Kiss and Tell (69 page)

‘Are you ill?’ Faith reached for her forehead in concern.

‘Alcohol poisoning? Bad food?’ Lemon guessed.

But Beccy shook her head wildly, imploring them to leave her alone.

‘What is it, Beccy?’ Faith pleaded, kneeling down beside the bed. ‘You must tell us.’

For a moment a blade of panic lanced her chest as she wondered whether Beccy had been the one outside her room last night, had heard her and Lemon and was reacting like this because she was jealous.

But then she whispered ‘Hugo’ and started crying.

‘What about Hugo?’ Perching on the opposite side of the bed, Lemon stroked Beccy’s shoulder the same way as he did when handling one of the more nervous horses: not his usual brash, tactless self at all.

‘It was all my fault,’ she sobbed. ‘He kissed me, but then it all went wrong.’

Lemon’s gaze met Faith’s across the bed, his pale-lashed grey eyes bulging in alarm.

‘What went wrong?’ Faith asked carefully.

But Beccy was muttering and sobbing nonsensically now ‘… in the stable yard … all those filthy rugs … so ashamed …’

‘Did Hugo attack you, Beccy?’

‘No! It was a bit rough, maybe, but he was frightened of getting caught. I feel so terrible. It was all my fault.’ The sobs stopped her being able to say any more.

Lemon opened his mouth but Faith hushed him with her hand. ‘She’s had enough right now – we’ll talk more later. Make her a cup of tea, Lem. She can stay here. We’ll keep checking on her, and as far as the others are concerned, she’s ill today.’

There were no bank holidays for horses. From first light, Lough and then Hugo appeared looking somewhat the worse for wear and
began working in the indoor school. When he finally appeared on the yard Rory looked terrible, making Faith think that Lemon was right; he must have spent the night womanising. But he was the only one of the three men to notice that Beccy was missing.

‘Beccy overdo it last night?’ he asked.

‘Something like that,’ Lem replied.

‘Bloody lightweight,’ Rory grumbled, tacking up Rio to follow the others into the indoor school, which was the only safe surface until the frost thawed.

Lemon and Faith went into a huddle once he was out of earshot. ‘Hugo doesn’t look remotely shifty or worried.’

‘Why should he?’ Faith sighed. ‘He doesn’t think he did anything wrong.’

‘He tried to
rape
her!’

‘Keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t know that for certain.’

‘As good as! You heard what she said. She should report it.’

‘What, her word against his? A highly strung ex drug trafficker with a proven history of dishonesty and unpredictable behaviour up against the nation’s favourite gold-medal-winning, happily married toff? I think not.’

Lem reluctantly conceded the point. ‘I won’t let this drop. Hugo’s a heartless shit.’

Faith lowered her voice to a breath: ‘We’re going to have to take care of her, Lem – prop her up. And that means she mustn’t know about what happened between
us
last night.’

‘Good though, wasn’t it?’ Lem growled, eager for a repeat performance at their earliest convenience.

‘It was great,’ Faith said quickly, ‘but we mustn’t tell her, and we
mustn’t
do it again.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘She’s sensitive. She needs to feel included right now. If we’re to stand a chance of finding out what really happened to her last night we have to support her totally. Totally.’ With that, Faith headed off to groom Humpty for Rory’s second ride.

Watching her retreating back, Lemon groaned, hoping that they uncovered the full story as quickly as possible so that he and Faith could resume their sexual co-education.

He took his frustrations out on the sack of rock salt by the horse-walker,
hacking at it manically with a shovel to split the plastic before digging it in and throwing showers of it down on the rubber track so that they could get some horses moving safely in the mechanical exerciser to make up for the frozen fields.

Unlike the dissolving salt, Lem’s hatred and resentment towards Hugo had crystallised still further. It had been building up slowly over weeks, but what had happened to Beccy, combined with Hugo’s murderous mood since Lough’s arrival, had accelerated the chemical reaction.

‘Fucking Hugo.’ He dug his shovel blade deeper and deeper into the split belly of the salt sack. ‘Stuck-up bastard. He deserves a fucking big fall.’

But it was Rory who took a fall that morning when bringing Rio back to the yard. The horse caught a vein of untreated ice under one shoe, his leg slipping right underneath him so that Rory was forced to kick out the stirrups and bail out, landing on his feet before his own heels encountered the ice and upended him on to his bottom.

