours.” When Marcus said nothing, she muttered, “And it would not be squandered.”

“That is a matter of opinion,” he said. She scowled at him and he grinned. “Come now,” he coaxed, his cool gray eyes full of amusement, “you know that as your guardian there is little that I deny you, but it would be remiss of me in this instance to allow you to spend a small fortune on a horse.” He shook his head. “Especially
that
horse.”

Her temper flared and her topaz-colored eyes narrowed. “And what, pray tell, is wrong with Tempest?”

“There is nothing wrong with him. The price Leggett is asking for him, while high, is not exorbitant. And I’ll agree that the stallion is beautiful. His bloodline is impeccable and anyone with an eye for good horseflesh would be proud to own him.”

Her black expression cleared instantly and a blinding smile
crossed her small, vivid features. “Oh, Marcus, he
is
a wonderful stallion, is he not?”

Marcus nodded, bemused, in spite of himself, by that smile. “Yes, he is.” Recalling himself, he added, “But he is not for you.”

The smile vanished like the sun behind a thundercloud. “And why not?”

“Because,” he said bluntly, “you don’t have the strength or the experience to handle an animal of that size and spirit right now.” He smiled faintly. “You’re both young and untrained and you’d probably kill each other within a week.” At her gasp of outrage, he held up a hand. “But there’s another reason I won’t fund this latest fidget of yours. How many times have you concocted one outrageous scheme after another, only to lose interest within a fortnight? Remember when you were going to breed goats? Or you were certain that you wanted to raise chickens? If memory serves, the goats nearly ate your aunt Agatha’s rose garden to the ground before they could be sent to market and as for the chickens…. Wasn’t there something about a rooster and the rosewood newel post of the main staircase in Denham Manor?” Ignoring the storm gathering in her eyes, he continued, “Now you say you want to breed horses, but what about next month or next year? Something else to consider: what will happen to your horses, all your plans, when you go to London next year for the Season?” He shook his head, smiling at her. “I know you. By summer your head will be full of nothing more than ball gowns and all manner of fripperies, the parties and the balls that you will be attending next spring, and the gentlemen you will have falling at your feet. And when you marry, as you surely will, brat, you will have no time or thought of horse breeding. The expenditure for Tempest will have been wasted.”

Her ready temper returned in an instant and her small hands clenched into fists. “Unfair!” she protested furiously. “I was eleven years old when I wanted the chickens and it
wasn’t my fault the rooster flew into the house; Papa’s old dog, Lucy, chased him there,” she said defensively. “It’s true the goats ate Aunt Agatha’s roses last fall, but it was good for them. This year you can’t even tell that the goats had ravaged them and the bloom has been spectacular. Even Aunt Agatha said so.” She shot him a look of dislike. “And it wasn’t all of the roses, just some of them.”

Ignoring her outburst, Marcus said, “My point is that you haven’t a very good history of following through with these fancies that take you. How do I know that Tempest and your scheme to raise horses isn’t just another case of goats in the roses and roosters in the house?”

She glared at him, rage and hurt mingling in her breast. Why couldn’t he understand that Tempest and the grand stud farm she imagined had
nothing
to do with goats and roosters! Her wretched guardian knew very well that she loved horses, had loved them all her life and, she thought resentfully, was very good with them; everyone said so. Even Marcus admitted—when he wasn’t being so aggravatingly mule-headed!—that she had an uncanny ability with horses. It was unfair and unkind of him to throw her disasters with the goats and chickens in her face. Those were childish pastimes. She was an adult now, making adult decisions. Why, oh why, couldn’t he see that? Why did he persist in seeing her as a child? Still think of her as a child to be petted and indulged and sent away when convenient?

Isabel had only to take a glance in the cheval glass in her room to know the answer to that question, she thought miserably. She still
looked
a child. Barely five feet tall and fashioned upon a slim, fairylike frame, and to her great disappointment, with no bosom to speak of, it was likely that decades would pass before her family and friends stopped thinking of her as a child. It didn’t help that fate had given her a mop of unruly red hair and—gasp!—a sprinkling of freckles across her nose that no amount of buttermilk or cucumbers could erase. She found no fault with her nose itself; it was, she had decided a
few months ago, a rather nice nose, finely formed with a saucy tilt to the tip. No one denied that her eyes, large, lustrous, and framed by dark lashes of marvelous length and thickness, were her best feature. But fine eyes or not, nothing, not even the fact that she had left behind the schoolroom weeks ago, was going to make anyone view her any differently as long as she remained the size and shape of a ten-year-old boy! Especially not Marcus Sherbrook. With a painful twist in her heart she realized that she wanted him to see her as a young woman. He never would, though—not as long as she was trapped in this childish, boyish body, she thought bitterly. Misery welled up inside her. She was never going to be a tall, stately beauty; she was condemned to spend her life short, flat chested, and freckled! It was so unfair!

