Page 7 of A Duchess of Mystery (The Mismatched Lovers #3)

D espite having arrived home from the Bembridge House ball long after midnight, Isabella had no intention of allowing her mere few hours of sleep to stand in the way of keeping to her normal morning routine.

And that routine had included, ever since the early days of her marriage to Marcus, an early morning gallop around the park.

Away from the ties of being a duchess and, when he had been in residence, the odious company of her husband, these rides had given her room to breathe and a fleeting sense of otherwise unattainable freedom.

Since his death, she’d continued with the rides.

She refused to acknowledge that even after all these weeks, his presence continued to haunt the house as though his unquiet, vengeful spirit refused to leave.

She’d only discovered the joys of horses after her marriage, when Old Amos, the head groom, had very kindly taken her under his wing and taught her to ride on Sapphire, Marcus’s late grandmother’s old gray mare, who had been brought out of retirement especially.

Sapphire had been a gentle introduction to riding, but Isabella had not taken long to realize that gentle was not what she required of a horse.

Sweet Sapphire was returned to her retirement for her declining years, and Marcus, who at that time had been feeling more generous than was his wont, had bought her a much more challenging mount.

In a moment of unexpected camaraderie, which could have been a veiled insult, of course, he’d also compared her to her horse.

It was true they shared the same hair coloring, but Isabella’s husband had probably meant they also shared their temperamental personalities.

As usual, her maid, the redoubtable Hawkins, arrived in good time to help dress her mistress in her customary deep-green riding habit, bringing with her a cup of hot chocolate to fortify her until she might return for breakfast. Before long, Isabella was able to give herself a once over in her cheval mirror.

Having found her image as pleasing as she always did, especially as perforce her riding habit wasn’t that dreadful dreary black, she descended the grand staircase to the wide entrance hall of the castle.

At this time of the morning dear Wyndham, who never liked to rise early, would still be snoring in his bed, so the only other people at large were the servants, all scuttling to keep out of her way while going about their morning duties.

Isabella, her gown swishing as she walked, crossed the hallway, and took the corridor that would lead her to the stableyard.

She was not just a lover of riding. She was also a lover of horses.

And that meant she liked to prepare her own horse herself, rather than have someone else do it.

She held that if you just turned up to a ready-groomed and saddled horse, you were missing out on cementing that bond of rider and horse.

Why should the grooms be the only ones to experience that bond?

So she prepared her own horse whenever she could.

And this morning she intended to ride Sultan, the showy dun Arabian Marcus had won at cards a matter of weeks before he died, and which she now considered hers.

Jem Whitaker, one of the younger grooms, was busy sweeping the yard as she emerged.

He kept his head down, but she knew he was watching her.

All men watched her, even those in the lowliest of positions.

How could they not? She was beautiful, and she knew it, which only served to enhance her beauty as she moved with the inborn confidence of one aware of her own charms. Jem watched her surreptitiously every time she ventured into the stableyard.

Which was every morning while she was resident at the castle.

He was a good-looking lad with a mop of dark curly hair and bulging biceps.

A much more presentable young man than their other young groom, the recently arrived Jack Watkins, who always had his mouth open as though he couldn’t breathe through his nose, a part of him which always had a drip on the end of it.

Flashing an appreciative smile at Jem, just because he was handsome and she could, Isabella strode across the sparkling cobbles to the left-hand run of stables, whose outer door stood open in welcome.

This was where the riding horses were kept, plus those who didn’t, in fact, do much work at all, unless the grooms took them out for exercise.

The carriage horses occupied the right-hand run of stables, and, to either side of the archway, large doors indicated where Marcus’s wide array of carriages were kept.

Jem, like all the other stable staff, had accommodation in the lofts above the loose boxes.

After the bright sunshine of the early morning, the interior of the stable block was gloomy and it took a moment or two before Isabella’s eyes grew accustomed.

Sultan occupied the loosebox right beside the tackroom, which meant she had to walk down the tiled corridor past all the other stables.

