Games of Pleasure by Julia Ross Page B

inn door. Tall and blond, he stopped to pull on his gloves as he glanced up at the gathering darkness.
    â€œMy horse,” he said to a passing groom. “I fancy a ride before supper.”
    â€œVery good, my lord.”
    She did not need to see the face beneath the gilt hair. The sound of his voice was enough. Backing rapidly into the shadows, Miracle slipped out into the street and walked fast out of town. A stile took her from the main road onto a footpath. Terror beat hard, robbing her of breath. She could not risk traveling so slowly any longer. Whatever it cost her, she must secure another horse. Then she must disappear completely, before Lord Hanley caught up with her.
    Â 
    Â 
    RYDER’S horses steamed as four fresh animals were run out, ready to take His Lordship wherever his whim might demand next. His servants stood stoically as Lord Ryderbourne told them to take their supper in the inn, then strode off alone into the town.
    The Market Square was littered with dung and straw, where horses had been bought and sold earlier that day.
    Ryder accosted the first man that he met. “Good evening, sir. I’m looking for a bald-faced chestnut gelding—”
    The man scratched at his head and shook it. Ryder asked three more strollers and a lad with a dung cart and shovel. In vain. Yet the fifth man nodded and pointed with one finger.
    â€œWhy, Mr. Pence, our apothecary, purchased that very nag this afternoon, my lord, along with a saddle and bridle. Said he needed a good mount for his wife. . . .”
    Ryder shook the man by the hand and strode off in the direction he had pointed.
    Mr. Pence came to the door in person and immediately insisted that His Lordship step into his humble parlor. The knife in Ryder’s gut twisted again as the man only confirmed what Ryder had already learned at the White Swan. Ghostly in the twilight, the gelding’s white face peered over the apothecary’s stall door. A lady’s saddle hung in his tack room.
    â€œI also purchased some saddlebags and their contents, my lord. If Your Lordship would care to come back inside to take a look?”
    A brown riding habit, a fresh petticoat, all the little bits and pieces that Miracle had taken with her from the Merry Monarch. The fabric moved softly under Ryder’s fingers. Grief and anger surged in a floodtide. The apothecary’s face seemed to disappear into a dark mist.
    â€œThank you, Mr. Pence,” he said at last. “I’m most obliged to you, sir.”
    â€œYou wish to recover the horse and these things, my lord? Did I purchase them in error? Alas, I’m afraid the men who sold all this to me are long gone by now.”
    â€œNo,” Ryder said. “It doesn’t matter. Keep the horse. You bought him in good faith.”
    He strode blindly back through the town to his coach. She had been robbed. The horse. The saddle. Even the riding habit she had been wearing, and the pitiful little necessities that she had carried in the saddlebags.
    There was little doubt what must have happened to her.
    The bitterness of his grief filled his mouth with ash.
    NIGHT was falling by the time Miracle arrived at the Drovers’ Arms. Fatigue rang in her bones from her tramp over the fields, climbing stile after stile, occasionally losing the path in the dark, only to stumble into the edge of wheat fields, or startle a lumbering cow.
    A gaggle of boys crouched outside the inn, keeping watch by the light of wavering torches over herds of sheep and cattle and pens full of ponies. Bulky shapes shifted, permeating the night with their animal odors. The boys glanced at her without interest as she passed, then huddled back inside their coats.
    She hesitated for only a moment on the doorstep, listening to the dull rumble of men talking and their occasional laughter as she unpinned her hair. Then she looked up one last time at the pure night sky, before she pushed open the door.
    It was even darker