The Lady Most Likely...

by Julia Quinn

  “Here now,” the innkeeper said, appearing again suddenly, “you keep your manners about you when you’re in Parsley, or we’ll toss you out on your bollocky ear. Shall I bring you and the lady something to drink with that meal, then?” he asked Hugh.

  “We can always improvise,” the player said rather dreamily. “That’s how I started out, you know. Back in London.”

  “Ale for myself and Mr. Lear, and a glass of lemonade for Her Ladyship,” Hugh said. “What sort of things did you improvise? Are you always the King, or sometimes the Fool?”

  “Always the Fool, and yet sometimes a King,” Lear said sadly. He raised his mug of ale and drank.

  “I wonder if you have a play that would be suitable for the Marchioness of Finchley’s birthday?” Georgina asked. “The marquess mentioned that he had hoped to have Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night performed.”

  “We can’t do that one,” Lear said flatly. “I can do you any selection of gory romances, complete with corpses and appropriate songs. Ghosts, battles, strangled women, ghosts of women; there is a difference, you know, between the male and the female ghost—”

  “What is the difference?” Georgina asked.

  “Oh, the male ghost is obsessed with vengeance, I find,” Lear said, drinking again.

  “And what are the females obsessed by?” Hugh asked.

  “Prick songs,” Lear said. “Snogging. Same as when they’re alive, really. Hanging around singing ‘Willow, willow’ because somebody did her in a hedge.”

  “Willow?” Hugh asked dubiously.

  “It’s a song from a Shakespeare play,” Georgina told him.

  “Oh, Shakespeare,” Hugh said, his face clearing. “If I came back as a ghost, I’m going for your sex’s routine, minus the singing. Prick songs sound much better than vengeance.”

  “What is snogging?” Georgina whispered.

  He laughed from behind his tankard of ale. “Just what you think it is, darling.”

  Darling! The word curled into her heart.

  “We can do A Battle of the Centaurs, Including the Love Story of a Eunuch,” Lear stated, “or The Merry Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe. Either one.”

  “The love story of a eunuch?” she asked somewhat dubiously.

  “Pyramus and Thisbe,” Hugh intervened. “A eunuch is demoralizing for a birthday, even if the man in question is lovestruck. Tomorrow at eight, Mr. Lear. The Finchley butler’s name is Slack. He will be happy to show you the theater whenever you choose to arrive. I would just ask that you do not dress as players when approaching the manor, in case the marchioness should happen to glimpse you.”

  “We will be there with our royal velvets and glittering crowns safely hidden in trunks. My lady. My lord.” Lear rose and ambled away without further farewell.

  “Excellent,” Hugh said dryly. “Well, I think we’re done here.” Before Georgina registered what was happening, he had swept her out of the tavern and thrown her up on Elsbeth again.

  He seemed to be turning the horses’ heads toward home, and she couldn’t bear that idea. In fact, it made her feel wild with sadness not to mention anger at herself. Though she couldn’t—didn’t have time to—think that through. “Where shall we find an apple for Richelieu to eat?” she asked.

  “There are apples in the stables,” Hugh said, leading the way back out of town. He was intending to simply return home.

  “Weren’t you going to teach him to have fun?” she asked, telling Elsbeth with just a nudge that she would like to keep up with Richelieu.

  “I think we’ve all had more than enough fun for the day, don’t you?” His voice was wry, and he did look at her then.

  His were the bland, cheerful eyes of a friend. It was as if the attraction that flared between them was already just a memory. The kind of memory she would take home, the way she took home the memory of her marriage. Take it out in the dark of night and wonder what went wrong and what she could have done differently.

  The anger of it choked her throat for a second, and her knees tightened on Elsbeth, who misinterpreted and started forward, flying into a full gallop.

  It was so unexpected that she almost lost her seat, except somehow she never really lost her seat on a horse, even riding sidesaddle. Not since she was eight years old or so.