Thinking she’d be riding her own horse, Amos would have left her customary wooden box of grooming tools outside the mare’s door, so she needed to collect them.

However, before she reached Sultan’s loosebox, her attention was caught by a strange horse in the third box along, and beyond that, a second one.

With a committed horsewoman’s obsessive nature, Isabella knew every horse on the estate, be it the garden pony, the farm workhorses, or those that drew her carriages.

And this horse was not one of them. Neither was its companion.

She stopped outside the first stable and ran her experienced eye over its occupant.

The horse, a bony bay, was engaged in snatching hay from the iron hayrack in the corner of the box with a gusto that suggested it had been starved most of its life.

Bigger than Sultan, and a gelding as well, he had the look of an animal that had recently fallen on hard times.

She couldn’t precisely count his ribs, but she could see them clearly beneath his rough coat, and his hips stood out from his not at all rounded quarters with distinct lines of poverty to either side of his tail. A tail that had been docked.

Isabella abhorred the practice of docking, and had long since decreed that none of the horses at Stourbridge should have that mutilation carried out.

The carriage horses could have their tails tied up out of the way for safety, she argued, and that would be every bit as effective as cutting their tails right off part way down the bone in such a barbaric fashion.

And they would still have something left to swish to keep away the summer flies.

The horse turned its head and looked at her out of wide, intelligent eyes. Yes, some good food and beneficial exercise to build up some muscle and this poor creature might blossom. “Hello,” she said, keeping her voice soft and low. “And who might you be?”

“Richard,” said a voice that surely couldn’t emanate from the horse. “But you may call me Diccon.”

Isabella couldn’t help herself. She jumped back from the stable door as the man who must have been sitting in the corner of the stable, hidden by the wall, got to his feet.

She stared.

He was tall. Taller than Marcus had been, but his superficial likeness to her late and unlamented husband was striking enough to render her breathless, for a moment, with fear.

Then common sense took over. This man wasn’t Marcus, but, by the look of him, he might be some by-blow of Marcus’s late father, a man whom she’d never met.

It wasn’t unheard of for illegitimate sons to be employed on the estates of their fathers.

The fact that he was wearing a not-all-that clean shirt, open at the neck to show the curling dark hairs on his chest, and had his sleeves rolled up above the elbow, inclined her to suspect he had arrived seeking work, at the same time as setting her heart a-fluttering.

Which, she had to admit, was an odd reaction.

She took a better look at him. The man had a look of whipcord strength about him that Marcus had never had, as though in a moment he might transform himself into a beast of prey.

And this was not an unattractive trait. Handsome, it was true, but a rough diamond of a man.

What a shame he wouldn’t be gracing any of the ballrooms she frequented, as it would have been fun to have flirted with him. Just a bit.

Yet what was his horse, for it must be his, doing snugly tucked up in one of her stables?

Had this man also spent the night there?

He did appear to have bits of straw sticking to him.

A few even decorated his attractively tousled hair.

Hair it might have been pleasurable to run one’s hands through.

Her heart gave another little flutter. And he didn’t appear to have shaved in several days, for his firm jaw was covered in a generous growth of dark beard which gave him a rather swashbuckling appearance.

Which in turn further enhanced his allure.

No. She must control her heart and not think of any man like this, and definitely not someone who had come seeking a position in the stables or the garden and looked unnervingly like Marcus.

It was fun to toss a careless smile at a handsome servant from time to time, but that was all she could ever do, and if anyone found out she had done it, that would only add grist to the mill of disapproval.

Although the idea of seeing this man working in either location, with his muscles rippling beneath his tanned skin, kept pushing its unwelcome way back into her mind.

He smiled at her. Yes, he had Marcus’s dark eyes, although something in this man’s gaze felt very different to her late husband’s. However, she was not about to be won over by the smile of a potential groom, however handsome he was. No, she was not. Absolutely not. Never.