Free Sport of Baronets by Theresa Romain Page A

with frustration.
    Maybe Lady Crosby had been such a one, tied to the family estates. Had she wanted the responsibility? She had never tried to push it onto Bart. But until her apoplexy, he had never tried very hard to pull it away. Routine was easier. Familiar too.
    Hannah made a powerful argument for its opposite.
    â€œI used to wonder,” she said softly, “what you were like. What London was like. I couldn’t really hate you because I did not know you—and yet I could almost hate you for getting to leave. And I could almost hate all the women you danced and flirted with too, for being where and what I wanted to be.”
    â€œYou wanted to flirt with me.” The words made blood rush hotly through his veins.
    â€œWell…” She cleared her throat. “The idea of you. I didn’t know you at the time.”
    â€œWhat do you want of me now?”
    She stopped walking and turned to face him. “To begin, I want another look at whatever marvelous waistcoat you are wearing today.”
    â€œAh. Happy to oblige.” With fingers made clumsy by haste, he slipped free a button of his coat to give her a better look.
    Her freckled nose crinkled in a grin. “Red satin. Why do you hide it beneath a coat so plain?”
    â€œA drab coat is practical for one who spends a great deal of time with horses. The fine waistcoat lets me feel I’m still myself underneath.” He leaned closer to her ear. Fine wisps of gold-brown hair pulled free to peek from beneath her cap, and they danced as he murmured, “I am far more exotic and mysterious than the world realizes.”
    She pressed a gloved hand to her cheek, but it did not hide the blush. “Oh.” Her breath came short and shallow.
    He savored the sight. Every bit of it. “Perhaps,” he said, laughing, “I am overstating the truth. To be honest, I simply like red.” His own fingers traced the line of her sleeve, hidden from the view of onlookers by his body. “And—I like this green. And the shade of your hair and your eyes. I like those too.”
    This ought to have been far more difficult than asking a woman to dance, but instead it was easy. Under the silver-blue of a cloudy sky, bounded by track and cushioned by grass, everything fit together exactly as it ought.
    Including—especially—Hannah’s hand, slipping into his waistcoat pocket to stroke the muscles of his abdomen until he shuddered. “Let us find a place to be alone,” she breathed. “And I hope you will show me more of what you like.”
    Yes, yes, good God, yes. “If you will promise to do the same,” he said, “then I know exactly the place to go.”

Six
    They made some excuse to Sothern; Hannah hardly knew what. Bart was everything friendly, speaking with the groom briefly before Sothern led the horses away.
    â€œWe have an hour,” Bart murmured. His dark hair glinted with silver, his eyes with promise. “There is a place we might go on the July Course, if you’ll accompany me?”
    In a heartbeat. Without question.
    â€œYes,” Hannah said.
    Little used until the summer months, the July Course was a dogleg off of which jutted the straight dash of the Rowley Mile. On the Rowley Mile, where the Two Thousand Guineas Stakes would be run in a few days’ time, jockeys and trainers and owners paced off the subtle topography of a course that changed with every rainfall and every baking sun. Anything for an advantage in the Two Thousand Guineas or any of the other chances to prove one’s worth.
    Hannah was happy to leave it all behind for an hour, to stride through the grounds with an entirely different sort of topography on her mind.
    She and Bart drew up before a white building that looked like a long cottage, with a thatched roof and half-timbering about the windows. “The jockey room?” she asked.
    â€œAnd the weighing room and the winner’s