Miss Spencer Rides Astride (Heroines on Horseback) (20 page)

He was there.

She gasped and nearly fell backwards into the room, her head whirling, her heart thumping. He was there, just below her window, seated proudly on Bald Nick and with Gretna on a leading rein beside him. The mare’s dark coat gleamed in the moonlight, but it was the silver rays glinting from William’s shining hair that touched her most deeply.

He had come!

She took a deep breath and leaned out of the window again, willing herself not to faint like some silly maid and fall to her death.
 

“Grainne,” he called, smiling mischievously. “If you fall out of the window I will not be able to marry you.”

“Indeed, I think you would be honor-bound to marry me, for you would have caused the fall. I was snug in my bed before you appeared here like a knight in a fairy tale.”

“Is that what I am to you?”

She smiled, unable to resist him. “You are,” she admitted wistfully.
 

He nodded. “And you are the maid in the tower.”

“And how shall you rescue me? I have no braids to unwrap, and there are no beanstalks for you to climb.”

He shrugged. “It is the nineteenth century, my love. I shall go through the front door as befits a gentleman.”

She laughed and jumped back from the window, seizing a taper and lighting a few candles. She had better hurry up and get dressed. She flung open her door and shouted down the hallway.
“Emer! Emer, come at once!”

Despite her having been in her nightgown and fast asleep, it was really not late at all. Grainne had just taken to sleeping most of the time, to avoid the boredom of lying around the room she had been locked up in. But now, she was certain, she was leaving at once.

Emer came flying down the hall, eyes alarmed. “Miss, Miss, I’m here, miss!” She stopped short before her mistress and raked her up and down with an assessing glance, taking in her wide, excited eyes and flushed cheeks. “Whatever has happened?”

“He’s come back for me, Emer. Now help me find my riding clothes. No, not that habit! I shall be riding astride.”

Emer dutifully found Grainne’s breeches and riding blouse, which had been laundered and put into a bottom drawer of her bureau, where they would not be stumbled upon and wept over. She had not seen Grainne in men’s clothes in weeks, and thought the dresses a distinct improvement. But Grainne was overjoyed to be reunited with her trousers. She tugged them on at once, exclaiming over how loose they had grown since she had lost her appetite.

“You can’t wear those all the time,” Emer said doggedly. “You’ll have to dress like a lady when you’re not working. Especially if you think you’re going to marry William Archer. He’s no scrub, even if he just rides horses for a living. He’s a gentleman.”

“Oh, I know
that,”
Grainne said rapturously. “I always supposed he must be a bastard son or something, but I really don’t know the first thing about him.”

“And you’re going to run away with him?” Emer considered this a slight improvement over the gypsy scheme. If Grainne
was
hell-bent on running away with somebody, anybody, to avoid Maxwell, William Archer would certainly be her first choice.
 

The door-knocker rattled through the house. “Good gracious, Grainne, he’s gone to the front door!”

“Yes, he said he was going to.” Grainne handed her a ribbon. “Do tie up my hair and let us go and see what happens.”

Grainne went rushing downstairs, boots clattering on the wooden stairs, with Emer, both disapproving and hopeful, close on her heels. They came into the entrance hall and saw her father gazing at Mr. Archer with something like disbelief in his face. The two horses stood just outside, their reins still wound through William’s hands.

“And you’re telling me you’re the next Earl of Tivington. That’s what you’re saying to me.”
 

Grainne gasped and stopped short. Emer nearly ran into her.

“I apologize for the deception,” William said. “It was regrettable, but necessary to my scheme. I came to Ireland to escape an… arrangement… that my father had entered me into. I returned because of my father’s ill health, and found while I was there that the arrangement was not agreeable to the other party, as well. So we reached an honorable ending to the… arrangement, and I was free to return.”

Mr. Spencer squared his jaw. “For what reason are you returning?” He looked pointedly at the two horses cropping at his lawn.

“To request the hand of your daughter in marriage.”

