Chapter 12
The estate accounts blurred. Columns, figures, lines of expenditure.
Everything smudged as though water had been spilled across the ink.
Edward sat back, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.
The study was quiet but for the ticking of the mantel clock and the low groan of the house settling on its ancient bones.
Outside, late-afternoon sun fell in slanting gold through the window, warming the edge of the desk and nothing in him.
I should have made much more progress by now.
After the wedding breakfast and the endless parade of smiling mouths, he had meant to resume normality. Return to work, the unending work of a dutiful Duke. A service of a different kind. Not to ship or shipmates but to house, land and lineage. Things should have slotted into neat pigeon holes.
Marriage, completed. Transaction, agreed by bride and groom.
Reputation, secured. Life, restored. Instead, his mind betrayed him.
Every time he bent over the ledger, her face ghosted up from the page.
Not the composed bride she had been at the altar but Isla as she had stood in his private rooms the night before.
Cheeks flushed from haste, hair loosened, eyes wide as she caught him half-undressed.
He had expected embarrassment. What he remembered was the quickness of his breath, the racing of his pulse.
Even thinking about it made his heart beat in his throat.
He rubbed the back of his neck as if he could rub the memory out.
These daydreams are ridiculous, improper and dangerous.
He leaned forward again, but his father’s voice rose from the past like a lash.
A duke keeps his house in order, not in want. If you cannot manage a desk, you cannot manage a title. Running away to sea solved nothing. Duty does not wait on your comfort, boy.
Edward’s jaw clenched until ache spread into his temples. He pushed the ledger aside. The neat lines blurred again, this time because his eyes refused to serve him. The ghost of his father was intolerable company and so, he stood.
Riding will clear my mind if anything can.
He left the study with a curt stride. The servants he passed dipped their heads.
Outside, the air sharpened pleasantly. The sun had begun its descent, warming the gravel drive and burnishing the edges of the stable roof.
He breathed deeply and felt the pressure ease, if only a fraction.
He stepped into the stables and stopped dead, heart sinking but pulse quickening at the same time.
Someone had saddled one of the geldings. Someone whose back he knew already by instinct. Slim, sure, light on her feet. Someone wearing breeches and a man’s short coat.
Breeches! What on earth!
Isla turned at the sound of his entrance. A loose shirt, rough cotton and clearly a stable hands, hung open at the throat. The breeches fit her too well. His throat tightened and he forced it open again.
“What,” Edward said, voice low and dangerously even, “are you doing?”
Isla blinked at him with maddening calm. “Preparing to ride.”
“In a man’s trousers?”
“They are not his trousers anymore,” she said. “Merely trousers.”
“Do not trifle, Isla.” His voice hardened from steel to diamond. “What do you think you are playing at?”
“I am playing at practicality.” She tugged the girth strap with brisk competence. “I mean to ride properly. Not perched on a sideways contraption designed by someone who wanted women ornamental and half-crippled.”
“You stole those clothes.”
“I borrowed them,” she corrected.
“From an unattended room?” His brows snapped together. “Were you rifling through my servants’ quarters? Have you lost your sense entirely?”
Before Isla could retort, a figure emerged from the far stall, broad shoulders, grey mane of hair, whiskers bristling like a hedgehog prepared for war. Harold Godwin. Stable master. Devout. Gruff. Loyal as old oak. And utterly fearless. He knew his value to a duke who loved his horses.
“Beggin’ your pardon, Your Grace,” Godwin said, straightening. “No untruth from Her Grace tonight. I gave the Duchess leave to take a set of work clothes.”
“You,” Edward turned slowly, incredulity slicing clean through his temper. “You gave her the clothes?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Why?”
“She asked.” Godwin shrugged, utterly unrepentant. “Said she wanted to ride. A duchess on a good horse is a fine sight. Never knew a woman ruined by knowing how her own legs work.”
It was the simple truth. Godwin was devout in his faith and considered lying a sin.
He was incapable of even a white lie, seeing no degree to insulting the Lord.
In another moment Edward might have laughed, bitterly or helplessly, he wasn’t sure.
But not now. Not with Isla standing there looking entirely too at ease in those damned breeches.
