Be that as it may, he was far beyond disturbed; it was taking fully half his mind to hold back, lock down the clawing need to savage whoever had dared attempt to harm her, to take her from him. And most of the rest of his mental capacity was absorbed with formulating plans to ensure beyond all possibility that she remained safe. That she remained with him; he couldn’t view the prospect of losing her with any degree of calm.
With what faculties he could spare, he racked his brain for the answer to her question. It was the right question, and there ought to be an answer, but . . . finally, he shook his head. “I honestly don’t know. I accept that such a man is most likely behind the incidents, but I don’t know—can’t guess—who he might be.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Well, you didn’t know about Fitzhugh, either—that he might have had cause to imagine you’d stolen his wife. It’s possible there’s some other gentleman who, like Fitzhugh, has been fed a tale by his wife, perhaps to conceal a dalliance with some other rake.”
After a moment, he confessed, “I’m starting to feel that I’m reaping the ill rewards of my previous life—and you’ve been involved because of me.”
She didn’t smile too easily and brush aside his statement; instead, she held his gaze for a long moment—long enough to make him wonder just how much of his mind she could read—then she smiled wryly in agreement, rose, and, before he could join her on her feet, with a swish of her heavy skirts, she dropped into his lap.
Placing a hand on his cheek, she angled his face to hers, met his eyes, and simply said, “Don’t worry. Together, we can overcome anything.” Holding his gaze, she confidently stated, “Together, we’ll work this out.”
“You can’t leave the house.” Halting beside her chair half an hour later, he shut his lips and braced for her arguments.
Mary looked up at him, then arched her brows and looked back at her book. “I don’t want to go out at the moment.”
When he continued to stare down at her—not daring to believe—she glanced briefly up at him. “I told you we’d work this out.”
“I thought you’d agreed not to go outside?” Sudden panic churned in his gut.
“That was yesterday. Today—well, there’s no need to go far from the house. Just the rose garden will do.” Mary looped her arm in his. “You can come to make sure I’m safe. The walk will do you good—you’re far too tense.”
He was starting to believe that Fate had, indeed, arranged their match. Mary wasn’t just more than he’d expected, she was more than he deserved.
Together, we’ll work this out. He’d assumed she’d meant that they’d pool their mental resources in investigating who was behind the attacks, not that they would, together, work on the ways, the precautions, the plans, all the elements of her security necessary to allow him to cope with all he felt.
So he could sleep alongside her and not fear the morning.
He wasn’t about to—had no spare space in his mind to—examine what he felt, if it was rational or even logical, much less define what the so powerful, so dominant, and so utterly demanding emotion that had taken root in his heart and guts actually was, not while she was under any degree of threat.
And to his everlasting gratitude she understood, at least enough to comprehend that his conversion to martinet, to dictator and tyrant, wasn’t something he could control, wasn’t the way he actually wished to act but was instead the result of something he was quite simply helpless to counteract.
Given his temper and personality, and hers, if she hadn’t understood . . . in the days that followed their ill-fated ride, he constantly gave thanks that she could.
If anyone had told him that he would, one day, be grateful that his wife could see into his soul, he would have laughed himself into a stupor.
He wasn’t laughing on the morning she’d determined as the time for her to once again venture beyond the grounds.
Since the disaster of that first ride, she’d remained within the protective cordon he, with the grimly determined assistance of the staff, had fashioned. For the first day, she’d remained inside the house; yesterday, she’d convinced him to walk with her in the gardens. Later, during luncheon, she’d broached the subject of riding again, but when he’d voiced his continuing antipathy to allowing her back in her saddle, she’d regarded him shrewdly, then had nodded and acquiesced—and insisted he allow her to drive herself in the gig on a visit to the nearby village.
Having earlier informed her that the men he’d sent to scour the neighborhood for any sighting of strangers had reported that none had been seen, and more, that none were lingering in the vicinity, he’d lost the ability to cite lurking would-be villains as a threat. Not that that had stopped him from arguing, vehemently, but for once she wouldn’t be moved—and given she had thus far been so accommodating . . .
Unable to assemble sufficient ammunition to quash her notion outright, he’d fallen back on the tactic of agreeing subject to her demonstrating her expertise with the reins sufficient to pass his standards.
She’d smiled and agreed.
How could he have known she had at some point inveigled Simon to teach her to drive?
After she’d tooled the gig about the drive with every evidence of not just capability but enjoyment, he hadn’t been able to deny her the outing.
So that morning, after they’d breakfasted and she’d finished her daily meeting with Mrs. Pritchard, they walked out to the forecourt where the gig stood waiting, a well-conditioned roan, a nice, solid stepper with an exceedingly even temper, between the shafts.
The gig was small, light; it couldn’t carry them both, and given his weight, he wouldn’t have used it himself, even alone. He helped Mary up to the seat, then turned to where Benson held Julius’s reins. Swinging up to the saddle, he picked up the reins, then looked at Mary—met her brilliant smile.
She pointed with her whip. “Onward.”
In more ways than one. Gritting his teeth, he set Julius to trotting along the verge, keeping pace with the gig as Mary tooled it sedately out along the back drive.
