by Fiona Walker
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he breathed, and to his shame found tears in his eyes.
He was only grateful she was facing away from him. By the time she lifted off and repositioned herself facing him, he was back in control, knowing the show must go on.
That she could look him so directly in the eyes while the dark blush spread up through her chest and throat, her fingers between her legs, lips parting, inhibitions utterly abandoned always thrilled him. She so wilfully grabbed her pleasure and rode it hard home. It still blew his mind – and his wad – even if his heart was starting to lock itself away.
*
While Dillon was playing wedding singer in Abu Dhabi, Nell headed to her brother’s yard to see Cœur d’Or for the first time in weeks.
Piers Cottrell had grown surprisingly fond of the horse with the wild eyes and the heart-shaped star, despite the fact that his early shots at riding him had left him on the deck. He was quite the best-looking animal on the yard, and after a few fierce arguments this Vale of the Wolds stalwart had put the strongest bit in his possession in the French horse’s mouth and risked a morning’s hunting to see what he would make of it. The horse – and Piers – had loved every minute. Now they were a regular partnership in the field and Heart was shaping up to be a true master’s horse.
Piers was therefore supremely reluctant to let his sister ride the animal. ‘Just a quiet hack,’ she pleaded. ‘He’s my horse.’
Nell had always been able to bend her older brother to her will.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he eventually relented. ‘There’s a shoot going on today; I don’t want you riding through it. Give me half an hour.’
But Nell wanted to be alone with Dillon’s Heart and so, while her brother was distracted on the phone, she quickly tacked up, hopped into the saddle and slipped away.
There were many who’d accused Nell of riding too recklessly over the years. She had always loved speed, often at the expense of safety. However, since taking a crashing fall out team-chasing while pregnant with Giselle, she’d calmed down greatly. She did exactly as she had told Piers, hacking along God’s Corridor past the Abbey, marvelling at the horse’s long, easy stride.
She stared up at the big house as they passed, wondering if Dillon’s father would ever move in or was just intent on owning it to wind up his son, as Dillon maintained. She was far too distracted staring at all the changes the Rockfather had wrought to remember Piers’s warning about the shoot.
A hundred yards away, a single gunshot cracked through the woods.
When Cœur d’Or took fright Nell wasn’t fazed, and she was quietly determined to stop him without heroism or hysterics.
The horse bolted the full length of the woodland bridleway, over a five-bar gate and out into open country. There, in a huge set-aside field punctuated by just one lone oak and a startled pair of fallow deer, they hurtled around in wide circles. Nell knew the horse would eventually run out of puff, but he was hunting fit and so there was an awful lot of puff to get through. Round and round the perimeter of the field they sped until she was close to exhaustion. He was one indefatigable horse, but she was determined to hang on.
By the time Heart finally slowed down enough for Nell to take control, both were close to collapse. Nell rode away from the sound of the guns and found a gate at the far end of the field. It was padlocked. For a moment she thought about jumping it, but the horse was on his last legs. Instead she found a gap in the hedgerow a few yards away and urged him through it, not seeing the gaping ditch hidden beneath a tangle of dead bracken and brambles. But Heart saw it and put in an enormous leap from a near standstill, clearing it easily. Caught unawares, her legs and arms still like jelly from her recent exertions, Nell pitched forwards. As the horse landed his neck came flying upwards and smacked her firmly on the nose. She heard it crack, a strange sound that seemed to come from inside her head like a thought bubble popping.
They hacked back to the yard with the horse almost on his knees, his ears flopping sideways with utter fatigue.
‘What have you done?’ Piers was appalled when he saw the state of them both, dried blood congealing across his sister’s chin and chest, while Heart shambled through the gate so stiffly Giselle could have walked faster.
He put an urgent call through to their brother Flipper, an equine vet, before taking Nell to hospital to have her nose reset. To her credit, she didn’t complain once about the pain, but Piers was nonetheless livid. ‘You bloody little fool!’
However much she protested that the horse had just taken off, he didn’t believe her. Nor did the rest of her family, especially Flipper.