  And while she could have stopped Elsbeth by her second stride, she didn’t. Instead, she just leaned forward, into the wind, and let the mare tear down the lane. They were running away. Away, away, away.

  She heard the ragged end of Hugh’s shout, then the pounding of Richelieu’s hooves. He would catch them in a moment. Richelieu was bred for speed and the race. She didn’t have to look to know that the horse’s ears were flat back, and his limbs were eating up the ground, dust swelling behind them. In another second, Hugh would have a hand on her reins.

  To the left there was an old stone wall. To the right, the hawthorn hedge wound its way all the way from Finchley manor to here. She and Elsbeth leapt the hedge because it was easier to fall off a sidesaddle when you swerved left. They cleared the hedge as lightly as a dragonfly skims the surface of a river and tore off through the field.

  She heard Hugh swearing, but his words were torn away by the wind. Maybe he thought Elsbeth was running away with her. Who cared what he thought? The edge of the field approached, and they galloped straight into the next one, leapt a fallen-down stone wall, pounded down a country lane, just long enough so that she could hear Richelieu’s hooves land on the dirt.

  Then they were off over another hedge. She miscalculated slightly, and almost slid from the saddle, but managed to hang on. It was just as well that she had left her riding hat at the pub, because it would have been long gone. Fashionable hats were not designed for tearing across the countryside.

  By now Elsbeth was starting to blow, and her neck was dark with sweat. Gallant, sweet thing that she was, her ears were flickering, waiting for the next command. She was still enjoying herself … but growing tired.

  They jumped one last hedge, just because they could and because there was a pond on the other side. Then Georgina slid off Elsbeth, and before Richelieu had even cleared the previous hedge, she had unbuttoned the hateful jacket, turned it inside out, and used it to rub Elsbeth’s neck.

  “You’re a sweet lass,” she told her, catching her own breath.

  Elsbeth blew into her palm and nickered a little, saying in horse language that she’d like to do that again. Just not at the moment. Then Georgina pulled off her bit and bridle and let her amble to the pond.

  Richelieu sailed the hedge with a good three feet to spare. That horse would win the Ascot, Georgina thought. He had heart and verve, as well as astoundingly powerful legs.

  Hugh was out of the saddle before Richelieu’s hooves touched the ground, but instead of laughing at the fun of the chase, those large hands closed on her upper arms like a vise and he gave her a shake. A hard shake. “What in the bloody hell do you think you were doing, Georgie?” Another shake.

  She pulled free, stepping backward, and his hands fell away. Fury swept down her back. “You have no right to—”

  He wasn’t listening, she could already tell. He just reached out and hauled her into his arms like a sack of grain, put his mouth over hers between one word and the next.

  It was a Hugh kiss: like a firestorm, a kiss so fierce and possessive that she couldn’t possibly fight it. Not that her body wanted to. Her mind went into a haze of pleasure the moment that hard body came against hers. Her knees went weak, and her arms wrapped around him … and she pretty much forgot to breathe.

  “You can’t do that sort of thing,” he said fiercely a moment later.

  Georgina hadn’t even thought of it for this reason, but now she just grinned at him. “Why not?”

  “You’re not a good enough rider for that sort of frolicking about.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Show me a hedge high enough for Elsbeth to clear, and I can take her over it. Just who do you think is a better rider than
I?”

  “Me,” he said promptly.

  “You? You fall off all the time,” she said. “I don’t. I never fall off.”

  “Well, you—”

  “And what’s more, I am riding a sidesaddle,” she said, speaking over him because this was important.

  He didn’t look so angry anymore. “Are you saying that I should take lessons from you?”

  “I don’t fall off. I never take a hedge my steed can’t manage.”

  “Neither do I,” he said promptly.

  “Then why did you give me a shake?” She didn’t look at him, just brushed off a leaf that had landed on her white shirt. For some reason, she felt a bit vulnerable without her jacket. Her bodice was made of frail Irish linen. She could almost see the pink of her arms through its sleeves.

