Free Well Groomed by Fiona Walker Page B

know.’ Zoe was framing her words carefully, aware of how sensitive Tash could be about Hugo. ‘But it does make things rather awkward for Gus when there’s this ruck between you two. You know how much he relies upon Hugo’s support.’
    ‘Humph.’ Tash stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Hugo takes him for a ride almost as often as his own nags. Gus is better off without him.’
    ‘Not really,’ Zoe said kindly. ‘I mean, I know that the majority of Hugo’s actions are born out of self-interest, but he’s not a bad ally for all his faults. He gets Gus liveries, gives him a lot of his time and cast-off equipment, sends Franny down here to help out when we’re short-staffed.’
    ‘I hardly think Hugo’s forcing her!’ she snorted.
    Franny was Hugo’s Rubensesque and rather terrifying head girl who dressed like an S & M mistress of pain and had a whip-like tongue to match. For the past six months she had been conducting a very public affair with Gus’s much younger and less efficient groom, Ted. It paralleled and helpfully shielded the far more private liaison which Hugo was conducting with Gus’s senior working pupil, Kirsty Judd, a Scottish event rider who used the yard as her southern base. Kirsty, who had worked in Australia for several years as a riding instructor, was engaged to a very rich, very macho Australian solicitor with whom she was spending Christmas. The fact that Hugo was also in Australia for the festive season had not gone unnoticed. Just as he took especial pleasure in riding dangerous horses, so, it seemed, he preferred his relationships with the heat on and the risk-factor high.
    ‘Go easy on him on New Year’s Eve, huh?’ Zoe pleaded, handing Tash a chipped mug full of coffee. ‘He’s only mad at you because he’s jealous.’ She carefully didn’t add what specifically he was jealous of. She privately doubted that it was just professional. Hugo was a far more complicated character than Tash gave him credit for.
    ‘I’ll try,’ she sighed.
    For years, as a teenager, Tash had lusted after Hugo from afar with a passion that only the hormonally confused youngster can harbour. A close friend of her brother-in-law Ben Meredith’s, he had drifted around in the background of her family’s social calendar like a beautiful spectre, and haunted Tash’s dreams like a goading nightmare. His total disdain for her had been crucifying. While Tash had wept and daydreamed over pictures of him cut from Horse and Hound , Hugo had treated her with the curtest of uninterested scorn in return, hardly seeming to notice her existence.
    It was only when they had been forced to endure one another’s company during a long, lazy holiday with Alexandra, Pascal, and the rest of their assorted family and friends two years earlier that they had struck up an unexpected, if uneasy, friendship. Hugo had helped her get to grips with the difficult, hot-headed Snob, given to his step-daughter by Pascal as a holiday challenge. Hugo had admired her courage and talent, and helped her get a job with the Moncrieffs as a result. For a brief and rather terrifying moment, he had even appeared to be attracted to her. The sense of amazed, disbelieving victory which Tash had experienced at that time had only been overtaken by the giddy joy of falling madly in love with Niall. Hugo had gone off her pretty quickly afterwards, and wasted no time in working his way through a string of staggeringly beautiful girlfriends, most of whom he treated appallingly.
    Since then, Hugo had not shown the slightest interest in Tash as anything but a horsewoman and pupil, a fact which, in her very darkest, late-night moments, far away from Niall’s comfortable, sleeping embrace, rather offended her. She knew that was fearfully disloyal to Niall, whom she loved with more depth and honesty than she had ever felt for Hugo during the agonising length of her fierce crush. But there was something competitive in her relationship with him that fed off a