Page 54 of A Duchess of Mystery (The Mismatched Lovers #3)

I sabella woke late for the first time in her life.

And for the first time in her life she appreciated that she was clean, and in a soft feather bed, and warm.

And, also for the first time in her life, she realized that there were people who were not waking up as safe and secure and comfortable as she was.

Of course, she’d always known that the estate tenants and the servants didn’t have such a luxurious life as she did, but they had homes, they were warm and well-clothed as far as she could see, and well-fed. None of them suffered want.

Now, as she lay in bed on the morning following her incarceration, as rays of warm sunshine streamed in around the edges of her window drapes, she had time to reflect on how lucky she was: lucky to have been born her father’s daughter, to have never known poverty or want, to have always had fine clothes and big houses, to have eaten well all her life, and to have been, despite Marcus, for the most part happy. Well, only unhappy when he was about.

She sat up in bed. What time was it? The sunlight suggested quite late.

She needed to get up. A ride on Sultan was what she needed.

A ride to clear her head and make her appreciate her own freedom.

Her own hard-won freedom. Won for her by Richard.

Diccon. As if she weren’t appreciating everything enough right now.

She buried her nose in her pillow for a moment, taking deep breaths.

Oh, the scent of clean sheets and her clean nightgown, the feel of clean hair and skin.

She would never take that for granted ever again.

A tug on her bell rope brought Hawkins hastening to her bedroom.

An hour later, smart in her green riding habit and feeling very much herself again, and after a breakfast in her room of toast and hot chocolate, she descended the stairs into the hallway, intent on heading to the stables.

No one seemed to be about, so she could make her escape with alacrity and be gone before anyone noticed.

Her longing to be out in the fresh air burgeoned ever further.

Her progress down the rear passage past the kitchens to the stables went unnoticed, and in a minute or two she was entering the long stable block, where the horses greeted her with soft whickers in the hope of treats.

Today she’d brought nothing but a caressing hand though, as she hurried towards Sultan’s loosebox, the delicious aroma of hay and horses seeping into her every pore.

She reached the door and set her hand on the bolt, and as she did so, someone stood up from behind the stable wall. Someone who must have been waiting inside the stable with Sultan for her to arrive.

Richard.

With a little gasp of surprise, Isabella took a half step backwards, her hand to her mouth. Her heart did a little excited flutter, and heat rose to her cheeks.

He was dressed much as he’d been on the first day she’d met him: his old boots and breeches, a white shirt, clean today, open at the neck to show his darkly curling chest hairs, sleeves rolled up to reveal his powerfully muscled arms, and braces keeping up his breeches.

As he was brushing straw from his clothes, he must have been sitting down. In Sultan’s stable.

“Good morning, Bella.” He smiled, a wide, friendly smile, as unlike Marcus as he could possibly be. Another flutter of the heart.

She had to smile back. “Good morning… Diccon.” She gestured at Sultan. “What on earth are you doing in Sultan’s box?” As if she didn’t know the answer.

His smile widened and his dark eyes danced. Her heart did an involuntary flip of pleasure and she was aware of the pounding of her pulse in her throat. “Waiting for you.” He chuckled. “And it was a long wait. You must have been very tired to sleep in so late.”

“You surmised that I would come straight out to ride?”

He nodded. “I did indeed, and I was right, was I not?”

Excitement buzzed through her. “You seem to think you know me well.”

“Not as well as I would like to.”

Her mouth went dry and her unruly heart began to beat even faster, a queer feeling beginning in her belly.

Could she deny that she would like to know him much better, as well?

That maybe now she was free to? She opened the stable door.

“I see you’ve groomed him for me.” She glanced around.

“That was very kind of you, but where is your horse? I don’t see Douglas standing ready to be ridden out. ”

He moved towards the door. How tall he was, standing over her now, looking down at her out of those gentle, peaty eyes.

“I thought to take out the horse on which I traveled here. Amos thinks he has the makings of a good hack, and he’s had over a week of good food in him now, and plenty of rest. He’ll be a different horse to the one I paid a few guineas for in Maidstone. ”

She smiled, her heart fluttering like the wings of a captive bird. “Be careful he’s not grown too full of himself on Stourbridge oats.” How short a time ago she’d been right here, dismissing Richard as just her late father-in-law’s by-blow, come looking for work.