Fighting back the urge to burst into tears, she lifted her chin and said with commendable calm, “You have every right to believe that Tempest is merely a whim of mine, but if, as you said, he is an animal that anyone would be proud to own, then there is no reason for me not to buy him. If, as you think will happen, I grow tired of him in a few months, he should be able to be sold for the same price I paid for him. I would lose no money on the transaction.”

Marcus regarded her steadily for several moments. Isabel had always been hard for him to resist, and as the years had passed and she had blossomed into an appealing young woman, he’d found it more and more difficult not to indulge her every wish. And he cursed this blasted guardianship that frequently put them at daggers drawing. It hadn’t always been so. There’d been a time that, like a precocious kitten, she’d scampered at his heels and he’d been happy for her to do so. He couldn’t explain it, but from the moment he’d seen her, a babe in arms, with that red hair so bright and vivid that he’d been astonished his fingertips hadn’t been burned when he’d touched the silky nap, she’d held a special place in his affections.

Though Isabel had been born to wealth and position, Marcus was very conscious that her life had not been without problems. Her mother had died tragically before Isabel’s second birthday and, despite a doting father, it couldn’t have been easy for her to grow up without a mother. She had adored her father; oddly enough the two of them rattled around happily in Denham Manor, completely satisfied with each other’s company. His death had hit her hard. Sir James, her uncle, wasn’t unkind, but he couldn’t replace Sir George in her affections, and his wife, Agatha…Marcus’s jaw clenched. Talk about history repeating itself! Sir James had followed in his brother’s footsteps in more ways than one. Stunning the neighborhood once again, two years ago he had tossed aside his bachelorhood and married a woman half his age: Agatha Paley, Isabel’s governess!

Marcus had never liked Miss Paley, not even when his mother insisted that she was an exceptional governess and precisely what Isabel needed. At the time she’d been hired, he’d thought her too strict, too cold and unfeeling for someone like Isabel, but to his regret, he’d allowed his mother to override his objections. It had not been a good match: Isabel, impetuous and spirited, and Miss Paley, cold and rigid. He’d known that Isabel had been dreadfully unhappy, but before he could change the situation, Miss Paley had stolen the march on him and married Sir James. He still wondered how she had brought that about, but it didn’t matter; what mattered was that the former Miss Paley was now Lady Agatha, Isabel’s aunt, and the former governess made certain that everyone knew
she
ruled Denham Manor. His expression softened as he stared down into Isabel’s face. Poor little mite. Living under Agatha’s icy fist couldn’t be pleasant.

He grimaced. Who was he to deny Isabel something that made her happy? As she’d said, if she lost interest, the stallion could always be sold. He worried, though, about the danger. Tempest was aptly named; he was a big, powerful
two-year-old stallion. Marcus knew. He’d seen the horse. The moment he’d gotten wind of Isabel’s interest, he’d made it his business to look into it. Despite himself, he’d been impressed when Leggett, a man known for his excellent horses, had led out the magnificent chestnut stallion with the nearly white mane and tail and four white stockings. If Isabel had not already spotted the horse, he’d have purchased him on the spot. He couldn’t argue with the animal’s quality, pedigree, or price, and Isabel was right; the horse could always be sold if her interest waned. He took a deep breath, hoping he wasn’t making a mistake.

Her eyes fixed anxiously on Marcus’s dark face, Isabel felt despair roil through her. He was going to say no. She just knew it. Neither defeat nor patience were her best-known virtues and she took refuge in that volatile temper of hers. “If I want to throw it away on a bloody horse it is my right,” she declared furiously. “Furthermore, you’re a mean-spirited beast and I hate you! Do you hear? I hate you! Oh! I cannot wait until I am no longer your ward and no longer have to deal with a clutch-fisted miser like you.”