Her legs were wonderfully shaped, giving a sense of athleticism while retaining feminine allure. Edward found himself wondering if she would take to the garment when not riding. He stopped that train of thought, cutting its lines and dropping its sails.
“You may not be seen like this,” he said, forcing authority into place. “You are my wife. You cannot ride out dressed … dressed as …”
“As a competent human being?” Isla finished.
He glared. She smiled. Then she swung into the saddle with one clean, practiced move.
It startled him. The horse startled too, but settled immediately beneath her hand.
Isla gathered the reins and leaned forward, the posture of someone who had lived on horseback long before London had tried to civilize her.
“You are not riding out of this barn,” Edward said.
“I am,” she said.
“You will disgrace yourself.”
“That is my choice.”
“And disgrace me.”
“That,” she said sweetly, “is your ain look-oot.”
She dug her heel in and shot forward. Straight at him.
He had just enough time to swear, leap sideways, and avoid being trampled.
She burst into the yard, hair snapping behind her like a victory flag.
For a moment Edward could only stare at the open doorway, stunned.
Then heat surged up his throat, mixing fury with something he refused to call desire.
“Your Grace?” Godwin asked dryly. “Shall I saddle t’other bay? Or do you mean to chase her on foot?”
Edward swore again. “Saddle anything that moves.”
“Yes, sir,” Godwin said with the serenity of a man enjoying God’s private theatre.
Edward vaulted into the saddle before the stirrup even settled and drove his horse forward, pulse pounding with a fury he could not afford to examine.
***
Isla rode like sin embodied. Not reckless but fast, daring and joyous.
She cut across the south meadow. Edward urged his own horse harder, but Isla gained ground, slipping like a wisp of smoke through a gap in the old stone wall and into the east pasture.
The wind tore at Edward’s hair. The estate blurred into streaks of green and gold.
He wasn’t even wearing a hat. The thought of his tenants seeing their duke bareheaded and flying, galloped through his mind and was gone.
He could taste the sharpness of rain building over the moors.
Isla looked over her shoulder once, eyes alight and triumphant.
She teased him with her very existence. He pushed his mount harder.
At the far edge of the pasture, a narrow stream cut the land in two.
Isla slowed, angling her horse to a ford where the stones lay shallow. Edward did not slow.
I am the lord and master of this land. I do not follow like an obedient school boy.
He gave his horse its head, rose in the stirrups, and jumped. For a moment they were weightless, man and horse. Then they landed hard on the far bank. Isla hauled her horse to a stop, fury flaring bright as struck tinder.
“Are you mad?” she shouted. “You could have broken his leg!”
“He is fine,” Edward said, patting the bay’s sweating neck. “He is trained for it.”
“A horse is not a tool for masculine pride!”
“You have no right,” Edward shot back, “to complain about my horsemanship while you ride my land dressed like a …”
“A person?” she supplied.
“A scandal.”
She urged her mount through the ford and to Edward’s side. Dismount was a single fluid motion, boots hitting turf with controlled force. “I will not sit pretty and polite because the ton demands I pretend my legs do not exist!”
He swung down as well, temper meeting hers like flint.
“You are my wife,” he said. “The ton will watch you for any excuse to rip your reputation apart. And you handed them one!”
“And you,” she snapped, “risked an animal’s bones for the sake of getting ahead of me!”
A crack split the sky, thunder rolling up from the hills. The wind shifted, sharp with rain. They looked at the darkening clouds, then at each other.
“We need shelter,” he said begrudgingly breaking off the argument.
“We need to make sure your horse is well,” Isla insisted.
“Would you do that in the pouring rain?”
“Aye.”
Edward spied the little shepherd’s hut lay up the slope from where they had stopped.
Little more than a lean-to with stone walls and timber supports holding up a roof of wood and turf.
Large enough to crouch under in bad weather.
As Isla bent to check his horse’s legs he set the animal moving, collecting her reins as he went.
He didn’t look back to see that she followed, feeling the first fat drops of rain.
If she doesn’t, let her get wet while I sit in the dry. It will serve her right.
Inside, the hut smelled of wool and old smoke from a blackened, stone-lined pit in the middle. The horses crowded in with difficulty, leaving barely enough room for him. Isla followed moments before splashing drops became a sheeting downpour.