Seated comfortably in a leather armchair as they smoked cigars over postprandial brandies, Rakesley had regarded Stoke with a restrained manner of sufferance. Stoke wasn’t the first—or last—to appear to kiss the ring of the young, but powerful, Duke of Rakesley.
Unable to watch his brother ingratiate himself to Rakesley, Bran had taken himself off to the stables. Though they were to conduct the Thoroughbred business the next day, he’d wanted to see Somerton’s renowned stables for himself first.
They didn’t disappoint.
The stables that housed the Thoroughbreds were nothing less magnificent than a medieval cathedral, from its soaring vaulted ceiling supported by massive stone columns to its immaculately clean, herringbone red-bricked floor. It was with no small amount of awe that Bran walked down the center aisle, peering into the boxes of the best horseflesh in England.
He’d been only two-and-twenty, fresh out of Cambridge, and attempting to figure out what it was he wanted to do with his life. His first and foremost love was horses. He had a way with them. If he were a less titled personage, he would’ve been a trainer. But with theLordin front of his name and no money behind it, he would have to go about it in a different way. He just hadn’t quite worked it out yet.
A figure appeared at the end of the aisle. A lady who immediately noticed him, the tilt of her head said. Confidence in her long-legged stride—it would only be a few months before he knew intimately how long—she marched toward him.
She was dark of hair and eyes, with an olive complexion that thrived beneath the sun, and possessed of a neat little dimple in the center of her chin.
But the part of her beauty that unexpectedly captivated him was her smile.
A smile that allowed one to see straight into her soul and know it for all that was pure and bright.
Curiosity shone in her dark, luminous eyes. “Are you the earl or the brother?”
Those were her first words to him.
“The,erm, brother.” Her directness put him on the back foot, even as he felt a responding smile pull at the corners of his mouth. “And you are?”
“The sister.”
Ah.Rakesley’s sister, Lady Artemis, who wasn’t yet out, and therefore hadn’t taken supper with them.
“You’re Lord Branwell, then?”
“I am.”
“And are you as mad about Thoroughbreds as all the rest of the gentlemen of my brother’s acquaintance?”
“I appreciate all horses.” He wasn’t so much defending himself as explaining himself. An important distinction. For a reason he didn’t yet understand, he wanted her to see him—to see he didn’t contain a mere single dimension. “Every type of horse has been bred for a different sort of labor—even racing is a labor—so shouldn’t we appreciate each as they are?”
Lady Artemis’s eyes narrowed as she watched him speak, as if she were soaking in his every word—as if his every word mattered.
“You know,” she said, at last. “I believe you.”
A laugh startled out of him. “I haven’t given you any reason not to.”
A smile pulled at one corner of lush, berry-red lips. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe all the sorts you can’t believe when it comes to horses. Something about these perfect, lovely creatures can bring out the ugliest nature in people.”
That was the instant.
The very instant Bran’s world inverted and he became ruinously besotted with Lady Artemis Keating.
Her head canted subtly to the side. “What are you doing a month from now?”
“Pardon?”
“Will you be in London?”
“I could be.”
The little smile that tugged at the other corner of her mouth said she’d heard it—the conditional.
He could be in London in a month’s timeif…