  “Because you—” He stopped.

  “I’m the best rider on a sidesaddle that you know.” She just stated it, because it was true, and he knew it.

  “You frightened the shit out of me,” he said, giving her another little shake. But it was a gentle one this time. “I thought—”

  “Fear,” she said primly, “is a very unwelcome emotion, I have always thought.”

  He surprised her. He threw back his head and laughed, the kind of bellow that rolled right across the field and made Richelieu prick up his ears to listen before he went back to cropping grass. “You were trying to teach me a lesson?”

  He was a big, beautiful, brute of a man, and she wanted him. She looked at him laughing in the sun, the strong column of his neck brown and powerful, and she allowed herself to know the truth.

  She wanted him with a kind of raw, fierce desire that was the antithesis of anything she’d felt in her marriage. She wanted him with an ache that started in her chest but spread down her legs.

  Still, she was nettled by the fact he was laughing at her, so she turned away from him and walked over to Elsbeth, who was peacefully cropping the dandelions that grew all around the edge of the pond.

  He followed her. “Do you remember when we went swimming, years ago?” he said, into her ear.

  She hadn’t realized that he’d come so close to her and shivered. “Swimming?” she echoed. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.” There was something wicked in his voice.

  “I’ve never been swimming,” she stated, certain of that. Swimming was not an activity that proper young ladies even considered. And Lord knows, she’d always been proper.

  “I was ten years old. It was the summer my mother died, so you and your mother were staying with us at the estate.”

  She slipped her hand into his. “I’m sorry. I was only six. No, I must have been seven. I don’t have very clear memories of that summer.”

  His smile was generous, joyful, even. “She was a wonderful mother, not at all as proper as a countess should be. I was mad for horses, from the moment I escaped from the nursery.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” Georgina commented, holding his hand tightly.

  “She used to come to the nursery and take me down to the stables. Even that summer, I came to her chamber every day and she would draw pictures of horses for me. She always drew me on top of the horse, jumping over a hedge that was higher than the manor, winning a race … my favorite sketch shows me clinging to a horse whose hooves are just clearing the moon.”

  It wasn’t enough to hold his hand, so Georgina did something she had never done before. She moved in front of a man, cupped his face in her hands, and kissed him. And then she wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him as tightly as she could.

  Being Hugh, he took a hug that was meant to be consoling and turned it into something quite different.

  “Wait,” she said, pulling back a few minutes later, the breath catching in her throat. “I want to—”

  He took her face in his hands this time. “What?” he said, meeting her eyes, fierce and intent. “What do you want to do, Georgiana Sorrell?”

  It was too much. “I want to hear about your swimming excursion. The one where you think I joined you though I didn’t.”

  The smile that curled on his lips told her that his question would return, but he didn’t argue the point. Instead, he sat down on the grass and pulled her arm so that she lost her balance and fell into his lap.

  “Hugh, you can’t do that sort of thing!” she protested. “You can’t pull me and trip me and generally act as if I were a mare with a bridle.”

  “I never think of you that way,” he said, tucking her sideways. His fingers brushed her slippers, then slowly, scandalously, caressed her ankle.

  “That either!” she said, sticking her legs out straight so that he didn’t ruin her concentration with his games. “Now tell me where you went swimming.”

  “The horse pond,” he said promptly. “You probably don’t remember the estate—”

  “Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I was there for a week at Twelfth Night, remember? The horse pond is behind the stables, and it isn’t really a pond. It’s more like a widening in that stream that runs through your property.”

  “It’s still there,” he said thoughtfully. “Though I didn’t know that you even came to the stables during Twelfth Night.”

  “We’ve already established that you didn’t see me if I did,” she said tartly. Because the truth of it was that she had come down to the stables a few times and watched him putting his horseflesh through their paces, and had even taken a peek at the twin foals, though she would bite her tongue before she admitted such a thing.