‘He’s tied up behind and blown both his front suspensory ligaments by the look of things,’ Flipper reported when they got back. ‘He won’t be hunting again this season, let alone eventing. The tendon injures will take months to heal.’
‘How many months?’ Nell asked her brother anxiously.
‘Hard to tell. At least six, probably the best part of a year, possibly never.’
‘My poor, dear Heart.’ Nell cupped the horse’s muzzle in her hands, feeding him mints and kissing his star. Rare tears of remorse dropped on to her chest. She seldom wept over anybody, but horses were another matter.
‘Chances are, he’ll be fine.’ Flipper patted her back. ‘Many even get back to top-level one day. We’ll get him back to Haydown – Hugo has the facilities for laser- and hydrotherapy to help him.’
She turned tearfully to her brother. ‘Dillon will think it’s my fault. You all think it’s my fault. But he just kept going with me, Flips! He wouldn’t give up.’
Flipper knew his twin sister better than anyone. He placed a firm hand on both her shoulders. ‘And did you try to stop him?’
She looked at him sharply, opening her mouth in protest. Then she closed it again as she realised what he was saying. Very slowly, she shook her head. ‘I never try to stop them. I just wait until they get too tired to carry on. It’s what I always do.’ They both knew she wasn’t just talking about the horse now.
Chapter 33
Sylva Frost was unwittingly walking in the direction of the Fox Oddfield shoot. The black-skied December drizzle depressed her utterly. In Slovakia, her home village would be covered in thick snow, its preparations for Christmas magical and steeped in history. In Upper Springlode the duck pond had overflowed to turn the little village green into a mud bath, the fairy lights outside the New Inn had fused and the windswept Christmas tree had blown over. She thought longingly of her fifteen-foot fibre-optic designer tree in the vaulted hallway of the Buckinghamshire mansion, stretching up towards the chandelier and decked with a thousand pounds’ worth of brand-new Swarovski-encrusted decorations.
Coming to the Cotswolds had been a waste of time. She wished she had never agreed to host an intimate Christmas here. Despite the fact that her mother and the boys arrived tomorrow, and Hana and Zuzi were on their way, Sylva was tearful and dispirited. Even the sight of her fourteen-page Christmas Cheers! shoot, published that day, hadn’t cheered her up because she was convinced her Botox was wearing off and, with her pet beauty technician in the Bahamas until New Year, it was too late to get a top up for the festive parties ahead.
She wearily retied her designer scarf around her neck, climbed a stile to her right and changed direction, cutting across a field once used for strip farming that rippled up and down like a fluffy green slide.
She couldn’t even go and see Jules to offload because the paps were all over the village and they were playing down their friendship since the exposé. Mama had been incandescent with rage about that particular story, even though it was such fantastic publicity – Sylva had been IFOJ for weeks now. The paparazzi had certainly got a lensful earlier, when Sylva set out on a stroll in the sodden countryside looking lonely and sad. The public would love it: their very own Dorothy, blown out of Kansas, lost and lonely and looking for her yellow brick road, perfectly timed for the customary Christmas screening of The Wizard of Oz. She
was lonely; now even the paps had retreated back to their cars, their trainers heavy with water and mud, eager to email the first shots to their agencies for the scoop, and then to follow her by car or motorbike. This far off-road, however, she was totally alone.
The official path hooked to the right, running around the edge of a big private wood belonging to the old Fox Oddfield Abbey estate before climbing back up towards the Springlodes. But Sylva stealthily clambered over a gate marked ‘Private – Keep Out’ and dived into the gloom.
It was sheltered and peaceful in among the trees. The wood was a commercial plantation of Scotch firs looming up as regularly as girders in a warehouse, the tracks between rows as wide and straight as American intersections. After ten minutes of trudging, she found herself passing between big game enclosures with high, chain-link fences like prison exercise yards. She could hear guns in the distance, at least half a mile away, going off with the regularity – and the accompanying whistles – that indicated a well-organised driven shoot, no doubt suits from London.
Cynical locals believed that the Abbey estate was running as a money-making theme park for City boys to play at being country squires. They said that Pete Rafferty had no intention of ever setting foot there, which disappointed Sylva.