The village of Axford lay less than two miles distant and was more directly reached via the rear drive and the country lane beyond. While Ryder had a curricle and a phaeton in the stables, either of which would have served for him to drive her to the village, neither was well suited to the country lanes, and he would have had to handle the ribbons—and trying to protect a female while managing a pair of highly strung horses was, in his estimation, a less favorable arrangement than him mounted on Julius, acting as guard, a pistol in his saddle holster and a short sword in a saddle scabbard.
In addition, from Julius’s back he could see much further.
His own pastures stretched for some way, the well-graded drive gently wending through them.
Mary held the roan to a steady, entirely unexciting pace. At least she was out in the fresh air, and despite his heightened watchfulness and the tension that inevitably still gripped him, Ryder was with her, riding alongside—and the day was, in her eyes, fine and destined to improve.
She was, she felt, very successfully making lemons into lemonade. She was pleased if not delighted with the outcome of her plan, the results thus far of her adherence to Minerva’s edict on how to deal with an overly protective nobleman. Indeed, she rather thought she could now write her own advice on how to tame such a nobleman—agree with him, work with him, to find solutions to his problems . . . and gently turn the applecart in a more amenable direction.
Yesterday she’d written to Minerva to thank her sincerely for her long-ago advice and tell her that it was bearing fruit even as she wrote. Ryder might still be wary—she occasionally glimpsed that in his hazel eyes—but he was increasingly learning to ask for her views, to incorporate or defer to her suggestions, her version of how they might best get along together.
A little way ahead, a lane ran across the end of the drive. Ryder an
gled Julius closer to the gig. “I’ll jump the hedge over there”—with a nod he indicated a spot a little way along the lane—“and wait for you.”
“All right.” With a breezy smile, she twirled her whip in salute.
As Mary slowed even more for the turn, Ryder swung Julius for the hedge, tapped his heels to the gray’s flanks, and gloried in the surge of power as the big gelding accelerated across the open ground, then soared, clearing the hedge with ease to come down in the lane beyond.
Reining Julius in, wheeling, Ryder checked the lane—the real reason he’d come ahead. There was no one in sight; relaxing, he drew Julius to a restless halt and looked back along the lane to the opening of the drive.
Just as the roan turned neatly out into the lane, Ryder noticed some dark twiglike things scattered across the surface of the lane between him and the gig. “What the devil?”
His disbelieving brain told him what the things were just as Mary saw them, too, and reacted. She hauled on the reins, not just to stop the roan but to turn the horse aside—toward the ditch. The roan fought the sudden redirection, but Mary insisted and the horse responded . . . but not fast enough; the roan stepped on one of the objects—and screamed.
The horse half reared, kicking out with one foreleg, sending the gig wildly slewing.
Dropping the reins, Mary leapt from the gig.
The roan staggered and went down, half rolling, half sliding into the ditch; dragged behind, the gig overturned, smashing as it tipped into the ditch, too.
Ryder was already galloping madly back, cursing, panicking.
Reining Julius in before he hit the wide swath of caltrops, too, Ryder flung himself from the saddle. As he raced the last few yards, his heart in his throat, his eyes locked on Mary lying facedown on the far bank of the ditch, he saw her move. Then she pushed back on her arms, blew her hair—tumbling loose—from her face, and started to get up.
Leaping the ditch, he raced past the roan—now lying mostly in the ditch with one foreleg extended, but no longer in such panic; jumping over the smashed gig, Ryder stooped, swooped, and wrapped Mary in his arms, held her tightly to him.
For a long moment, he stood with his face buried in her curls, breathing in the scent of her, feeling her body lithe and warm against him. He was shaking, inside at least; he thought she was, too.
Eventually freeing a hand, she stroked the side of his face. “I’m all right.” There was none of her usual brightness in her tone.
Barely daring to believe she’d escaped unharmed, he raised his head and eased his hold enough to look into her face; her expression was sober but showed no hint of pain. “Nothing hurt at all—no bruises or sprains?”
“No—that’s why I jumped. I could see the grass was thick over here, and once the horse reared, I knew I wouldn’t be able to manage well enough to do anything more.”
Quick thinking; her wits and her abilities had saved her again.
Looking at the destruction of the gig, she grimaced and patted his arm. “We have to see to the horse.”
They approached the roan with due caution, but the caltrop embedded in its left front hoof appeared to be the only damage. Once Ryder removed that, then freed the horse from the wreckage of the gig, between them they urged the roan back on his feet, then carefully checked him over, but other than favoring his wounded hoof, the horse seemed otherwise unharmed.
“If you hadn’t had the sense to pull to the side, ditch or no, it would have been much worse.” Handing the reins to Mary, Ryder said, “Hold him while I get rid of those damned things.”
Absentmindedly stroking the roan’s nose, Mary watched as Ryder reached into the wreckage of the gig, retrieved her empty basket, and proceeded to fill it with the strange twisted metal spikes that had been strewn in a wide band across the lane.