Grainne made a little hop of excitement, causing the floorboards to squeak in protest. Spencer turned quickly and saw her standing there. He took in the breeches and blouse, long forbidden, and the pink in her cheeks. “I see you are amiable to this plan, daughter,” he said without pleasure.

“I am, Father,” Grainne replied, trying to keep her tone steady. “I should prefer it over every other arrangement.”

Spencer frowned. “And yet I refused Archer’s hand before, and my reasons for doing so have not changed. Have you forgotten that, lad?” He turned back to William, and seemed to puff himself up a little, as if trying to block William’s path to Grainne. “And I can see by the way you appear here with two horses that are not yours, ready to ride away with my daughter in men’s clothing, as I have forbidden her to appear in public, that you are still not steady nor fit enough to take her in hand and moderate her wild behavior. At this moment, sir, you are no better than a horse thief yourself, had you thought of that at all?”

Grainne was horrified. What her father said was true. William was standing before them with Bald Nick and Gretna, horses that didn’t belong to her or William or even her father, but to Lord Kilreilly. How could he have been so foolish? Her heart began sinking to the vicinity of her boots. Her father was in such a quiet, simmering rage, she would count them all fortunate if he only sent William away on foot, and did not send for the magistrate.
 

Although she wondered if an Irish country magistrate would dare arrest an English peer.

Why wasn’t his newly landed status making any sort of a dent in her father’s armor, anyway?

“I am not satisfied with the fact that you have proven yourself a master of deceit in my own home,” Spencer was adding.

“Regrettable, as I have stated before,” William admitted. “But at least you cannot name me a horse-thief. I have the bills of sale for these two animals in my saddlebag. I supped with Lord Kilreilly tonight, and purchased Bald Nick and Gretna from him before I took my leave.” He smiled at Grainne. “Two horses so masterfully trained, I could not help but have them for my stables in England.”

Spencer was red in the face. He clenched his fists and then unclenched them, stretching his fingers at his side, and then he took a deep breath. “Archer — Archwood, Tivington, whatever your name is…”

Grainne and William waited breathlessly.

“I must sleep on this.”

Grainne felt utterly deflated.
 

“You can be sure I will not allow my daughter to go riding away with you if you are not decently married. I wonder that you could even imagine such a thing. Return those horses to the stables and then come back here. Mrs. Kinney will prepare the guest room. And you, Grainne —” he turned to face her, and his expression was forbidding. “You shall not stir from your room until breakfast, is that understood? And then I wish to see everyone at the breakfast table so that we can discuss what I have decided.”

Grainne nodded obediently. She watched William do the same and turn from the door, taking all the air from the room with him when he left. Her body was tingling with disappointment; she had been so excited to go galloping down the road with him, and then to stop for a rest in some quiet copse, to slip into the shadows and feel his hands on her once again, taste his kiss and know that he was really and truly hers…

Instead it was back up to bed, back under the covers, as if nothing had ever happened.

Emer tugged at her. “Come on, miss, let’s go get you changed back out of those riding clothes.” She went with the maid, feeling listless and shaky after all the excitement, but there was nothing for it.
 

***

William cursed all the way back to the stable. His grand romantic gesture, reduced to this! Yessiring to a protective father! What must Grainne think of him? He should have swept her off her feet, flung her into the saddle, and galloped away, Spencer’s outrage be damned.

But, a reasonable voice in his head cautioned, that would be the most dishonorable thing to do to her. And after all the trouble you have gone to, returning to make peace with your father, and to end the affair with Violetta with honor, why would you run away with a young lady, ruining what shreds of a reputation she had left, and creating an irreparable rift with her father?

The reasonable voice, he thought, sounded an awful lot like Peregrin’s.
 

After untacking the horses and putting them back in their boxes with a new portion of hay, he went walking back through the moonlight to the Spencer house, trying to work through all of his options. The old earl had already put his blessing on the marriage, hardly questioning the rather distant connections that Grainne had to anyone in the peerage. Kilreilly was a surprisingly modern fellow, for a spry old seventy-year-old; he seemed to think that her genteel upbringing and the cousin who was an earl were probably all that London would require in a countess of Tivington, and although William had to question his definition of the term “genteel,” one could not fault Grainne’s information or diction, so that was certainly a fair point.
 

