When they parted, their foreheads rested together. His breath came a little short, hers ghosted warm against his lips.
“We will find another explanation,” she said, as if willing it into being. “There must be one.”
“We will look,” he said. “We will ask questions. We will not assume.”
Her hand dropped from his shoulder, curled into a fist. “First, I want my horses.”
He smiled faintly. “I thought you might.”
She stepped back, gathering herself. “They got out. Their tracks were everywhere. They will not have gone far.”
He looked toward the yard, where the muddle of hoofprints led out through the gate and away.
“Very well,” he said. “Let us see where panicked Strathmore horses run.”
They followed the trail at a canter. The marks led over low stone walls, through a gap in a hedge, across a stream where the water had muddied the prints but not erased them completely. To Edward’s surprise, the trail did not loop back toward Strathmore’s own high pastures, as he might have expected if the horses had simply bolted in panic. It angled north-east.
Isla noticed too. “They are going toward the Blackwood border.”
“Yes,” he said.
The name lay between them like a stone. The land grew rougher as they rode, scrub and gorse replacing fields, the ground rising in gentle folds. At last, cresting another small rise, they saw what lay ahead. Glenmore Hall’s outer pasture fences. And beyond them, clustered in a broad, well-kept paddock near a line of neat stone stables, a group of horses Isla did not need to count to know.
“Strathmore geldings,” she said tightly. “Every one.”
Edward saw the brands, the colors.
“I had not realized Glenmore had grown so generous,” she murmured.
They rode down toward the stables. Men moved in the yard, Glenmore’s livery on their jackets. At the far end, a tall figure in dark riding clothes stood beside the paddock fence, watching a groom struggle with a saddled horse.
Nigel Blackwood, Duke of Glenmore, was every inch the man Edward remembered from London. Broad-shouldered, iron-haired, his face unlined in a way that owed more to composure than to youth. His features were handsome in a hard sort of way, as if carved for coin rather than affection. He was also, at that moment, furious.
“What in hell’s name do you call this?” he demanded of the groom, voice cracking across the yard like a whip.
The groom’s hands were wrapped in bandages. Another white swathe covered one side of his face, creeping up beneath his hairline. Despite the wrappings, he was attempting to buckle a girth, his movements clumsy with pain.
“I’m doing my best, Your Grace,” the man stammered.
“Your best?” Glenmore snapped. “Your best has the saddle sliding down the horse’s side. A monkey could do better. You are of no use to me like this.”
“My hands …” the groom began.
“I can see your hands,” Glenmore cut in. “I can also see that I am paying for them. I do not pay for useless men. You are dismissed.”
The groom recoiled as if struck. “Your Grace, I …”
“Off my land by evening,” Glenmore said coldly. “Or I will have you whipped off.”
He turned away, already done with the man. Isla’s temper, already frayed by ash and grief, snapped. She urged her horse forward; Edward’s hand shot out, catching her rein.
“Carefully,” he warned under his breath. “We are on his ground.”
“I do not care whose ground it is,” she said, eyes blazing. “Those are Strathmore horses, not Glenmore’s, and that man has burns on half his body. Where do you think he got those burns?”
“Isla,” he murmured. “Let me speak first.”
She bit back a retort, barely, holding herself in check with visible effort.
