Her fingers traced the star on Lady Daisy’s forehead. “Is this how she came by her name?”
“I thought it looked exactly like a daisy.”
“Señora Margarita.” Lady Daisy emitted a soft whicker at the Spanish version of her name.
Percy’s suspicions were aroused. “For someone who hasn’t spent any time with horses, you are quite at ease.”
“Mm-hmm,” was all Isabel gave him by way of reply.
The woman was beautiful and intelligent, but those traits weren’t half as attractive as her natural communion with Lady Daisy. Horses understood people in a way people didn’t, or couldn’t, understand each other. And Lady Daisy understood, and liked, Isabel.
Percy snapped to. He shouldn’t be thinking about this woman’s attractiveness in any context. “Shall we conduct our lesson? I have a day to get on with,” he added with an unnecessary churlishness.
After one last stroke of the snip on Lady Daisy’s muzzle, Isabel stepped back. Percy led them to a large box stall where they would have ample room to practice mounting. While he moved to Lady Daisy’s flank to check the girths and straps of the saddle, Isabel was again cooing in the horse’s ear. He averted his gaze and kept to the task. He wouldn’t dwell on how damned attractive it was. The woman was a temptation, and that was a fact.
There.
He’d identified a source of the tension between them. Now he should be able to control it. He only had to get through this mounting lesson.
Mounting lesson?Instantly, his mind conjured an image, one that didn’t help his problem with temptation.
He cleared his throat with a gruff harrumph that startled both horse and woman. “When you are ready.”
One parting stroke of Lady Daisy’s mane, and Isabel met Percy at the horse’s flank. He dove right into it. “I’ll hold my hands out like so”—he laced his fingers together and extended them forward as he crouched to a squat—“and you step on and push off as I spring up, placing your right leg over the pommel and left foot on the footrest. Understand?”
“Like this?” She placed her boot in his hands and, before he knew it, executed his instructions with a fluid grace that had him staring up at her, flabbergasted.
Either she was the most natural horsewoman the world had ever seen or . . . His eyes narrowed. “No one gets it perfectly right their first time.”
She stared down at him, enigmatic. “I would guess there is a first time for everything.”
“And you’ve never mounted a horse before now?”
She shrugged, and he knew he’d been had. “Shall we go for a ride?”
The minx. What was her game? In answer to her question, he shook his head. “Not in the heat of the day. It might be too much for Lady. I thought we would be spending more time learning to mount, but it appears you’re a prodigy.” He grabbed a handful of oats to feed Lady Daisy when he heard the delicate clearing of a throat. Isabel stared down at him expectantly.
“Mayhap you could assist me in dismounting?”
Instant dread churned Percy’s gut. “Of course.”
He should have called for a groom. Or fetched the mounting block from the tack room. Instead, he found himself settling into position to help her down, arms extended up to receive her. The moment her hands pressed into his shoulders, and his fingers tightened about her waist, he knew he’d been wrong, wrong, wrong as the heat from her palm seeped through the thin layers of his linen shirt to find his skin, and he feltit, that spark of awareness, that flash of desire.
She tipped forward, trusting, as he steadied her down, her fingers clenching and digging into bunched muscle. Her toes touched the ground, and her body lightly brushed against his for what would have been a fleeting tick of time. Instead, he found his fingers clutching her tighter and pulling her into him. An action primal, instinctive, driven by his body’s response to her.
She inhaled a gasp that held, and her eyes flew up to meet his. He read confusion there, but desire, too . . . The spark of awareness flared into a banked fire that only needed a whisper of oxygen to turn into white-hot flame.
Her responding desire was such oxygen.
Experience understood where this feeling would take him. It would consume him whole until nothing was left.
He’d spent years—years—erecting defenses against his natural tendency toward wickedness. He wouldn’t allow it to win today.
His hands released their hold on her, and he took a step back. Her brow furrowed.
“I suggest you continue with the headache fiction to my family,” he said, his voice nearly unrecognizable to his own ears. “It will make the next few days easier.”
Isabel blinked, then squared her shoulders. The glint in her eye said she’d recovered herself. “And what sort of bride would that make me?”
