Artemis snorted. “That’s one way of putting it. Do you know the story of the lost Thoroughbreds?”
Bran nodded. “I know it. The Darley Arabian covered every mare in Yorkshire, not just the ones with long pedigrees.”
“And the lost Thoroughbreds were sired.”
Bran shrugged. “Horse breeding is a dodgy business. Always has been.”
Though they hadn’t been looking to, their gazes caught. Of a sudden, an awkward, aware silence fell between them. They’d been conversing aswhat?
Not friends, of course. Butfriendly? Friendly acquaintances? Friendly rivals?
A frown pulled at her mouth. Any explanation that put their relationship on ground other than former acquaintances and possible enemies didn’t sit right inside her.
Bran’s scowl said he’d reached approximately the same conclusion. “We’ve gotten all we can out of this training session,” he said, gruff and final. “We’ll be on our way.”
Back to the Roost, of course.
It was only now she noticed that while she’d been watching the proceedings from her hunter, Bran had been standing on the platform the entire time. She glanced around. “Where is your mount?”
As if her question had the power to change the very composition of the air and him within it, he went as still as ancient stone. “I no longer ride.”
That same stillness took hold within her and froze the breath in her lungs. “Of course you ride.” She wasn’t sure why it mattered to her—but it did. Branrode. It formed a large part of his identity in her mind. “You’re one of the best horsemen I’ve ever seen.”
His jaw clenched, and his gaze would have been inscrutable, except for the single emotion that blazed within—fury. “No longer,” he ground out.
Sudden heat flooded her.Of course. His leg injury … He’d been standing in one place this entire time, so she’d almost forgotten it. Again, she glanced around. “Have you a carriage to take you back to the Roost?”
He shook his head and directed an order to a lad. When he turned to her again, his brow lifted, as if to say,Are we still on this subject?
They were.
“It will take you several hours to walk back to the Roost.” It was a considerable walk for a person with two fully functioning legs—a fact she would keep to herself.
“Twohours,” he corrected.
“But youcanwalk.”
He snorted derisively. “If you want to call it that.” No mistaking that corrosive note of bitterness.
She had a point to make—and he would hear it. “If you can walk, you can ride.”
There, simple.
“Artemis,” he said, fury unabated, “it is none of your concern.”
It wasn’t his fury or his general irritability that had her mouth snapping shut and her hands taking up the reins of her mount.
It was that he was correct.
It was none of her concern.
Nothing about Lord Branwell Mallory was.
Without another word, she turned her hunter and encouraged him into a canter without a backward glance, even as her mind tumbled with a confusion of emotion.
Artemis, it is none of your concern.
Again she found herself wondering about his injuries—the ones visible … and the ones not. Was it the leg injury—the injury she could see—that was preventing him from riding? Or wasit an altogether different injury preventing him—an injury she couldn’t see?
