Velvet (6 page)

Gabrielle drew rein just in time to stop herself from overtaking the hounds and committing the cardinal sin of destroying any scents in the process.

“He’s gone to ground,” she gasped. “I don’t know
whether to be glad or sorry. Wasn’t that a wonderful run?”

Her hat was slightly askew, dark red ringlets escaping from its confines. The translucent pallor of her complexion had taken on a rosy glow and the dark eyes were alight. Nathaniel’s head spun again.

“You’re mad,” he declared. “Of all the crazy, reckless pieces of riding! There had to be an easier way over that hedge.”

Gabrielle looked at him as if he’d taken on some strange, alien shape. “Of course there was. But we wanted to be ahead of the field.”

“That’s no excuse.”

She continued to stare at him in incomprehension. “What are you saying?”

“That it was a piece of the most foolhardy risk-taking I’ve ever witnessed,” he said flatly.

“Well, why did you follow me if you were scared?”

“I was not scared. It was all right for me to take the fence; my mount is bigger and more powerful than yours.”

“Oh, wait a minute,” she said softly. “This is nothing to do with horses, is it, Lord Praed? This is to do with what men can do and women can’t … or do I mean
shouldn’t!”

“You can mean what you wish,” he said. “But you’ve demonstrated yet again that you lack the qualities to join the service. I told you last night that reckless endangerment of oneself and others is unacceptable.”

“Nonsense,” Gabrielle said stoutly. “There was nothing reckless about that. My mount is one of Simon’s hunters. He’s well up to the weight of a grown man, let alone mine, and very powerful. Besides, I’ve jumped that fence hundreds of times. Georgie’s family estates march with the Vanbrughs’ and I hunted this land almost every winter until a few years ago.”

“You don’t stop to contemplate consequences,
madame,” he declared. “Such habits make for a dangerous and untrustworthy partner.”

Impatiently he glared around at the frustrated pack of hounds, the cursing huntsman, and the milling riders as they straggled into the spinney. “This is going nowhere. Why don’t they move on and draw another covert?”

“They’ll move to Hogart’s Wood in a minute,” Gabrielle said thoughtfully. There was no point defending herself verbally against such a wealth of misguided prejudice. They’d end up in a shouting match that would achieve nothing. A different, more challenging approach was needed.

“If you’ll excuse me, Lord Praed, I think I’ll make my way to the wood now. There’s a shortcut. You won’t wish to take it, of course, since it involves another rather sizable hurdle. But I’m sure you won’t miss anything if you follow the body of the field.”

She turned her horse and cantered off down the ride leading out of the spinney. Hooves sounded behind her with satisfying immediacy, and she smiled to herself, leaning low over the horse’s neck as they emerged onto a stretch of gorse-strewn common land. She nudged his flanks and the animal broke into an easy gallop. She hadn’t exaggerated when she’d said he was well up to a weight considerably more than her own. It gave her the advantage of speed in this race she was running with Nathaniel Praed.

They raced across the common, up a relatively steep hill, and then down the other side. The obstacle she intended to jump was a ten-foot stone wall at the bottom of the hill bounding the orchard of a sizable farmhouse. Hogart’s Wood lay on the far side of the orchard and the hounds would have to be taken around the wall. An intrepid rider could thus ensure he was on the spot when the hounds drew the wood.

Nathaniel didn’t know why he was following her. Except that she’d needled him again with that derisive
challenge. Except that he couldn’t seem to keep his distance. Except that he seemed in her company to follow impulse in as headstrong a fashion as the Comtesse de Beaucaire.

He saw the wall ahead—mellow golden stone in the crisp sunlight, dwarfing the horse and rider pounding toward it. He wanted to yell at her not to be a fool, but the black was already gathering himself for the effort and he knew he couldn’t risk putting the animal off his stride by startling him. A hesitation would be enough to throw him off balance, and if his hooves so much as clipped the top of the wall at that height and terrifying speed, he would go down, hurling his rider to the ground like a cannonball from the breach of a gun.

