Free To the Hilt by Dick Francis Page B

the curtains, as I’d always done. “How about you?”
    “I’m known as a dragon. There aren’t many with the guts of Saint George.”
    “Do you regret it?”
    She rustled out of the rest of her clothes and slid naked between the sheets, her curved shape momentarily silhouetted against an oblong window of stars. I took off my clothes and felt ageless.
    “Rumors run round Lambourn like the pox,” she said. “I’m bloody careful who I let into this room.”
    We stopped talking. We had never, I supposed, been inventive or innovative lovers. There had been no need. Front to front with hands and lips and tongues we had shivered with sensual intense arousal, and that at least hadn’t changed. Her body to my touch was long known and long forgotten, like going back to an abandoned building: a newly explored breast, familiar concave abdomen, hard mound of pelvis, soft dark warm mystery below and beyond, known secretly but never explored by spotlight, since, in spite of her forthright public face, she was privately shy.
    I did what I knew she liked, and as ever my own intensest pleasure came in pleasing her. Entry was easy, her readiness receptive. Movement strong and rhythmic, an instinct shared. When I felt her deep pulse beating, then too I took my own long moment; sometimes in the past it had been as good as that, but not always. It seemed that in that way also we had grown up.
    “I’ve missed you,” she said.
    “I, too.”
    We slept peacefully side by side, and it was in the morning in the shower that she looked at my collection of bruises with disbelief.
    “I told you,” I said mildly. “I got mugged.”
    “Trampled by a stampede of cows, more like.”
    “Bulls.”
    “OK, then. Bulls. Don’t come downstairs until the first lot has gone out.”
    I’d almost forgotten I was there to steal a horse. I waited until the scrunching hooves outside had diminuendoed into the distance and went down for coffee and toast.
    Emily came in from the yard, saying, “I’ve saddled and bridled Golden Malt. He’s all ready for you, but he’s pretty fresh. For God’s sake don’t let him whip round and buck you off. The last thing I want is to have him loose on the Downs.”
    “I’ve been thinking about anonymity,” I said, spreading honey on toast. “Have you still got any of those nightcaps you put over their heads in very cold weather? A nightcap would hide that very white blaze down his nose. And perhaps boots for his white socks ...”
    She nodded, amused. “And you’d better borrow a helmet from the cloakroom, and anything else you need.”
    I thanked her and went into the large downstairs cloakroom where there was always a haphazard collection of jackets, boots, gloves and helmets for kitting out visitors. I found some jodhpur boots to fit me (better than sneakers for the job), and tied my hair up on the top of my head with a shoelace before hiding the lot under a shiny blue helmet. I slung round my neck a pair of jockeys’ goggles, the big mica jobs they used against rain and mud ... fine disguise for a black eye.
    Emily, still amused, said no one would recognize the result. “And do borrow one of those padded jackets. It’s cold on the Downs these mornings.”
    I fetched a dark-colored jacket and said, “If anyone comes looking for the horse, say I had authority to take him, and I took him, and you don’t know where he is.”
    “Do you think anyone will come?” She was curious more than worried, it seemed.
    “Hope not.”
    Golden Malt eyed me with disillusion from inside his nightcap. Emily gave me a leg up onto his back and at this point looked filled with misgiving.
    “When the hell did you last sit on a horse?” she asked, frowning.
    “Er ... some time ago.” But I got my feet into the stirrups and collected the reins into a reasonable bunch.
    “How often have you actually ridden since you left here?” Emily demanded.
    “It’s all in the mind,” I said. Golden Malt skittered around