  “So you prayed to the gods to avenge my blindness,” he said, dropping a kiss on her ear.

  “What?”

  “And the gods avenged you,” he continued. “Because now, for the rest of my life, I’ll always know where you are, Georgina, or I won’t feel comfortable. I’ll always see you first, in any room I enter. And I’ll always want to find you there.”

  She swallowed and bit her lip hard. His voice was so steady and calm, the voice she remembered from her childhood. He wasn’t demanding anything of her, or even asking for a response. He was just—

  Stating it.

  Telling her.

  “The swimming?” she demanded, since she didn’t know how to respond.

  He sighed and dropped another kiss in her hair. “I used to go down at dusk, all sweaty from riding, and fling myself into the pond. That summer … it was all different. Mother was dying, and the doctors came and went all the time. All the servants, the whole household, revolved around it.”

  “I know,” she said, leaning against him. “I know just what you mean.”

  “I forgot about Richard’s illness. Of course you do.” He brushed the curls away from her forehead and kissed her there. “Well, so I had more freedom that summer. My sisters—and you—were penned up in the nursery with a phalanx of nursemaids, but I was old enough to escape. And escape I did.”

  “I don’t remember that summer clearly,” she said, frowning. “My mother was so close to your mother and father … we came every July, of course. In my memory, it’s just summer after summer, time in which we could escape the nursemaids too, and take our dolls to the stream, and play with you, and build willow-huts.”

  “I would strip off my clothes and jump into that pond,” he said.

  “Well, I never did that,” she said with a laugh. “So why do you think that I went swimming with you?”

  “Because you did just that.”

  She was silent for a moment. Then: “No!”

  “I don’t know what Caro would have done without you that summer. You carried a handkerchief in your pinafore.”

  “I always carried a handkerchief,” Georgina pointed out. “One of my mother’s rules.”

  “You would hand it over if anyone started crying,” he continued. “Not that I ever cried. I didn’t believe in it.”

  “I suppose boys don’t cry,” Georgina said with a sigh. The only man she’d ever seen cry was Richard’s valet, just a
fter Richard died. She’d let him sit by Richard toward the end, because … just because.

  It was only when his valet came out of Richard’s room with his eyes swollen and tears still falling down his cheeks that she knew she was a widow.

  “You didn’t realize it yet,” Hugh said, resting his chin on the top of her head. “You gave me that handkerchief a few times, as if you thought I needed it. I always pushed it back with disdain, but I appreciated the gesture.”

  “I don’t remember,” Georgina said. “How odd.”

  “Then my mother died. And we were all put into blacks, and my great-aunts arrived, and it was quite horrible.” His arms tightened around her. “It was harder for me to get out of the nursery, but I managed it, a few days after. Before that … well, the girls needed me.”

  “You were the best big brother,” she offered. “Even to me, and I’m not your sister.”

  “Thank God for that,” he said with a thrum of heartfelt thanks in his voice that made the joy spring up in her heart again. “I went down to the pond, not because I was going to cry—”

  “Since boys don’t cry,” she supplied.

  “Because it was all watery down there, and no one would notice in case I made a mistake of that nature.”

  “Where do I come in?”

  “You escaped as well, except I didn’t know it. You must have followed me. You were—what?—seven years old, so I can’t imagine how you managed it.”

  “Oh, I can,” she said, loving the way his arms formed a warm cage around her. “I was so trained to be aware of protocol, and servants, and the right thing to do that I always knew exactly how to do the wrong thing. It was unavoidable. You are told not to kiss in dark corners long before you have an impulse to do it.”

  “Did Richard kiss you in dark corners?” He sounded curious, not jealous.

  “No. So I escaped from the nursery?”

  “The first I knew of it was when I looked up from splashing around the pond, which was deliciously warm, by the way. There you were.”