The Country Escape (18 page)

Recognizing himself in his father’s racing colours, he laughed incredulously. ‘I can’t just swan in and try
to take all the silverware at the local point-to-point. Do you realize how unpopular that would make me? Besides, one needs a certificate of eligibility and all sorts. Dad owned pointers for years and the paperwork drove him crackers.’

‘All the paperwork is taken care of. Your popularity is not of concern. We want the people to see you as successful and audacious in the first instance.’

‘I’m far from racing weight.’

‘A week without drinking can make a great deal of difference, you will find.’ She gave him that sideways half-smile again. ‘And I assure you that you will be
very
well mounted. You have my word.’ This time, he knew her English was entirely deliberate.

He smiled widely back. ‘Where do I sign?’

By Heathrow, Dougie was having serious
second thoughts about the job, which might kill his acting career stone dead as well as entombing him in contractual obligations he could never live up to. He had friends in London who’d help him out; he could go to see them. He’d been living away too long. He wanted to party with his old mate Mil in Soho; he wanted to take Harvey home to Cottesley; he wanted to see his father, who was an unmitigated
bastard on most fronts but knew his horses and would understand his need to ride off demons. He was also feeling a sudden, unexpected drench of guilt for the way he’d treated Kiki. He hadn’t even apologized or said goodbye. Talk about kneejerk. He longed to call her to explain but his phone battery had gone flat in flight mode. He was also desperate for a drink.

Dollar was a formidable
warder, marching him through accelerated disembarkation, refusing to let him out of her sight until they had transferred by car to the Crowne Plaza hotel.

‘Don’t tell me, you’ve booked the penthouse suite for the afternoon to oversee my sex life.’ He cheered up a little, even more so when he realized he was in close proximity to a long row of optics as the hotel bar beckoned.

‘We
are setting off from the helipad here,’ she explained witheringly.

‘In which case, excuse me.’ He dived into the hotel to use the Gents. Creeping out after a lightning fast pee, he nipped into the bar. But Dollar was one step ahead of him and leaning against it, the corners of her mouth twitching again as she finished making a call on her mobile. ‘Deepak’s ready to take off.’

Dougie
might have been disappointed by the standard transatlantic flight, but seeing the golden helicopter again cheered him enormously.

‘Good afternoon, Mr Everett.’ Deepak greeted him once the headphones were on. ‘Did you have a pleasant flight, sir?’

James Bond fantasy back in place, a strangely uplifting comfort – albeit without the martini sun-downer – Dougie enjoyed the flight to
Herefordshire, soaking in the familiar jewelled patchwork green and frothy white piping of an English spring beneath him. As soon as they swept down over Eardisford, his eyes widened. He turned to Dollar. ‘This place is out of this world!’

She pointed out a huge curl of a lake in the midst of vast tracts of ancient parkland, its banks fringed with trees, among which was an exquisite farmhouse
in a clearing. ‘That’s where you must shoot your arrow through a heart.’

‘You do know that bow-hunting any animal has been illegal in Great Britain for years?’

She looked at him incredulously. ‘I am talking about Cupid’s arrow.’

The brook that raced through the lower woods alongside Lake Farm was keeping Dougie awake at night in the mill house a quarter of a mile downstream. The waterwheel had long since stopped turning and was grandly displayed behind a
glass wall in his basement kitchen – a great centrepiece design idea that was impossibly impractical because preparing anything to eat was deafening when the water levels were high.

Once rented out as a holiday let, the mill was relatively homely by estate standards, with a watertight roof, power showers and night-storage heaters. There was even a vast claw-footed bath in the master bedroom,
which Dougie lay in for hours on his first evening, topping up the water and admiring the view across the river to the water meadows. Ideally, he would have preferred to live closer to the stables, but the two apartments there, which would be shared between the rest of the hunt staff, were damp ice boxes. His commute to the ‘office’ was a five-minute walk.

So far all he’d seen of Eardisford
was the enormous, wrapped-up house, a glimpse of majestic parkland, his own noisy digs and – most importantly – the estate’s stables, one imposing flagged courtyard for carriage horses and the other, cobbled and more modest, for hunters and hacks. The most recent incumbents had been the Brom and Lem Hunt servants, hounds and horses, based there from the 1940s when the army had handed Eardisford
back to the Myttons after the war. The flats above the offices had been split into two for huntsman and whipper-in; the lower yard was divided with high walls and adapted to kennel hounds with raised fencing, chain-link barriers and pens; the stabling had been patched together over many decades to cope with decrepitude and excitable horses. Upon merging with the neighbouring Lemlow pack after the
ban, the hunt had finally relocated to the dryer, more convenient purpose-built kennels of their new bedfellows. The magnificent buildings had been abandoned in recent years, but Dollar had been quick to point out the restoration work already taking place to bring them up to Versailles standard for visiting trigger-happy tycoons and globe-trotting oligarchs.

After twenty hours’ travelling
together, it was a relief to be rid of Dollar who, for all her calm beauty, was a tyrant. She was staying in a local spa hotel, from which she could keep in contact with the outside world and burn off enough energy in the gym to power a small generator.