‘Emergency dismount!’ Rory joked when Faith raced over in alarm to check he was all right. It was an embarrassing fall, but both horse and rider were fine. ‘Guess I need some of that superglue I used to mend the china horse.’

Faith looked at him blankly, wondering what he was talking about. She led Rio away to his stable, leaving Rory kicking the edge of the ice, lifting it with his toe into little sharp shards.

When Hugo cornered him later that morning to confirm that he was the one going to the States, he felt only relief.

‘MC is very much looking forward to seeing you again.’ Hugo gave him a wise look.

Rory sighed, realising that as one door closed, another
porte
had opened in the storm.

The following week, five of Haydown’s top horses, including Rio and The Fox, flew out to Florida accompanied by Jenny. Hugo and Rory were to follow two days later.

Hugo had been making this annual excursion for many years with Tash, traditionally leaving his staff to get the top competition horses fit at home. The decision to take the best of the four-star horses to the States with him this time was a new tactic that he was
using as a part of their fitness campaign, taking advantage of the warmer climate and the early competitions to start tuning them up himself.

Determined to break the deadlock Hugo had drunkenly alluded to, Tash planned to use her wifely wiles to give him a send-off that would linger in his mind. She knew they needed to talk more, but didn’t want a last-minute showdown, and she was secretly terrified of hearing something she couldn’t handle. Instead, she felt actions should speak louder than words.

But her attempts at romance were blighted from the start. Her first proper period since Amery was born arrived that week, coinciding with a streaming cold that she must have caught from a New Year’s guest. Soon her temperature was leaping well over a hundred and she was wiped out with fatigue. With spare tissues, cold capsules and panty-pads lined up in the bathroom, she donned her best new La Perla combination for a final seduction, but was a vision of snotty-nosed, red-eyed, sneezing ill health. Hugo charitably declined to take advantage, so she gratefully knocked back more paracetamol and slumped into a deep, feverish sleep while he headed downstairs to gather more riding gear to pack.

When he finally rejoined her in the bedroom, clanking about so noisily she woke up, it was the early hours, but she was feeling far too ill to worry what he’d been up to, or that he had to set off for the airport at dawn. Her throat full of razorblades, she got up to refill her water glass and take painkillers for her stomach cramps. The reading light was on and Hugo was sitting up in bed when she returned, making notes on a printed list.

‘I’m leaving written instructions.’ He looked up as she staggered around the bed. ‘I don’t trust Lough to do anything I say.’

‘I’ll make sure he does,’ she croaked, sagging back against the pillows, sweaty and shivery from her excursion.

‘No. Leave him alone, Tash. He can figure it out, and Lemon’s been here long enough to know the score. I want you to keep away from them both, understood?’ The harshness in his tone surprised Tash, but she was too weak to argue. She just longed to sleep again.

But for once Hugo had chosen this moment to open up. Casting the list aside, he wrapped an arm around her and pressed a kiss to her clammy temple.

‘You mustn’t trust Lough,’ he said softly. ‘He’s a loner. He hates people, especially women.’

Grateful for the warmth of his arm as her body fought to regulate its temperature, Tash nodded vaguely, lead weights of tiredness on her brow and eyes.

‘He has his own agenda.’ Hugo’s voice was so quiet it acted as a lullaby. ‘He understands horses a lot better than he understands humans. He uses people, and I don’t want him to use you to get at me.’

Drifting off to sleep, Tash’s cold-filled brain took a while to register what he was saying. Now, her itchy eyes reopened. She was suddenly feeling very hot.

‘Why would he want to get at you?’

There was a long pause. She swallowed flaming ashes, her face burning, sinuses screaming with the effort of staying awake.

‘That’s not important.’ Hugo stroked her sweaty hair. ‘It’s what he might do that matters.’

Pushing away his arm, which was making her overheat like mad, Tash struggled to sit up, head spinning. ‘You don’t think he’s going to hurt us, surely?’

‘No, of course not,’ he said quickly. ‘I’d just rather you kept your distance.’

She sagged back against the pillows. ‘What is it between you two?’

A muscle was slamming in Hugo’s cheek, although his voice stayed calm. ‘He has a lot of secrets, none of them very nice.’

