Susan Wiggs - The Horsemaster's Daughter

She wondered if he could tell she was blushing. “Still intent on shooting him?” she asked in a teasing voice.

He walked into the round pen, latching the gate behind him. But instead of going directly to the horse, he walked over to Eliza. She was unprepared for what he did next. He reached out with great strong arms and grabbed her by the shoulders. His fierce embrace held not warmth, but intensity and desperation.

“I didn’t want to shoot that horse,” he whispered into her hair. “I surely didn’t.”

Frozen by amazement, Eliza simply stood there in his embrace. The stallion ignored them both, tugging indolently at a tuft of grass. Eliza’s eyes drifted half shut, and just for a moment she thought of nothing at all. She merely let her senses turn on, much as a wild animal’s do, taking in the essence of this creature holding her so tightly. The finely woven linen of his shirt felt cool and smooth against her cheek. The fabric smelled lightly salty from the sea air. His hair, long enough to brush his collar, held the clear golden color of the sun. And his skin was scented with a strangely evocative combination of sweat and salt.

His hand moved. Slowly, feeling its way, it skimmed upward over her back so that his fingers found the nape of her neck and pressed there. She felt almost compelled to tip back her head, baring her throat, completely vulnerable to him. Soft heat swirled through her, and she felt such a terrible wanting that it frightened her. Summoning all her self-control, she resisted the warm pulse of her body’s needs and shoved him away.

“I told you I could help this horse,” she said.

He took a step back. “I didn’t believe you could break him, until I saw it with my own eyes.”

She drew herself up, disliking his choice of words. “My father called it ‘gentling.’ Breaking a horse is a savage, dangerous practice.” She watched Finn with a welling of pure affection. “It was a matter of gaining Finn’s trust. He has no idea what patience and dignity and respect are, but he needs them just the same. A horse doesn’t lie, Mr. Calhoun. Not ever.”

“Humans lie all the time.” He leaned back against the fence. Across the circle, the big chestnut horse browsed in a clump of clover. “Finn could have gone anywhere on this island,” he said at length. “And the only place he wanted to be was with you.”

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s not black magic,” she said testily. She gestured toward a lean-to at the end of the paddock. “There’s a scythe in that toolshed over there. You can get started on the bigger pen. It’s best to have you working nearby so he can learn who his owner is. You need to clear that field, and later see about fixing that lower fence rail. It’s almost rotted through.”

He fixed her with a narrow-eyed stare, his earlier gratitude gone. “I don’t take orders.”

“I didn’t think you would. You probably aren’t even used to doing work.”

The blisters on Hunter’s hands rose before noon, and burst before one. The sun burned through the clouds and beat like a hammer of fire on his bare head as he worked. He was no stranger to this sort of labor. He had wanted to tell her that. But she wouldn’t have believed him, for she considered him a lazy planter who amused himself by racing horses. Or a bungler who maimed himself with a hammer. Best to show her who he truly was. She seemed the sort of woman who believed her eyes more readily than her ears.

From the corner of his eye, he watched the stallion in the adjoining pen. The animal stood calmly in the shade. She had put soft leather hobbles around his forelegs, and he tolerated them as he had the halter.

Hunter tried not to wonder where Eliza had gone and what she was doing. But it was all he could think about. She had amazed him. In a world that held very few surprises, she had surprised him. Her bond with the horse seemed so natural. Hunter had watched with his own eyes as the barrier separating human from horse had melted away. He had seen, between girl and stallion, a touch so intimate that it was like the touch between two lovers.

Why did her manner with the horse make her so attractive to him? Hunter pondered the question as he worked, heaving scythed plants up and over the rail, his movements as methodical and regulated as a tobacco worker’s. It left his mind free to think about Eliza Flyte.

With no sense of vanity or even gratitude, Hunter knew he had loved some of the most extraordinary belles in Virginia, so a barefoot island girl should not stand out in the pantheon. Yet in her own way, Eliza Flyte was extraordinary too. She was not pretty, but clear-eyed and dark-haired in a way that commanded attention. She wasn’t charming. Raised by a mysterious man in the middle of nowhere, she lacked the refinements of a well-brought-up lady. She dressed poorly and spoke oddly, and yet she was the most compelling woman he had ever met. There was something about her that he recognized. Suddenly, a part of him emerged that he had never been able to bring out before. Her freshness felt brand new, made him feel brand new.

In the years after returning home from the University of Virginia, Hunter had been treated to a variety of women. As the elder son of the master of Albion, he had regularly reviewed a bright parade of eligible ladies all vying for his favor. Some of them were willing to do more than flirt. Some of them were prettier than a girl had a right to be—particularly Lacey Beaumont.

Fair-haired and merry-eyed, she had captured his heart and held it for longer than he should have let her. Long enough for him to convince himself that the match—arranged years before by their parents—was founded on love and trust, and that their vows actually meant something.

Disaster was the crucible that melted their marriage. Lacey had taught him the painful lesson that even the brightest love could not transform the world. Perhaps a deeper love would have held them together through the years of struggle after Albion had failed. Perhaps not. Hunter would never know. What he had begun to suspect, as time marched on and his heart grew icy and hard, was that true love was an illusion. A hoax made up by poets and dreamers.

Out here, on this wind-torn island where breakers crashed and willets wheeled, he seemed far from all the intrigue and entanglements of the past. He found that he liked being out here, on the edge of everything, where earth and sea and sky met and the lines blurred. The hugeness of the sea put his own world into perspective. Perhaps that was the appeal of the island. Perhaps that was why Eliza Flyte stayed here, her back squarely turned on the world.

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