He grinned a little irrepressibly, perhaps at the same memory. “We’ll have to see. I’ll fetch your saddle for you.”

Half an hour later they were riding up the long track to the downs, both Sultan and Richard’s horse full of the joys of spring, despite it being quite the opposite end of the year.

Although Richard’s horse was, in truth, mainly full of the joys of the oats he wasn’t used to receiving.

He fairly bounced along under Richard, as though the oats and good treatment had changed his personality and turned the nag of ten days since into a blood horse raring to go at the start of the Epsom Derby.

As she watched Richard struggling with so fiery a mount, Isabella couldn’t help but wonder if it had been a wise decision to ride this particular horse.

She herself would have found the beast a challenge, and Richard wasn’t that good a rider.

She had to laugh at his expression, though, as the horse, whom she’d declared should have a name and chosen Mercury for—“Because he so clearly has winged heels”—skipped sideways at a fluttering leaf. It was certainly on its toes, but, so far, Richard appeared to be coping.

“Do your grooms never turn out the horses into the fields so they can stretch their legs? Or exercise them?” Richard asked, hanging on for dear life as Mercury lived up to his new name by leaping into the air, as though he had pretensions of flight, as a pheasant carked in the bushes on the right.

An occupational hazard on an English country estate.

Isabella, who was finding herself more and more at ease with Diccon as the ride progressed, mainly, it had to be said, because she was finding his predicament so amusing, laughed out loud.

There was nothing like seeing him in difficulties to make her feel more in sympathy with him.

“I’m sure they do turn them out, and they do exercise them too, when I’m not at the castle, but your Mercury is a new horse, and there were no instructions about him, I imagine.

I fear the grooms just might have left him in his box this last week or so, while filling him up with oats.

” She patted Sultan’s warm neck. Mercury was doing a good job of making Sultan look like an old plodder, which he was not.

“He does seem a trifle over enthusiastic about being out. Are you sure you’re all right on him? We could go back, if you prefer?”

Richard shook his head, possibly because he didn’t want to lose face. “He’ll get it out of his system once we’ve had a gallop, I should think.”

They passed the folly gatehouse where the Crumps lived, luckily for Richard with no frightening washing adorning the bushes, and turned out onto the ridgeway path across the top of the downs.

A warm breeze ruffled Isabella’s hair. The downs stretched away green and open to the south, heading towards Winchester.

The urge to just let Sultan gallop and not stop until they were off the Stourbridge estate, away from all the troubles of the last weeks, rose.

Common sense took over, though. It would have been a long ride back.

Instead, she shot Diccon a challenging smile. “Shall we run Mercury’s high spirits out of him then? And see if that improves him a bit?”

Doubt flitted across his face, as Mercury had just performed a creditable buck combined with a sideways leap when he caught sight of a scarecrow in one of the arable fields to the left.

Best not to give him time to think. She gathered her reins.

“I’ll race you.” A slight tap of her heel to Sultan’s side, and her horse was off, springing forward from walk to gallop in a matter of moments, the wind whistling in her ears.

This was true freedom. Only on the back of a horse had she ever felt it—the exuberance, the vitality, the being at one with all those who’d come before her who’d galloped over these open downs, back down the countless years into the mists of time.

She crouched forward, Diccon forgotten, urging Sultan ever faster, as though her speed might carry her back into the past herself.

Sultan was fast, but he was pure Arab and only fifteen hands, and Mercury was a good six inches taller, with longer legs.

Who knew but that he didn’t have gallopers in his ancestry?

Derby winners, perhaps. He certainly looked as though he might have, right now, as he came alongside Sultan.

Diccon was hauling on his reins to no effect because the horse had his mouth wide open, evading the bit, his neck outstretched and his eyes wild and dilated.

This was a horse that might have been trained to run at some point.

He’d fallen on hard times, ending up being sold off as a hack, but now, after all that good living and those buckets of Stourbridge oats, he’d found his feet again. With a vengeance.