Free Elisabeth Fairchild by The Love Knot Page A

into action. A good gallop would restore her spirits. “We must work up an appetite.”
    They proceeded apace to the temple, Aurora tearing along in the lead, Miles more sedately bringing up the rear, his baskets full of booty clanking with what sounded like glass and cutlery.
    How amusing, Aurora thought as she and the mare flew with gratifying haste across the turf, that a man should feel a picnic required such accoutrement. Walsh would never have burdened his horse with such a rattling compliment of condiments. A hunk of cheese and a heel of bread would have contented his needs, just as it would hers.
    Miles’s excess struck her not so much as accommodating her requirements as his. He was, she decided as the horse stretched out beneath her, a finicky sort of fellow, a man who knew not how to feel comfortable in mud-caked boots and wind-blown hair, a man who might ride all afternoon and still not smell of horse. He was wearing chalk white breeches this morning! Such a gentleman was a mystery to her, a pitiable creature. He had no comfortable place in her world.
    Her brothers were the sort of fellows Aurora was accustomed to: rough, brash, loud and reeking of the outdoors or an overindulgence of spirit. Aurora tried to imagine Miles Fletcher drunk as a wheelbarrow, and could not. He would probably reel quite gracefully, she decided, if he allowed himself to imbibe too freely. He did not strike her as the type to allow such a loss of control, and in that realization, came a strong clue to the essence of this man’s difference from all the men she was acquainted with. Miles Fletcher had himself under tighter rein than the galloping horde she was used to dealing with.
    Control governed his every move. Such control baffled her. She was unused to thinking of men as more than green-broke creatures. Rupert, the only exception in her experience, was governed by the limitations of his leg and the memory of military order. There was a difference.
    She found this difference, this contradiction to her assumptions with regard to the wildness of the male gender, amusing to the point of the ridiculous. She could not have dreamed up a fellow more different than her brothers, more removed from Lord Walsh. Cutlery on a picnic! The very idea had her grinning like an idiot the whole pleasant gallop to their destination. The weather was fine, the light good and the targets still conveniently at their disposal. There was much to keep her smiling, the least of which was not the cutlery bearing exquisite whose horse trailed hers by several noisy furlongs.
    Aurora slid laughing from her horse to wait for Fletcher to catch up. An attractive bay was tethered in the clearing before the temple, evidence of the Grace who had gone ahead. Of the horse’s rider there was neither sign nor sound.
    The clearing was still. Light poured like golden syrup through the trees onto the pale, dun colored brick of the temple. The birds had stopped singing, disturbed by her noisy approach. The setting walmost surreal. An otherworldly aura held it enchanted. Aurora was beset by the notion she had stepped out of normal time and place into some other, more interesting reality. An uneasy quiet settled around her like a Norwich shawl. All she could hear was the thudding of her own gallop stimulated heartbeat and the echoing thud of hoof beats as Fletcher’s jingling mount approached. Silverware and white breeches on a picnic! He was an amusing part of the strangeness of this setting.
    Aurora was reminded of the library. There was, inherent in this coming together of she and this unfamiliar gentleman so far from the crowds that had filled her eyes and ears these past few days--with no sign of his mysterious sister to play chaperone--an unsettling air of laughable danger, mindful of the mosaic lion eating mosaic leopard in the golden peace of the library. Even such a mental comparison could not but amuse. Who in this instance was the lion and who the unlucky leopard?
    As