But if Spencer didn’t see it like his master did, there could be trouble. William was going to have to take her from the house against his will; perhaps he should just take her up to the Big House and wait for a special license there, under the protection of the earl.
 

Mrs. Kinney opened the door to him with a tight smile that did not reach her eyes. “Mr. Arch
wood,”
she ground out, voice taut. “Your room is ready. Will you require refreshment?”

He had a flask in his pocket. “That will not be necessary, thank you.”

The house was just a rectangle, nothing fancy or ornate, and as he walked along the upstairs hallway to the guest room he was able to distinguish, from the location of the windows outside, which door must be Grainne’s. He stepped lightly on the floorboards, watching where Mrs. Kinney’s heavy tread fell, trying to determine where the squeaky spots were.
 

He didn’t think he could get through the night knowing that she was just down the hall. And he had a feeling she was in the same boat.
 

Grainne had pulled the sheet off of her bed and wound herself up in it, cocooned in her fireside chair while she watched the flames leap in the hearth. She had stoked the fire as soon as she came back up to her room; she had left the window open, and the cold night winds had made themselves at home.

Besides, she could not sleep again, not knowing that William was just down the hall.

She had heard his steps following Mrs. Kinney’s, the housekeeper walking as heavily as a horse, as always. He was much lighter behind her. She thought he might be able to sneak down the hallway undetected, if he chose to.
 

Or she could do it.

She sat up in her chair, thinking about whether or not she dared. She knew where the squeaky floorboards were, she knew she could creep down to him without being caught… assuming no one came to check on her. She sat back again. Her father had forbidden her to leave the room. She was so close to being able to marry William, so close to escaping every evil in her life and attaining the one true thing that she wanted. Should she jeopardize that by creeping around the house and risking being caught in the one thing she had been warned not to do?

But oh, to know he was so close… she slipped her hands down, inside her sheets, to touch her tingling body. She was trembling all over at the thought of him, and nowhere so strongly as the warm place between her thighs…

Her door opened.

She froze.

William slipped through the tiny opening and shut the door silently. He took her in at a glance and then smiled, a slow sensuous grin unfolding across his lovely face. She felt something inside of her twist and purr with excitement.

He crept to her in stocking feet, kneeling beside her chair. “My lovely lady, I would take your hands, but I think they are already occupied,” he intoned, with the slightest hint of mockery. She could barely stop herself from bursting into embarrassed laughter.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered, extricating her hands from the winding sheets with some difficulty.
 

In answer, he took her hands in his and kissed each fingertip. She sighed, warmth flooding her body, and shifted herself so that the sheets began to fall from her and she was revealed in only a sheer little gown. William ceased his kissing and raised his eyebrows. “That is not the maidenly nightrail I remember,” he admitted. “This is altogether more wanton than I would have suspected you of. Is that lace? My, my.”

“I ordered it from a Dublin seamstress,” Grainne explained. “I was ordering wedding things and decided to add in a few garments just for me.”

“Are you sure this wasn’t for me?” he asked, and she smiled in answer.

“Come down here by the fire with me,” William requested, giving her hand a tug, and she flung all of the sheets onto the carpet so that they would have a soft place to lie. She slipped down onto his lap and his lips found hers in a hot, teasing kiss.
 

“I have been thinking of nothing but you this fortnight past,” he told her between kisses. “Your lips,” he kissed her gently, “and your eyes,” he kissed her below each half-closed eye, “and your hair,” he planted a kiss on top of her head, amongst the lusciously curling coppery locks, “just you, and you, and you,” and he went back to her sweet mouth for more.
 

It seemed a lifetime later that Grainne heard footsteps walking down the hallway. “Stop,” she whispered, putting her hand to his, which was wandering down the front of her nightgown and playing wicked games with her breasts. He froze, listening as well.