Free Elisabeth Kidd by A Hero for Antonia Page A

Isabel, whose concentration was not so easily distracted, and knocked off one of Octavian’s pieces.
    “Must I recruit Milford?” demanded the viscount querulously.
    “Good God, no!” Octavian protested, immediately thereafter apologising to the dice for raising his voice in their presence. “You know he isn’t fit to live with for days after exposure to fresh air—confound it!”
    Isabel held out her hand for the dice, which Octavian reluctantly handed over. The viscount saw that it was useless to address either of them further.
    “Why don’t you take two horses from the stables,” Mr Kenyon suggested, as if equine companionship were all that was required. “Antonia will show you all the paths.”
    Kedrington accepted this solution as the best he would get, leaving the company before the offer could be withdrawn again. “Can you ride in that?” he asked Antonia of her carefully chosen morning ensemble.
    “Mrs. Walker—the housekeeper—was used to keep some things here for us to ramble about in. I daresay they are still here somewhere, if you do not mind appearing abroad with a positive frump.”
    “I don’t expect we shall be observed.”
    “Dear me! Don’t remind Uncle Philip of that.”
    Antonia excused herself and reappeared after a short time in an old, but undeniably becoming, dark blue riding habit. Kedrington exercised his self-control in declining to comment on it, confining himself to admiring the ribbon trim on her hat, and they were off.
    The horses were as eager to be loose as their riders. The overnight cold had frozen the ground hard, and they began with a quick gallop across country, almost to the edge of the estate. The crisp air was exhilarating, and Antonia’s cheeks were flushed with the pleasure of the first such good ride she had enjoyed in weeks. Kedrington looked as if he did it every day.
    They halted for a moment on the ridge looking toward Wyckham and an expanse of rolling country. The viscount’s eyes narrowed as they swept the horizon with a keenness that most observers would not have granted it. He reminded Antonia just then of her brother, who had told her that in Spain survival often depended on keeping the eyes in the back of his head open. He had also said that attending to what might happen rather that to what was happening was a difficult habit to break.
    “You look as if you are expecting to be ambushed,” she said.
    Kedrington smiled. “By you, fair one?”
    She was anticipating this line of attack today and met his opening volley with a broadside of her own.
    “Is it true that you were betrothed to a Creole countess?” she asked in a tone of detached enquiry.
    He threw back his head and laughed. “Good God! Wherever did you hear that?”
    “Is it not true, then?”
    He leaned over to stroke the neck of his horse, which had begun cropping the sparse grass around them, but he did not turn away quickly enough to conceal the unmistakeable glint of mischief in his eye.
    “She wasn’t a countess,” he said.
    Antonia had a suspicion that she ought not to pursue the subject, but could not help asking, “What happened to her?”
    “She sailed away with a Barbary pirate.”
    “Wretch!” she exclaimed, choking. “How shall I know what to believe of you?”
    “My heart, don’t you recognise a Banbury tale when you hear one?”
    “You mean it is all a hum?”
    “Entirely!” he confessed cheerfully. “Believe me, if I had been the subject of half so many true stories as apocryphal that fly about after me, I should have been dead of exhaustion years ago.”
    “Well, I don’t know what was so implausible about that one. Although it is quite true that people will believe what it suits them to believe. I once said—quite in jest—that I painted my face with honey and crushed rosemary to aid my complexion, and before I knew how it had come about, this absurdity had become all the crack. Some ladies even claimed it helped them! I soon denied I had anything to