Rebel Baron (16 page)

      
She looked up at him, and that awareness hummed between them once more. “Perhaps there is no such thing as the romantic love written about in books. I don't know. Once...long ago, I believed in it, but found it chimerical. Marriages are far safer based on practical considerations.”

      
“If you want to be safe.” He shrugged, cursing himself for saying that, uncertain just why he had. Or what he meant by it.

      
Lorilee, who had bade adieu to Abbie and Marian, trotted Taffy across the soft grass, approaching her mother and the baron. She noted that they appeared to be in some sort of intense conversation. Her mother was looking up at him strangely. And he appeared bemused, for want of a better word. As soon as they heard her draw near, whatever spell had held them was broken and they greeted her with smiles which she felt were forced.

      
“You're a natural rider, Miss Auburn,” he said smoothly.

      
“I only wish I could convince Mother to join me, but she's a stick about horses.”

      
“I can barely control one carriage horse and she wants me bouncing on the back of a spirited riding mount,” Miranda exclaimed. “One might believe my daughter wishes me to break my neck.”

      
The teasing light in her mother's eyes kept Lori from vehement denials. “You can do anything to which you set your mind,” she replied instead.

      
“I second that,” Brand replied, but Miranda shook her head.

      
“I am content to watch the two of you ride.” The implication was clear. If they were seen on the Row together, it could only mean that he was courting her with her mother's blessings.

      
“Will you show us how that great black beast wins so many purses?” Lori asked him with a sunny smile. “Perhaps we can have a race before we get to the Row...if you will handicap a lady?”

      
He touched the brim of his hat. “My pleasure—and Reiver's, isn't it, boy?” he asked, patting the stallion's neck. The big black raised his head as if nodding assent. “I'll give you forty yards. The race is to the hedges by the pond and back. Agreed?”

      
With that, Lorilee was off, leaning gracefully forward over the little mare's neck.

      
Brand waited longer than the agreed-upon forty yards before kneeing Reiver into a graceful gallop across the wide-open field before them.

      
Miranda watched him hold back the powerful stallion so Lori could win the race. The thought struck her that they had made no wager, which made her sad. If Lori were smitten with a young swain, she would most certainly have made some flirtatious bet. Miranda had been out enough in society as her daughter neared the age of debut to know how such things were done. Lori knew, too.

      
But this is no game of flirtation and romance. It is a sensible arrangement,
she reminded herself. A tightness began forming in her chest, and almost as if sensing her restiveness, the carriage horse suddenly shied.

      
“Whoa,” she commanded, tightening her hold on the reins as the horse began to neigh and rear up. “What the devil—” She got out no more than that when the beast suddenly bolted off, heading for a ditch some hundred yards distant, surrounded by trees. Miranda yanked frantically on the reins, only to find them abruptly loosen in her hands. The horse had nothing holding him back! She could see the useless ribbons caught up in the harness, flapping around his legs, only adding to his inexplicable terror as he ran.

      
The ground beneath her carriage wheels was a blur of greens and browns as the strong young gelding picked up speed at an alarming rate. The carriage was light as a feather and offered no resistance to his run. Thoughts flashed through her mind with lightning speed as the trees and ditch drew closer. Better to jump than risk crashing into a massive oak trunk or overturning in the ditch? But what if she jumped and her ballooning skirts caught in the wheels? She'd be pulled beneath them and crushed!

      
Brand and Lorilee had already made the turn at the pond and were headed back. Lori was still in the lead when Brand heard Miranda's cries for help. Fortunately, because he'd played the gentleman allowing his lady to win, he was nearer to the carriage. Wheeling Reiver about, he headed in a direct course to intercept the runaway.

      
His head bent over the black's neck, he urged his mount on in earnest now, racing flat out. Winning the Ascot Gold Cup paled in comparison to winning this contest. Miranda Auburn's life was at stake.

      
She could hear the pounding of hoof beats behind her, faint over the rush of the wind and jingle of the harness. And most of all, the furious pounding of her own heartbeats. She leaned out of the carriage and saw Brand, saw the grim desperation on his face as he spurred Reiver recklessly faster.

      
Then she turned to where he was looking and her pounding heart froze in her chest. The horse was racing directly toward the trunk of a huge gnarled oak tree.

Chapter Eight

      
Brand could see her white face as she leaned out of the carriage and turned back toward him. He was five yards from the carriage and the carriage was five yards from the tree as the horse veered frantically at the last moment to avoid the obstacle in its path. There would be an even finish unless Reiver could beat the odds.

      
The black responded to the desperate challenge. With one mighty lunge he leaped forward as Brand yelled, “Miranda! Jump!”

      
She cried out something indistinct to him as the vehicle began to spin in a sickening arc toward the tree. His body leaned toward her, arms outstretched. She leaped, her body seemingly suspended in midair for a breathless instant, arms reaching for his neck.

      
He swooped low and caught her to his side. Reiver veered sharply to avoid disaster as the light slipper Victoria smashed into the tree. The sounds of wood and leather being ripped apart and the screams of the gelding struggling to break free filled the air. The horse lunged over and over with crazed strength until the last pieces of the harness snapped. Then it bolted away as if shot from a cannon.

      
Neither Brand nor Miranda noticed. Reiver, lathered and winded, slowed to a walk, then stopped with his sides heaving. The baron's shocking breach of propriety in using her Christian name was a faint memory teasing the periphery of her mind. Her skirts were spread across the stallion's flank and her body molded to his as he held her in his arms. Unthinking, she buried her head against his neck, inhaling his scent, the essence of life from this man who had saved her yet again.