Equipping the Eardisford Estate with the highest speed broadband and mobile reception was not proving as straightforward as anticipated,
Dougie gathered, even with huge cash incentives available to expedite the process. Local residents, already locked in a painfully slow campaign to raise private capital to replace old cabling with fibre-optics and eager to get Seth onside, had not reacted well to his planning application to site a giant 4G mast on a much-loved hill.

The lack of any signal was a blessing for Dougie, who
was grateful not to be able to make or take calls in the aftermath of his split from Kiki. In public, Kiki was serenity personified – the ‘amicable’ break-up was blamed on ‘pressure of work’ and the terrible fire. But the voice mail messages he’d heard before he lost the signal had made it clear she was tantrumming big-time. Finlay was obsessed with her, she said in one, practically
stalking
her.
How could Dougie do this to her? She knew the girl in the restaurant meant nothing to him, she wept in another, that the fire had screwed with his head. He was her hero. He was a bastard, she screamed next. He’d never work in the film industry again if he spoke to the press about their relationship. ‘We both know the truth, Dougie. You thought being with me would help your career, but I can’t
carry you. I’m worth more than that. You’re dead weight. Go to your muddy little country and get a life.’ In the next call, she begged him to come back.

Dougie threw his smart-phone into a drawer, aware that fifty per cent of his relationship had been conducted through a SIM card. His guilt for leaving was fading, and he was grateful to be spared more exposure. The confidentiality contract
with Seth meant he had been deliberately vague about his whereabouts in England to his LA friends. No doubt the press would find him soon enough: the locals were hardly going to keep quiet once he was recognized.

He wasn’t planning to dwell on his million-pound bonus. It was totally preposterous and impractical, and would get in the way of good sport. As his father was fond of saying, ‘If
one chases two scents in the field, one loses both.’

Yet Dougie found himself lying awake until the early hours, his body clock totally out of alignment, his mind whirring as he contemplated the challenge and imagined just what he could do with a million pounds. It would buy Harvey an awful lot of oats.

After a lightning breakfast meeting with Dollar, who had a packed schedule
of appointments with architects and planners, Dougie spent his first day touring the jaw-dropping expanse of Eardisford’s farms and forestry in a Range Rover alongside the po-faced, monosyllabic Scottish estate manager, Alasdair ‘Dair’ Armitage. Dair clearly disapproved of the new ‘Hollywood huntsman’. Being generally off the Scots since meeting Finlay, Dougie made little small-talk and received
almost nothing back, but he gleaned enough insight to appreciate that Seth was increasingly mistrusted locally: he shrouded himself in mystery, and his plans for Eardisford’s sporting rights were being kept especially tightly under wraps. Both Dair and Dougie knew that private hunting was planned, but neither man made direct mention of it.

Dougie was blown away by the beauty of the estate,
which was on a scale owned privately by only a handful of British aristocratic families. Having been run by a skeleton staff for decades, it was gloriously anachronistic and spectacularly run down, but the sheer unspoilt expanse of it was so magnificent it was hard to take in. Having complained to Dollar that it was very hard to hunt hounds on just one land holding, he was starting to see the
possibilities.

The estate’s tenanted farms were extensive, numbering at least twenty, mostly arable, accounting for more than half of the land. There were also huge tracts of rough pasture, including the hill where the mast was planned, mostly grazed by sheep, other areas forming artificial moorland where grouse-shooting traditionally took place. It was the sporting side of the estate that
was the real show-stopper. It had been the only profit-making area for twenty years, Dair told him proudly. The shooting and fishing were second to none, and Dougie could see why, the river curling and twisting in a shoal of pebble-sided banks just perfect for coarse fishing, its tributaries and lakes positive orgies of carp and trout breeding. The woodlands were the size of small towns, rich
and diverse, from the vast ancient chase, Duke’s Wood, at the far end of the estate where medieval nobility had hunted boar and stag, to the swathes of pine plantations, new coppices and old coverts. The crowning glory was the parkland, almost five hundred acres of ravishing turf planted with spectacular specimen trees and fashioned with follies, bridges and lakes, including the majestic three-acre
crescent that dominated the main park.

Dougie had fully expected Lake Farm to form part of his tour, but it seemed the subject of the sanctuary was off limits as far as the Scotsman was concerned. All he said on the subject, in a dour Highland whine, was ‘No hunting dogs, guns or followers will be permitted on the land between the lake and the river under any circumstances.’ From the reverent
tone of his voice, Kat Mason was either a great deal more beautiful than her photograph made out, or she was some kind of witch. She certainly seemed to be adored by the tenant farmers they’d visited, almost all of whom had managed to drop her name into the conversation alongside that of Constance Mytton-Gough, always with chuckles and smiles. Seth’s name made them sit up and clear their throats
nervously.

Dougie was concerned by the high degree of local suspicion and mistrust about Seth and his plans, particularly from the neighbouring hunt, the Brom and Lem, who, Dair reported, were bristling that they were no longer welcome on Eardisford’s fifteen thousand acres, which accounted for almost their entire Wednesday country. A furious letter was waiting for Dougie when he arrived
back at the mill, addressed To Whom It May Concern and signed by almost every one of Eardisford’s neighbouring landowners to support the hunt’s long-standing service to the estate that had once been its home. As the new pack’s master, one of Dougie’s first responsibilities was to forge relationships with those whose land adjoined his country, and he’d not been given an easy start. He guessed swanning
into the point-to-point would not improve local opinion of him.