He closed his eyes involuntarily and when he opened them again the wall was almost upon him and it was too late to bring his own hunter to a halt even if he’d wanted to. The animal, like all horses, simply followed his leader in blind trust.

For a dizzying moment they were in the air and then landed with a jolt on solid ground amid the apple trees of Farmer Gregson’s orchard.

Gabrielle’s horse stood panting, reins hanging loose from his neck. On the ground beside him lay the still figure of his rider, her hat flung several feet from her body, her black habit spread over the damp, dark green grass beneath the trees.

Nathaniel flung himself from his horse and ran to the inert figure.

“Gabrielle! Dear God!” He dropped to his knees beside her, tearing at the snowy cravat to bare her throat, his fingers feeling for her pulse. It was strong but fast beneath his fingertip. He sighed with relief and then frowned. The black lashes formed half-moons on the pale skin, her lips were slightly parted, her chest rising and falling with each regular breath.

Her pulse was far too vibrant for an unconscious person.

“Gabrielle,” he said in a near whisper. “If this is a trick, so help me, I’ll make you sorrier than you’ve ever been in your life.”

“Try it,” she said. Her eyelids swept up, revealing utterly mischievous charcoal eyes, and in the same moment she sat up. Her arms went around his neck before he realized what was happening, and he could smell her warm skin tinged with the freshness of the winter air. Her mouth found his and he could taste her sweetness as the pliant lips opened beneath his and her tongue ran lightly over his mouth. Her body was pressed to his,
her gloved hands palming his scalp. He could feel her heart beating against his chest.

And a wildness swept through him. His arms went around her, and his hands spread over her back, feeling her supple slenderness, the rippling play of her muscles as she obeyed the pressure and reached against him. For a minute their tongues fenced, half in play half in war, and then he moved his hands to grasp her head, holding it strongly as he drove deep within her mouth on a voyage of assertion that in some faint part of his brain seemed long overdue.

Gabrielle had believed she could fake sufficient response to satisfy him. She had been prepared for revulsion and had trusted she would be able to control it sufficiently for her purposes. She had expected to take her pleasure in the satisfaction of fooling him, of achieving her goal.

She had not been prepared for what was happening. She had not expected to find herself responding from some deep, passionate well within herself as the red mist of arousal engulfed her and she could smell him and feel him and taste him … and she wanted him. She wanted him as vitally as she had ever wanted Guillaume. She wanted him in the same way, wanton and unthinking, the visceral responses of her body overtaking, suppressing any possible restraints of the brain.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. But it was happening. And Nathaniel Praed was matching her every step of the way. The knowledge was in her blood, transmitted from his skin to hers.

And it was going to play merry hell with schemes of revenge.

At long last his grip on her head slackened, his flat palm passed in a soft, caressing motion over her hair, and he raised his head. Her mouth felt bereft, and she knew her face was open and vulnerable, the truth of
her responses naked in her eyes, but she could no more dissemble than she could cut her own head off.

Nathaniel’s expression was as bewildered and as open as her own, his eyes no longer hard and flat but deep and luminous, desire burning like a candle in their misty depths.

“How the
hell
did that happen?” he said softly, touching his own mouth with a wondering finger before running the same finger over Gabrielle’s lips.

“It seemed … seems … as if it
had
to happen,” she said with much the same bemused wonder.

Nathaniel hadn’t kissed a woman for six years. He’d had women, fly-by-night encounters for the most part, satisfying a sharp bodily need and then forgotten, not the kind of encounters to include lingering, passionate kisses.

Sitting back on his heels, he regarded Gabrielle with a puzzled frown. She returned the look with a slight quizzical smile in her eyes, no hint of the mockery he was accustomed to. Then he shook his head in an abrupt irritable gesture of dismissal. The grass beneath his knees was unpleasantly damp and cold, and he’d just indulged in a piece of flagrant idiocy, allowed himself to be manipulated by a spoiled woman who had nothing better to do with her life than play silly games. Or so he told himself.

