Page 5 of Win Me, My Lord (All’s Fair in Love and Racing #5)

As there was no central aisle—or aisles of any sort—Bran navigated in the general direction toward where Sir Abstrupus took his morning tea, careful to avoid the odd cactus or delicate orchid or low branch of a kumquat tree.

One hadn’t a choice but to move slowly and with care, which suited Bran perfectly.

Slowly and with care had become his guiding mantra.

Familiar bitterness and frustration roared through him—as it would at least twenty more times today.

A shock of white sprang from the fronds of a bushy fern.

One labored, zigzagging step, then another, and Bran was facing Sir Abstrupus, whose teacup was lifted halfway to his mouth.

He was a small, delicate man who looked as if he might be composed of bird’s bones.

His bright cornflower-blue eyes, too, held a birdlike quality, quick and sharp—eyes that missed nothing.

Further, his head of wiry white hair that tended to stand on end would have done a crested chicken proud.

Presently, the humidity of the orangery had it displayed in a frizzed puff.

With a mild liftof bushy white eyebrows, he asked, “Will you sit and take a cup of lily-of-the-valley tea with me?”

“Lily of the valley?” Bran’s forehead gathered. “Isn’t that plant?—”

“Poisonous?” Sir Abstrupus finished for him.

All Bran could do was nod, slowly.

“Oh, it most certainly is,” said Sir Abstrupus in his blithe way. “But only in large quantities. In small doses, it can have wondrous benefits.” He took another sip. “Besides, the lilies looked so inviting, and I had to have a taste.”

Bran realized he hadn’t stopped nodding. “And is it—” He attempted to soften his natural bluntness. “ Good? ”

“Oh, it’s dreadful.” Sir Abstrupus heaved a defeated sigh and set his cup down. “Since you haven’t taken a seat, I suppose you have a purpose for this visit?”

Right.

Bran cleared his throat—and stopped nodding. “I was on my way to the stables.”

Sir Abstrupus tipped his head to the side. “Yet you’re here . On the opposite side of the chateau.”

Subtlety.

That was the skill called for in this situation.

The trouble was subtlety was a skill Bran had never acquired.

“Your neighbors,” he began again, this angle a little more to the point.

Sir Abstrupus narrowed his eyes.

Bran forged on, as he was ever prone to do when pursuing a path. “Do you know them?”

“I’ve occupied the Roost since I built it seventy years ago?—”

Seventy years ago?

“So, yes, I know my neighbors.” Sir Abstrupus lifted a single, shaggy eyebrow. “What would you like to know about them?”

“Just trying to gather my bearings for the surroundings.” It wasn’t a lie—but not the exact truth either.

His host nodded with knowing approval. “That’s the soldier in you.”

Bran felt his hands wanting to clench into fists. He bit back the impulse to correct the assertion.

There was no soldier left in him.

A soldier was a man of use.

Bran was no longer a soldier—no longer of use.

“Well, there’s Fernsby to the west,” said Sir Abstrupus, “and the Widow Bonner next to him. No neighbors to the east, unless you count the mollusks on the beach or the dolphins in the sea.”

Though Bran had known Sir Abstrupus all his life as a distant presence—through tangled family trees, he was Bran’s distant relative and godfather—he hadn’t ever been able to like him, precisely.

And strangely, he sensed Sir Abstrupus preferred it thusly.

That he be viewed rather than known—or liked.

“Do you have one more neighbor?” Bran had to ask, if for no other reason than to confirm his sanity—or insanity, as the case might yet prove to be. “To your south boundary?”

“ Ah .” Sir Abstrupus took another sip of lily-of-the-valley tea and winced. “Might you be referring to Lady Artemis Keating?”

The look in Sir Abstrupus’s eye held mischief.

Bran didn’t like it, but he had an answer.

He hadn’t completely lost his mind.

That was the good news.

The only good news.