Having plundered the fridge in the noisy kitchen at the mill – filled with green sludge health shakes, he discovered rather crabbily – Dougie planned to take a walk alongside the millstream to get a closer look at Lake Farm, but he was hit by a wall of jet-lag and crawled into bed. Within two hours, jet-lag had turned to fever
and he sweated his way through an uncomfortable, aching night as twenty-four-hour flu took hold to welcome him back to England.

He awoke from nightmares of being chased by tigers as he galloped through burning forests to find Dollar looking down at him, arms crossed and eyebrows aloft.

‘I was just dreaming about you.’ He stretched out lazily, not caring too much where the
bedding fell. The fever had passed, but he still ached, his head pounded and he was ravenous.

‘You will get up. We have horses to see. I take it your quarters are comfortable?’

Propping himself up on one elbow, he rubbed sleep from his eyes with the other hand and raked back his hair to smile at her. ‘Actually, they could do with a massage. This bed’s seriously hard.’

Her
beautiful face remained expressionless as she appraised his body. ‘There is much work to do. You have a good physique, but you looked better in
High Noon
.’

He laughed, unbothered by the criticism, which he thought was probably fair. ‘I worked out a lot for that role.’

‘It was a very good movie.’ She was still staring at him, the dark eyes glowing. But then she ruined it by saying,
‘You smell bad. Take a shower.’

Wrapping the sheet around his hips, he wandered to the window where a sunny English spring morning cheered him, birds frantically flirting in the branches of the alders and willows alongside the millstream. ‘I prefer baths.’ He knew a shower was more practical, but the bath took for ever to run, which might buy him the time to wake up. Plus he needed to soak
off the flu. He guessed he must have sweated off some weight.

‘You have twenty minutes.’

He turned on the taps, looking up at her through the rising steam, giving her the biggest, sexiest Everett Effect smile in his armoury. ‘Would you care to join me?’

Red spots in her cheeks, she thrust up her chin and stalked to the stairs. ‘I have calls to make.’

‘She blushes.’
Dougie whistled to himself, clambering into the steaming bubbles. ‘How interesting.’ He closed his eyes, wishing he didn’t feel quite so rough. The muscle aches were punishing, a combination of detoxing, a long flight and flu.

Twenty minutes later, having failed to summon a signal on her phone anywhere in the vicinity, Dollar found Dougie still deep in the bath.

‘Please dress and
come downstairs. We will be late.’

‘Thank God you’re back!’

‘Secular language only,’ she reminded him.

‘Thank fuck you’re back. I’m stuck. Cramp. Need a hand.’ He reached out, his face white with pain.

She hurried to help, but as soon as her hand closed round his, he let out a groan and rocked forwards, almost pulling her into the bath with him. His body was a slithery,
muscular mass of sweet-smelling spasm as he rocked back again, the blue eyes filled with apology and amusement. ‘Sorry. Bad idea. Be gone in a minute.’

Letting go and straightening up, she watched helplessly as he hissed through his teeth and braced his well-built arms against the sides, huge golden shoulders quilted with tension, handsome face paler than ever.

‘This is a common
problem?’

‘Never had it before,’ he said honestly. ‘Not very manned up. Sorry, but it bloody hurts more than riding a battle scene with a broken arm, which I did, incidentally, just in case it helps convince you that I’m not a total girl’s blouse.’

‘I don’t need convincing,’ she said huskily.

Cramp subsiding, he looked up at her, the apologetic smile transforming into the
big Everett come-on, as charmingly upfront and sexy as a four-poster made up with Egyptian cotton and scattered with rose petals. ‘That’s good to know.’

‘You feel better?’

‘Enormously. I’m sorry you got soaked.’ The smile widened, blue eyes playful. ‘Although that’s a girl’s blouse I’d be happy to look at all day.’

Glancing down, she saw that her shirt was dripping, her lacy
red bra clearly visible through it.

‘Would you mind passing me a towel?’ He loomed out of the bath.

She made no move, red spots in her cheeks deepening, her eyes unable to tear themselves away from a glorious full-frontal erection. ‘Bananas.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘For cramp.’ She looked up at his face. ‘Eat bananas. The potassium will help.’ She took a towel from the
rail to thrust to him. ‘We leave in five minutes.’ Poker-faced once more, she went to investigate the tumble-dryer.

Dollar had been busy, procuring Dougie a car and a small Indian groom, who spoke no English and appeared to be called Gut.

Dougie complained about both: the car was a flashy all-electric estate that would never take the workload around the estate’s green lanes,
and Gut, who had been working for a top flat-racing training yard, was built like a flea.

En route to see his first horse at a local point-to-point yard, he finally found he had mobile reception and called his father to ask if his old pick-up could come out of the tractor barn where it had been doubling as a chicken roost for several years.