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.