      
She could smell the elemental maleness of him, the faint musk of his skin, the slight rasp of a heavy beard already starting to grow so early in the afternoon. Never had she been so aware of a man's body. How hard it was, how different from her own. Her husband had not, even in the intimacies of the marriage bed, inspired such feelings. Certainly Kent Aimesley had not. If such thoughts had been conscious, she would have died of embarrassment; but in the aftermath of a harrowing escape from death, they remained deeply buried.

      
She clung to him.

      
And he held her fast.

      
Lori had seen the runaway carriage from a distance when the sound of Reiver's hoof beats had caused her to look over her shoulder. Terrified that her mother was going to die, she had turned, too far behind the baron to catch up. All she could do was pray he would be in time to prevent an unthinkable tragedy. Tears of sheer terror blinded her as she drew nearer.

      
She blinked them away, watching the scene unfold—the carriage splintering a bare instant after he swept her mother from the jaws of sure death; Reiver carrying them past the thrashing gelding while the baron's strong arm held Miranda against his side. As Lorilee drew nearer, she observed the way they clung to each other. Then they slowly broke apart. He lowered her mother to the ground, quickly dismounting, his hands supporting her lest she faint. But Lorilee knew Miranda Auburn had never fainted in her life.

      
Still the two of them stood looking into each other's eyes. Although a respectable space was visible between them now, neither of them relinquished the hold on the other's arms. Instead, they slowly slid their hands down until they were joined together like two dancers at the start of a country reel. Suddenly Lori could picture them that way—see her mother as a young woman with a dashing partner, eager to begin...what?

      
Surely not a courtship. After all, her mother had recently turned thirty-six! To one barely eighteen, that seemed a formidable age. The baron himself was thirty, according to a story she'd read in
The Times
. Her suitor was twelve years her senior, and she'd felt that age difference keenly, even though she knew it was hardly an unusual one. Indeed, it was far less than the forty-two years that had separated her own parents.

      
But her mother and the baron were only six years apart, even if he was the younger of the two. Was such a thing acceptable? She looked at them again and decided it just might be.

      
They shared an understanding of business matters and were both tirelessly hard workers. That was one of the reasons her mother had hand-picked him to marry her. They also laughed at jokes and argued about political matters she did not comprehend. The only thing they did not have in common was a love of horses. Suddenly Lori realized that was the sole interest she and the baron did share.

      
Yes, it could work!

      
She reined in Taffy and jumped down just after they broke apart. Her mother fussed with straightening her dress, something she normally never did. The baron turned his attention to his horse, patting Reiver's neck and murmuring to him. She could tell that both of them were shaken—not only by the brush with death, but also by what had passed between them immediately afterward. Something neither of them wanted to acknowledge.

      
“Are you all right, Mother?” she asked as Miranda rushed to her and embraced her.

      
“Yes, dearheart, I'm fine...just a bit shaken.” She attempted a jaunty smile that wobbled.

      
“I was so frightened. How did you lose control of Bally that way?”

      
“She didn't,” Brand answered for her. He held up one of the reins and showed them where it had been cleanly cut just over halfway through before it broke. “If the other ribbons have been tampered with the same way, someone deliberately intended grave harm for one of you.” He and Miranda exchanged a telling glance. He knew she was recalling the thief in front of the opera house.

      
Lorilee blanched, but Miranda said more calmly now, “Bally jumped and reared up very suddenly. That's when I yanked hard on the ribbons. When he began to run out of control, I felt them snapping.”

      
The implication was clear. If the horse had been deliberately spooked so it would bolt, then whoever did it knew that Miranda, not her daughter, would be the victim.

      
“Let's just see what might have made Bally react so violently.” Brand swung back on Reiver and trotted after the carriage horse, who was now grazing peacefully down in a swale about a hundred yards away.

      
He returned, leading Bally. By this time a small crowd was gathering, inquiring solicitously about Miranda's wellbeing and gawking at the smashed ruins of the carriage.

      
Miranda assured everyone that she was unharmed, and gradually the curiosity seekers dispersed. Lori's friends Abbie and Marian were torn between offering assurances that their mothers would have been prostrate after such an adventure and exclaiming about how positively dashing it was of the baron to have rescued her.

      
While Lori tried to soothe her agitated companions, Miranda watched as Brand pulled off his riding gloves and began to examine the gelding. He stopped in the midst of checking the horse's right front leg, then held up his bare hand. She could see a smear of blood on it.

      
“Something, a stone or sharp missile, hit him, hard,” he said with grim certainty.

      
“I thought...perhaps I heard a slight hissing sound just before he screamed and reared up,” Miranda said, although she did not sound positive.

      
Brand looked around the park. People were scattered here and there, some on horseback, some in carriages or strolling afoot. Most were fashionably dressed, but shabby vendors and other less savory sorts were sprinkled among them. Trees and shrubs could have hidden someone who had a good aim with a slingshot. Perhaps even a blowgun of some sort.

      
Wanting to see what her mother and the baron were discussing, Lori bade her friends farewell and hurried over to them. He was bare-handed, just as he had been that night at the opera. The sight bothered her. But not nearly as much as the blood he'd wiped from Bally's foreleg, which was beginning to swell. “Someone is trying to kill you,” she whispered incredulously to her mother.