He stood up, brushing at the damp patches on his knees, just as the huntsman’s horn sounded from the far side of the orchard.

“
Merde
!” exclaimed the countess inelegantly, springing to her feet. “After all that, they’ve reached Hogart’s Wood ahead of us. Help me to mount, please. I can’t manage Simon’s hunters without a mounting block.”

“It’ll serve you right to walk home,” Lord Praed declared unhelpfully. “I’m damned if I’m going to encourage you to play any more tricks.” With which
unfriendly statement, he swung onto his own mount and cantered toward the gate out of the orchard.

“Well, of all the—” Gabrielle swallowed the expletive. It was of no practical use in her present predicament. She’d have her revenge on Lord Praed in her own good time. She looked around the orchard for a substitute mounting block. Dismounting from the black had been a simple operation, and she’d been so fired with her plan that she hadn’t thought about the logistics of the reverse maneuver. But then, it hadn’t occurred to her that Nathaniel Praed would be so bloody-minded.

She picked up her hat, crammed it on her head, led the black back to the wall, found a toehold made by an uneven stone a couple of feet off the ground, and scrambled somehow into the saddle, thankful that there were no witnesses to the undignified process. She took a minute to adjust the plume of her hat on her shoulder, smooth her skirts over the pommel, and retie her cravat. She remembered the rough haste with which he’d pulled it free of her throat, and for a second her fingers touched her skin where Nathaniel had touched her and a shiver crept down her spine, her skin tingling with memory.

Dear God! Fate had really stirred the pot with a busy hand. But maybe it could be turned to good account. If he found the attraction as hard to resist as Gabrielle knew she did, then matters could well proceed apace.

It hadn’t occurred to Nathaniel that Gabrielle would be defeated by his own lack of assistance, and he wasn’t surprised when she trotted into the wood some five minutes after he’d reached the hunt. The hounds were making a cast, trying to pick up the scent of the fox, and the field milled around, waiting for something to happen.

“It’s not like Gabrielle to turn up in the rear of the
field,” Mites observed, unscrewing the silver cap of a hip flask and offering it to Nathaniel.

“Isn’t it?” Nathaniel managed to sound indifferent as he took a swig of the cognac and handed back the flask.

“You really haven’t taken to each other, have you?” Miles observed, drinking in his turn before returning the flask to his pocket. “It’s funny, but I’d have thought her spirit might have appealed to you. She’s unusual, and you’re always bored by the conventional.”

“She’s trouble,” Nathaniel stated without compromise.

Miles’s eyebrows shot into his scalp. His friend’s reaction to the Comtesse de Beaucaire was clearly far from indifferent, even if it wasn’t warm. However, he only said lightly, “She’s always been something of an
enfant terrible, I
grant you.”

The hounds caught a scent and with a great hue and cry set off after it, the field following with rather less enthusiasm than they’d shown at the beginning of the morning.

“The problem with hunting,” Miles observed as he and Nathaniel cantered side by side, “is that it alternates frantic bursts of energy and excitement with long periods of boredom and idleness in the cold. How about peeling off here for some sustenance? There’s an inn across the next field which does a very tolerable shepherd’s pie. And an excellent stilton.”

Nathaniel shook his head, his eyes on the black horse and his black-clad rider ahead of them. He realized with a sense of the inevitable that he had no intention of leaving the field before Gabrielle de Beaucaire. “I’ll see what this run brings, Miles.”

“As you wish. I’m for a tankard of ale and some nuncheon. My toes are frozen.” Miles turned his horse aside and galloped away from the hunt.

A few minutes later the fox broke cover and the hounds were in full cry. Nathaniel gave his horse his
head and came up with Gabrielle as they charged hell for leather across a plowed field. She shot him a quick sideways glance as he reached her and he called, “This time, Madame Reckless,
I
am going to give
you
a lead.”