On the beach studded with driftwood, kelp, and scurrying spiny spider crabs, he reached for his trousers, stepping his good leg inside first, then negotiating them up his bad leg. It was a slow process—the wet didn’t help—but one that had become familiar. The pain had diminished considerably over the last year, but much of the stiffness remained. Movement, he’d discovered, helped. So that was what he did for much of the day—he moved and kept moving.
Today, however, he didn’t immediately don shirt and boots. Instead, he grabbed them and made for the nearest sand dune, where he spread the shirt flat, then lay atop to watch the sunrise. He didn’t do this every day, as he usually preferred to make his way back to the Roost before the estate found its momentum for the day. But as he’d already stayed overlong this morning, he might as well reap the benefit. The arrangement of the clouds in the sky promised a beauty.
As the numbing sensation of the water faded from his body, a light breeze skated across damp skin, filtering through the fuzz of dark hair on his chest. A less dramatic sensation than frigid water soaking into bone, but a sensation altogetherpleasant.
This was new.
Nay, not new.
He’d experienced mere pleasantness in his life.
But how long had it been since he’d enjoyed it?
Perhaps he was savoring the feeling because it would be his last dawn swim for some weeks, as they were starting the walk with Radish to Doncaster today. Then, if the colt won the St. Leger, they would begin the process of transporting him south to Epsom Downs for the Race of the Century the very next day.
Or perhaps that wasn’t it, at all.
Perhaps it was two years on from his injury and some parts of him were ready to feel again.
He couldn’t help noticing it coincided with him leaving the family pile in Cambridgeshire and coming to the Roost and working with Radish.
But if he were to suppose all those elements combined to produce this glimmer of feeling, then he might have to allow for an additional ingredient.
Artemis.
Every day, without fail, rain or shine, she was at the practice track to observe Radish’s training. But unlike that first day, she kept her distance. Fifty yards was as close as she came—blessedly.
And the effect she produced within him—even after ten years … even at a distance of fifty yards—wasfeeling.
And it wasn’t mere pleasantness.
Rather, a riot of it.
A chaos of it.
As ever.
But not the same riot or chaos of feeling from ten years ago—he was clear on that point. Then, it had been all infatuation and lust and love. All too fast. All too much.
Now, the feeling was muddled with some anger and a dose of bitterness, and a rather substantial amount of bemusement. Further punctuating it all was a large question mark—why?
Why was she in his life again?
Down the shoreline, movement caught his eye. He turned his head and watched a horse and rider draw closer. The rider was a woman, the light sea breeze billowing her skirts to either side of her mount, dark hair, loose and flowing.
Recognition quickened the blood in his veins.
Artemis.
Once, for a short period, she’d been everything he wanted.
Years, it had been, since he’d allowed himself that memory.
Then she’d revealed herself to have been an altogether different sort of person from who he’d thought she was.
But she had been young … he had been young … and there had been all that confusion of feeling to contend with.
He realized that past betrayal no longer sat right inside him—as it had done for ten certain years.