She moved past the game pens to a section of old, broad-leafed wood where the ground rose steeply up in front of her like a huge leaf-scaled tidal wave. She turned to walk alongside it, reluctant to climb and now quite eager to find a spot to take a pee.
On the edge of the woods she crouched down behind a holly bush, keeping a safe distance from its prickles, and dropped her trousers.
A loud whistle shrilled immediately behind her. Moments later male voices rose up in catcalls and gruff whoops, sticks crashed against tree trunks and through bracken.
The beaters were making their way along the ridge above her head, sending up pheasants to the guns in the field just beyond the sparse hedgerow in front of her. She was slap, bang between guns and game.
The first shot rang out, so close by that she was momentarily deafened.
With a shriek, barely pulling her trousers beyond her knees, she dived under the holly bush and not a moment too soon. As guns exploded all around her, she was showered with shot and feathers. A twitching, blasted bird landed with a thump by her face, hot and bloodied, another ricocheted off her foot.
An eager black Labrador was the first to unearth her, with a cold wet nose on her shot-pecked, part-exposed buttock. Then a picker-up with a rasping Cockney accent shouted: ‘Dead woman, dead woman, dead woman – murdered, raped, dead!’ before running away.
Hastily trying to extract herself from the holly bush, Sylva found that her scarf had got caught up in its prickly leaves, tying her there. The more she fought to unknot it, the closer she came to asphyxiation.
‘Here.’ A leathery hand reached down towards her and Sylva let out a shriek as she saw the glint of a fierce-looking hunter’s knife.
The man calmly sliced through the silk scarf and freed her so that she could scrabble to her feet and pull up her trousers.
With a bleat, Sylva found herself looking into the ferocious, untamed eyes of Castigates the gamekeeper.
‘You okay, missus?’
‘Fine.’
‘Something happened to you?’ He looked her up and down, taking in the dishevelled appearance.
She hastily did up her belt, shaking her head. ‘Just … got a bit lost.’
Castigates narrowed his eyes. He never forgot a face. ‘I’ve told you off for trespassing before.’
‘Sorry. I will go.’ She turned to run.
‘Stay there!’ he ordered, turning back to his beaters and pickers-up, who were hanging around longing to see more of the pert tanned buttocks in a purple g-string that had been glimpsed through the foliage. ‘I’ll drive you back to a public path once these men have got back in the trailers. The guns are breaking for lunch now, so at least you haven’t interrupted sport.’
There followed a lot of shouting and ordering about, which Sylva watched with mounting delight. Close up, Castigates was an impressive stamp of a man. Wide-shouldered, bullish and taciturn, he reminded her of the Slovak pentathletes from her younger days. He was younger than she’d first thought, perhaps in his late thirties, with a fantastically chiselled jaw, straight dark brows and classic Grecian nose. Most excitingly, as he lifted off his flat cap to readjust it he revealed a mane of dark curls. He looked just like the bronze copy of the Apollo Belvedere that had pride of place in her Amersham hallway.
So when he finally led her to his pick-up truck, she laid on the charm, thickening her accent.
‘Vy do they call you Castigates?’
‘None of your business, missus.’
‘C’mon, it’s not your real name.’
He had climbed in, started the engine and began to drive before he answered. ‘That’s Mr Gates.’
The big pick-up bounced along the wet, rutted tracks.
She studied his wonderful profile again. He was really very rugged and manly. She adored old-fashioned machismo.
‘You can get out here,’ he ordered, pulling up at a road gate. ‘If you walk left along the lane you’ll get to the Oddlode to Springlode road.’
Sylva stayed put.
‘Is the Rockfather here for Christmas?’ she asked casually. He pulled his cap lower over his eyes and lit a small cigar.
‘That’s his lot shooting today.’
‘Pete Rafferty is among the guns?’
‘He was the one what found you, missus.’
‘Oh,’ she felt a deliciously shameful body blush course through her.
‘He doesn’t shoot no more. Says his hands shake too much after all the boozing years. Likes to pick up.’