His host gestured toward an empty chair. “Come and partake of one of Cook’s pickled onion scones.”

Pickled onion scone. “Are they delicious?”

Sir Abstrupus took a moment to contemplate the question, then said, “People set too much store by the concept of delicious .”

That was answer enough for Bran. “I need to get to the stables.”

“I shall save one for your tea,” Bran heard at his back, as he made his careful way through the orangery, his mind ticking along at a far faster pace than his feet.

Lady Artemis Keating … here .

Instinct bade him to go directly to his bedchamber, pack his belongings, and put fifty miles between himself and Yorkshire by dark.

But as he pulled the exterior door open and a crisp blast of morning air greeted him full in the face, the reality of his situation greeted him, too.

Leaving Yorkshire wasn’t an option.

He was here to train a racehorse.

The letter from Sir Abstrupus had arrived a fortnight ago.

His Thoroughbred, Radish, needed a trainer so he could run the St. Leger Stakes.

Bran’s first instinct had been to tell Sir Abstrupus to find another trainer.

Bran hadn’t left Stoke Hall in six months, and had no intention of doing so for at least another six months.

Then he’d continued reading the letter.

If Radish won the St. Leger, Bran could keep the entire ￡3,000 purse.

That was the detail that had him sitting upright in his chair.

Sir Abstrupus had no interest in the money. Rather, he was determined to prove that a Yorkshire Thoroughbred who hadn’t come up through the Newmarket system—he’d gone on at length in that section of the letter—could compete with the best of them and win.

Bran had sat very still for an indeterminate length of time as his mind ran through the logic.

If he trained Radish, and Radish won the St. Leger, then ￡3,000 was his for the keeping.

At dawn, he’d been on a post coach heading north.

Sir Abstrupus had made him an offer impossible to refuse.

Not if Bran was to do right by Gwyneth.

As ever, guilt regarding his sister’s situation struck through him.

Gwyneth had been a child when Bran had joined the Light Dragoons and left her under the guardianship of their brother, the Earl of Stoke.

While it appeared Gwyneth had been well looked after by a loyal governess, their wastrel brother had gambled away their sister’s dowry and everything else unentailed in his possession.

Only the family pile in Cambridgeshire remained ten years later.

Now nineteen years of age, Gwyneth should have already come out in society. But with no money for dresses or even reputable lodging in London, it was impossible.

Then came Sir Abstrupus’s letter with its possibility of a different narrative.

Gwyneth could have her season.

She was a beautiful, intelligent, and capable young lady; she would make the most of it.

Just as she’d been doing all the years Bran had been away.

As Bran’s useless future stretched before him, here was a useful thing he could do.

Ahead, the stables came into view. Horse stables were where he’d spent much of his life, from youth all the way through his military career in the cavalry, and he knew them down to his bones. He could enter a stable anywhere in the world and instantly know his place—even now.

Even after everything.

But as he made his slow, hitching way toward the stables, he saw not a place of refuge or usefulness, but rather a portal to the past.

It was in a stable that he’d first encountered Lady Artemis Keating.

Not at her come-out ball.

That would happen a month later.

Rather, they’d met weeks before, by chance.

In her brother’s stable.

Just past the stroke of ten at night.

Bran had been visiting the Duke of Rakesley’s famed racing stable, Somerton, with his brother, who had only recently been elevated to the title of earl after the death of their father six months earlier.

A young earl at seven-and-twenty, Stoke wanted to prove himself an up-and-comer by purchasing a Thoroughbred from the Duke of Rakesley, who was a young duke at twenty.

Except Rakesley had been a duke nearly all his life and had nothing to prove to anyone—and possessed of all the arrogance such a view of oneself would produce.

Seated comfortably in a leather armchair as they smoked cigars over postprandial brandies, Rakesley had regarded Stoke with a restrained manner of sufferance. Stoke wasn’t the first—or last—to appear to kiss the ring of the young, but powerful, Duke of Rakesley.