They could hear snuffling on the baby monitor, indicating that Amery, who also had the cold, would start bawling at any second, but as Tash peeled back the covers ready to go and comfort him, Hugo reached across and tucked her back in. ‘You need to rest. I’ll go.’

Soon she could hear him on the monitor, whispering to his son as he settled him back to sleep. She closed her eyes in relief, not sure if they were streaming so much because of the head cold or the panic tears that were starting to mount. Within minutes her nose was an unstoppable tap as she used tissue after tissue, trumpeting and snorting like a drowning elephant. Hearing Hugo’s soothing noises on the monitor made it all the worse as she thought about their young family, her little fortress of love that was under threat from Lough.

Nobody could deny the enmity between the two men. Tash had put it down to Lough’s appalling travel delays and the controversy surrounding them, but now she started to suspect there was more to it.

When Hugo returned the bed was piled high with tissues and Tash was hiccupping madly, her throat so sore she couldn’t speak. She looked at him blearily, taking in the beauty of his cool blue eyes and those long, strong limbs that wrapped themselves around her now, so secure and reassuring, the ultimate safety net.

‘What secrets does Lough hold against you?’ she finally managed to whisper.

‘Let’s not talk about it any more.’ His voice was low and hoarse as his kissed her wet cheek. He reached away to switch off the light.

Tash wanted to wail ‘I have to know!’ but her head felt as though it was being boiled in hot wax, so all she could manage was a groaning sob. Then, to her shame, her eyes and nose started to spout again.

Hugo was forced to turn the light back on before they both drowned. He reached for fresh tissues and handed them to her, his face drawn and tired. There was a long pause, during which Tash blew her nose a lot and Hugo ran his hands through his hair, unspeakably tense.

At last, she cleared the torrent. ‘Is it V?’

There. She had said it.

But Tash’s cold had done her enunciation no favours, and thinking that she was blaming herself, Hugo immediately launched into a rebuttal: ‘No, it’s not you. Darling Tash, you are perfection, although you are too bloody self-deprecating by half. It could never be you. I don’t deserve you.’

Remembering Zoe’s recent words of warning, Tash let out a horrified croak. ‘I don’t deserve you’ was a giveaway of infidelity.

There was an agonising pause, during which Beetroot unsympathetically re-nested at the end of the bed, turning around and around, nosing the covers this way and that and then plumping down and commencing a noisy clean-up of her paws.

Tash’s throat was as dry as her nose and face were wet.

‘I know you buy flowers in Waitrose!’ she suddenly blurted.

He looked at her, rubbing his head in confusion. ‘Is that against the law?’

She turned away, too strangled by tears to speak.

‘I don’t know what you have against them, Tash, but if it helps I promise to use the florist in Marlbury High Street from now on.’

Tash was appalled by this apparently open admission of regular flower purchases. Her eyes itched and stung so much they were practically fused shut, and her nose was poring forth non-stop. When she tried to ask him again about the secret he shared with Lough and whether it was that he had a mistress, she had a coughing fit that gripped her for almost a minute. Hugo waited it out.

‘You’re ill and we’re tired,’ he said eventually in a low voice, leaning across to kiss her sweaty forehead. ‘Let’s leave it for now. We all have nights we regret.’ He reached out to turn off the light again.

Tash knew he wasn’t talking about tonight, but however many times the voice in her head screamed for more information, her pounding heart denied it. She could only take the truth in tiny doses, like Lemsip and throat sweets.

Pulling the covers up to her chin she turned to face him in the darkness. His lips were the best analgesic she had taken all night.

Even though the kiss was marred by the fact that Tash was so snotty that she had to breathe through her mouth in rapid gulps, it was the most intimate they had shared in many weeks, a deep draw of love that transcended colds, cramps, his loose crowns and Beetroot loudly moving on from cleaning her paws to hoovering her rear end. Tash only wished she felt sexier, but although Hugo’s flagpole raised hopefully against her side she had to hold up the last white handkerchief and surrender to sleep. As they dozed through the brief hours until dawn wrapped in one another’s arms, she found her head full of disturbing, muddled dreams in which her husband had a harem of women to equal his string of horses, and Lough Strachan was trying to steal them all like a rustler in a bad Western.