‘Women mostly, I hear,’ she said lightly. His marriage to Indigo was again rumoured to be on the rocks after he’d been photographed leaving a Dublin nightclub with a Russian call-girl.
Castigates picked a strand of tobacco from his teeth with amazingly strong, calloused fingers. ‘A lot of pretty girls here this weekend, right enough, and a lot of men old enough to know better.’ His loyalty was clearly being stretched.
‘Anyone I know?’
He reeled off a list of half the members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, many of whom Sylva had assumed died from overdoses years ago.
‘Wow. That must be amazing.’
‘Not when you see them shooting. Pete’s got the hands of a surgeon compared to half of that bunch of old rockers with delirium tremens. You’re lucky you’re alive, missus.’
‘My name’s Sylva.’ She thrust out her hand.
‘I know who you are.’ He didn’t shake it, instead leaning across her to open the passenger door.
Close to, he smelt of cigar smoke, peat, wet tweed and gunpowder, a combination that spirited her back to childhood so unexpectedly and violently she felt faint with longing.
‘So the Rafferty family are all here for Christmas?’
‘If you don’t mind, I need to get on.’ He nodded towards the door.
She grabbed his arm. ‘I must thank you for saving me, at least. Are you free for a drink later?’
He regarded her from beneath his cap. Make-up free, platinum extensions hidden beneath a khaki boonie hat, now minus her garish scarf and camouflaged by her waxed cotton and moleskin layers, Sylva looked fresh-faced, earthy and incredibly pretty.
‘I usually taker the beaters for a pint.’
She rested a hand on his tweed thigh and encountered very exciting muscles.
‘Tell them something’s come up.’ She slid the hand higher, feeling that drumroll of anticipation start to thrum between her legs. ‘And I can feel it coming up as we speak.’
Once she had hopped over the gate to the lane Sylva called her driver, forgetting that he was half way to Stansted airport to collect her older sister and niece.
‘Okay, carry on – but take them to Buckinghamshire,’ she instructed Olaf in Slovakian. ‘Tell
Mama there’s been a change of plan. Christmas is delayed.’
‘Delayed?’ He was shocked.
‘That’s right. They must all stay away until Štdr veer. They can come here for the velija.’
‘That is Christmas Eve,’ he protested.
‘Yes. I must have time to … change my menus.’ Sylva felt marvellous. Uncovering a wild game dish was far more exciting than waiting for cheese to ripen.
At Stansted, Hana embraced her cousin Olaf.
She had spent a tiring journey with Zuzi. Their entire baggage allowance was taken up with Christmas presents for all the family, most important of which was the one for her sister. She had thought long and hard about what to get Sylva that would be significant, that would help convey the many emotions she had exploding within her in recent weeks. Convinced that Sylva wanted her quite simply to hand over her daughter, she knew that she had to remain strong and resolute, and keep control.
Earlier that week, she and Zuzi had travelled into Bratislava to sit for a photographer in a studio near the castle. After striking poses that had made them giggle as they rolled around the floor, played piggy-back and touched noses, they had come away with a folder full of images of mother and daughter, the invincible double act. Zuzi then chose an arty frame in a quirky gift shop in the Old Town before they stopped for lunch in a café where Hana started to quietly explain the truth about the little girl’s heritage. Afterwards, they had walked along the banks of the Danube and talked more.
Zuzi was amazingly calm, Hana thought proudly, so wise and stoic. Just like her aunt.
‘You will always be my bábätko,’ she told her.
Her daughter held on to her hand and nodded. ‘You will always be mamika.’
They agreed that nothing would change – unless for the better.
‘Two mothers are better than one,’ Hana promised her.
‘I think I only want one mother,’ Zuzi had replied.
Now, as they were told that Sylva was ‘too busy in the Cotswolds’ to see them, and were conveyed to the main house in Amersham, Hana felt strangely elated. There had been no tearful reunion at the arrivals gate, no photocall. Perhaps Zuzi would be allowed to have one mother after all. She hugged her to her side and listened to the Christmas songs playing on the radio; both pointed in amazement at houses lit up with fairy lights like fairground rides as they passed them.