Leaving Yorkshire wasn’t an option.
He was here to train a racehorse.
The letter from Sir Abstrupus had arrived a fortnight ago. His Thoroughbred, Radish, needed a trainer so he could run the St. Leger Stakes. Bran’s first instinct had been to tell Sir Abstrupus to find another trainer. Bran hadn’t left Stoke Hall in six months, and had no intention of doing so for at least another six months.
Then he’d continued reading the letter.
If Radish won the St. Leger, Bran could keep the entire £3,000 purse.
That was the detail that had him sitting upright in his chair.
Sir Abstrupus had no interest in the money. Rather, he was determined to prove that a Yorkshire Thoroughbred who hadn’t come up through the Newmarket system—he’d gone on at length in that section of the letter—could compete with the best of them and win.
Bran had sat very still for an indeterminate length of time as his mind ran through the logic.
If he trained Radish, and Radish won the St. Leger, then £3,000 was his for the keeping.
At dawn, he’d been on a post coach heading north.
Sir Abstrupus had made him an offer impossible to refuse.
Not if Bran was to do right by Gwyneth.
As ever, guilt regarding his sister’s situation struck through him.
Gwyneth had been a child when Bran had joined the Light Dragoons and left her under the guardianship of their brother, the Earl of Stoke. While it appeared Gwyneth had been well looked after by a loyal governess, their wastrel brother had gambled away their sister’s dowry and everythingelse unentailed in his possession. Only the family pile in Cambridgeshire remained ten years later.
Now nineteen years of age, Gwyneth should have already come out in society. But with no money for dresses or even reputable lodging in London, it was impossible.
Then came Sir Abstrupus’s letter with its possibility of a different narrative.
Gwyneth could have her season.
She was a beautiful, intelligent, and capable young lady; she would make the most of it.
Just as she’d been doing all the years Bran had been away.
As Bran’s useless future stretched before him, here was a useful thing he could do.
Ahead, the stables came into view. Horse stables were where he’d spent much of his life, from youth all the way through his military career in the cavalry, and he knew them down to his bones. He could enter a stable anywhere in the world and instantly know his place—even now.
Even after everything.
But as he made his slow, hitching way toward the stables, he saw not a place of refuge or usefulness, but rather a portal to the past.
It wasin a stable that he’d first encountered Lady Artemis Keating.
Not at her come-out ball.
That would happen a month later.
Rather, they’d met weeks before, by chance.
In her brother’s stable.
Just past the stroke of ten at night.
Bran had been visiting the Duke of Rakesley’s famed racing stable, Somerton, with his brother, who had only recently been elevated to the title of earl after the death of their father six months earlier. A young earl at seven-and-twenty, Stoke wanted to prove himself an up-and-comer by purchasing a Thoroughbred from the Duke of Rakesley, who was a young duke at twenty. Except Rakesley had been a duke nearly all his life and had nothing to prove to anyone—and possessed of all the arrogance such a view of oneself would produce.
