Free The Wedding Dress by Kimberly Cates

few minutes once she was up top to remember how to breathe. “Mount up,” Jared ordered.
    “M-mount up. Right. I just put my foot in that metal thing and…”
    “It’s called a stirrup. I’ve already got it set to about the right length for your legs.”
    Emma sucked in a deep breath and then edged toward the mare.
    “I’m playing the role of groom,” Jared said. “He’d help you get up on the horse.”
    “I can—can do it myself.”
    “Sure you can. But we’re going to pretend we’re in the fourteenth century.” He closed the space between them, too close for comfort. Her hair smelled delicious, like cinnamon. He linked his hands and crouched so she could put her foot into the cup his palms formed.
    “Now just let me boost you up.”
    Obviously uneasy, she did as she was told, gripping his shoulder in a fingers-of-death hold. Her breast was inches from his face, her hair brushing in silken strands across his stubbled cheek.
    Damn good thing they hated each other. Because if they hadn’t, they might never leave the barn. “Ready?” he asked.
    She nodded.
    “One, two, three.” He straightened, half suffocating in the folds of her gown as she tried to scramble onto the horse’s back.
    She gave a nervous squeak as she fought for balance, the mare sidestepping as Emma’s arms and legs flailed like a snarl of Slinky toys, limp and useless, her body listing perilously. She seemed ready to slide off the opposite side as she grabbed the leather reins—completely by accident, Jared figured.
    Smug as a cat with a mouse in its teeth, Jared started toward her to keep her from breaking her neck. But a split second before he could reach her arm, she nabbed the stirrups with her feet, leaned over the mare’s neck and took off at a dead run.
    Flashing him a diabolical smile over one shoulder, she left him eating her dirt. Literally. That was the major problem with gaping like an eejit when a horse’s hooves were flinging bits of dirt and grass back at you.
    Spitting out the grit and swiping the back of his hand across his mouth, Jared grabbed the long bundle, swiftly fastening it on the back of the suddenly restive Andalusian’s saddle. He swung up onto the black and gave chase, but Emma had won herself a fine head start.
    Reluctant admiration sparked inside him. Emma McDaniel sat on the horse as if she’d been born on one. Her silvery laughter echoed back to him as she splashed through puddles, mud spattering her gown, her hair a wild tangle as she lifted her face to the wind.
    She used the mare’s delicate legs to her advantage, flying above the ground like a fluff of dandelion seeds carried on the wind before a storm. Falcon thundered after her, the power that made him the terror of the recreated lists where Jared practiced with his lance doing little to close the last dozen meters between the two horses.
    But maybe Falcon didn’t want to catch them any more than Jared did at the moment. Maybe he wanted to enjoy the sight of two breathtaking female creatures running free. Far enough to the right side to see Emma and her mount in profile, Jared surprised himself, drinking in the sight. For with each stretch of countryside the mare flew across, Emma’s smile glowed more luminous, the elegant curve of her cheek a deeper wind-stung pink.
    When she’d bolted out of the barn fifteen minutes ago, she’d been showing off—elated to leave him in her dust and shatter his cynical doubt that she knew one end of a horse from the other. But the farther away from the stables they got, the more Emma and the mare seemed to bond, until they both looked as wild and ethereal as the magical creatures Jared’s father had told him about when he’d still been young enough to believe in them. Women made of mist and imagination, so exquisite a man only had to look at them to fall deathly in love and pine the rest of his life for the fairy queen far beyond a mortal’s reach.
    Is that what happened to my mum? Jared remembered