After gathering them all, Ryder caught Julius’s reins and walked back to her. Halting before her, he lifted one of the metal things from the basket, turning it in his fingers so they both could see. It was about the size of his fist, composed of three long nails twisted about each other.
Mary frowned. “What is it?”
“It’s a caltrop. They were invented to disrupt cavalry charges. This one’s not cavalry-grade—it’s a crude fashioning, but effective nevertheless.” Ryder set it on his palm. “It’s constructed so it sits on the heads, so the spikes stick up.”
Mary shook her head. “How horrible. Just think of the pain caused to the poor horses.”
“Hmm.” Ryder thought more of the pain that might have been caused to her. He glanced at the broken gig, the wooden struts smashed, one wheel caved in, the seat in two pieces, then he raised his gaze to Mary’s eyes. “Let’s turn the roan into the nearest field inside the grounds, then we’ll ride back on Julius.”
She nodded. “Filmore’s going to have a fit when he sees us riding back in, both on Julius again.”
Filmore wasn’t the only one about to have a fit, but his first concern was to get her back within the safety of the abbey.
Later that night, when they lay side by side and watched moonbeams drift across the ceiling of his room, still floating on the flushed tide of aftermath, he murmured, “Perhaps we should go back to London.”
“No.” Mary’s answer was immediate. “I am not letting some blackguard force me out of my new home.”
She lay wrapped in his arms. He tightened them slightly. “I was thinking more in terms of protecting you.”
“I can’t see how . . .” A second passed, then she amended, “Well yes, I can, but if you’re entertaining the notion of leaving me in London in the care of my family, then coming back here alone to discover who’s behind this, possibly by tempting them to make another attempt on your life . . .” Pausing, she drew in a breath, then concluded, “Put simply, you will need to think again.”
Turning in his arms, through the shadows Mary studied his face; from the tension in the big body pressed against hers, she knew she’d guessed his intentions aright. “I’m not quitting your side. We’re married, and in case you’ve forgotten, I vowed ‘to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death do us part.’ There’s nothing in that about leaving you to face unknown foes alone.”
Ryder heard the belligerence in her tone. “I haven’t forgotten.” He noticed she’d omitted the “obey” from her vows, but . . . he sighed. Admitted, “Keeping you safe is . . . critically important to me.”
She nodded. “And in the exact same way, keeping you hale and whole is vital to me. So we’ll simply have to accept that neither of us is going to back away from this—in fact, we should probably view it as a challenge.”
“A challenge.” His instincts flickered warily, but he had to ask, “How so?”
“Well, once we’ve learned to manage our way through this, we’ll know how to manage through anything that might come.”
Given what he was going through . . . she might well be right. The situation was starting to feel like a baptism by fire.
When he said nothing, she wriggled higher to look into his face, to in the poor light study his eyes. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m right. You’ll see. We’ll come through this stronger—more sure of ourselves together. I’m viewing this as a learning experience—and if you stop to think, you’ll realize you’re inclined to use it in the same way.”
He’d already realized that; as usual, she held the positive up like temptation. There was no real reply he wished to make, so he grunted, drew her down into his arms, and planted a kiss on her curls. “We’ll see.”
After due discussion, Mary agreed to remain within the estate grounds over the following days.
The first two were enlivened by a succession of bride-visits from the surrounding gentry; the ladies had held off for the customary seven days, but now that Mary and Ryder had lived a
t the abbey as man and wife for a full week, the carriages rolled up the drive and the ladies, and some of their husbands, too, called to make her acquaintance.
Caught up in the whirl of navigating the shoals of county allegiances and social rank, less dangerous than those among the haut ton, perhaps, but nevertheless present, Mary almost forgot the incidents that had marred her first week as Ryder’s wife. The visits from their neighbors gave her and Ryder plenty to talk about, to discuss, and in her case to probe and learn; the days, evenings, and nights passed in exactly the sort of pleasant whirl she considered their due.
The following morning saw the last of what Ryder expected in the way of bride-visits, a visitation from Lady Hamberly; the nearest representative of the grande dame set, her ladyship stayed for just over half an hour and appeared to approve of all she saw.
Standing at Ryder’s side on the front porch as they waved her ladyship away, Mary murmured, “What will you wager she spends the entire afternoon writing missives to her peers around the country?”
“That,” Ryder said, casting her a jaundiced look as they turned inside, “is no wager at all—it’s a sure thing.”
Laughing, Mary looped her arm in his and they headed back to the library.
As the possessor of a massive estate and also a significant fortune, Ryder had a near endless stream of correspondence to deal with; Mary sat in the chair and read her book, and in between, when he paused to check on her—to give her at least a little of his time—she grasped the chance to question him about his various smaller estates scattered the length and breadth of the land.
Later in the afternoon, deciding it was time to establish a place of her own, somewhere comfortable where she could retire when he was out or she didn’t feel like sitting in the library, she went on a solo tour of the house, going into the various reception rooms on the ground floor, sitting in this chair and that, but none felt right.
In the end, she tried her sitting room upstairs—and discovered that suited her perfectly. There was something about the way the light flooded in from the windows flanking the writing desk. An armchair sat in the corner to the left of the writing desk and simply beckoned.