Unable to watch his brother ingratiate himself to Rakesley, Bran had taken himself off to the stables. Though they were to conduct the Thoroughbred business the next day, he’d wanted to see Somerton’s renowned stables for himself first.

They didn’t disappoint.

The stables that housed the Thoroughbreds were nothing less magnificent than a medieval cathedral, from its soaring vaulted ceiling supported by massive stone columns to its immaculately clean, herringbone red-bricked floor.

It was with no small amount of awe that Bran walked down the center aisle, peering into the boxes of the best horseflesh in England.

He’d been only two-and-twenty, fresh out of Cambridge, and attempting to figure out what it was he wanted to do with his life.

His first and foremost love was horses. He had a way with them.

If he were a less titled personage, he would’ve been a trainer.

But with the Lord in front of his name and no money behind it, he would have to go about it in a different way. He just hadn’t quite worked it out yet.

A figure appeared at the end of the aisle. A lady who immediately noticed him, the tilt of her head said. Confidence in her long-legged stride—it would only be a few months before he knew intimately how long—she marched toward him.

She was dark of hair and eyes, with an olive complexion that thrived beneath the sun, and possessed of a neat little dimple in the center of her chin.

But the part of her beauty that unexpectedly captivated him was her smile.

A smile that allowed one to see straight into her soul and know it for all that was pure and bright.

Curiosity shone in her dark, luminous eyes. “Are you the earl or the brother?”

Those were her first words to him.

“The, erm , brother.” Her directness put him on the back foot, even as he felt a responding smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “And you are?”

“The sister.”

Ah. Rakesley’s sister, Lady Artemis, who wasn’t yet out, and therefore hadn’t taken supper with them.

“You’re Lord Branwell, then?”

“I am.”

“And are you as mad about Thoroughbreds as all the rest of the gentlemen of my brother’s acquaintance?”

“I appreciate all horses.” He wasn’t so much defending himself as explaining himself.

An important distinction. For a reason he didn’t yet understand, he wanted her to see him—to see he didn’t contain a mere single dimension.

“Every type of horse has been bred for a different sort of labor—even racing is a labor—so shouldn’t we appreciate each as they are? ”

Lady Artemis’s eyes narrowed as she watched him speak, as if she were soaking in his every word—as if his every word mattered.

“You know,” she said, at last. “I believe you.”

A laugh startled out of him. “I haven’t given you any reason not to.”

A smile pulled at one corner of lush, berry-red lips. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe all the sorts you can’t believe when it comes to horses. Something about these perfect, lovely creatures can bring out the ugliest nature in people.”

That was the instant.

The very instant Bran’s world inverted and he became ruinously besotted with Lady Artemis Keating.

Her head canted subtly to the side. “What are you doing a month from now?”

“Pardon?”

“Will you be in London?”

“I could be.”

The little smile that tugged at the other corner of her mouth said she’d heard it—the conditional.

He could be in London in a month’s time if …

“My come-out ball will take place in a month’s time,” she said. “In London.”

“Congratulations.”

“I hope to see you there.”

“I’m not sure I’m invited.”

The smile about her mouth, twinkling in her dark eyes, grew mischievous. “Oh, you are.”

With that—and with an unmistakably saucy toss of her head—she turned on her heel and marched herself down the center aisle the way she’d come.

And like that, Bran found himself looking forward to a ball for the first time in his life.

Now, he cast his mind back to their more recent encounter—the one from an hour or so ago.

Though he’d only been able to make out the rough outline of her silhouette in the dim light, it was clear she wasn’t the woman he’d met a decade ago.

She’d held no smile for him today.

Nor he for her.

Another surge of bitterness and frustration washed through him.

Life just kept throwing one thing after another his way.

Now, Lady Artemis.

Well, as long as she kept to her side of the woods—and he kept to his—then there was no reason they had to cross paths again.

If only life would consent to work that way, for once.