The hooves of the other horses pounded ahead of her, and her hand was firm on the reins of her horse, a natural born hunter with a competitive streak in him, who could have outdistanced most of the animals in the field and yet was too much of a thoroughbred to disobey any whim of the girl in his saddle. He had been hers from a foal, having been born on a night of storm when Dina was sixteen and home from school for the summer vacation. She had woken to the sounds of distress from the stables at the rear of Satanita and had hurried down in her pyjamas and hastily thrown-on raincoat, arriving in time to see the vet lifting the foal from the dead body of its mother. From that moment Major had been hers to care for, to rear and train, and a deep bond of understanding existed between them.
Major was one of the few reasons why she hunted, for he loved the thrill of the chase, and she would let him out into a full gallop as soon as they fell far enough behind the pack to be able to ride off at a tangent. Later on she w-ould pretend that she hadn't noticed she was heading in the wrong direc-
tion; no one would really mind, for Dina was accepted as a rather private sort of person, in some ways a bit of a dreamer but lovely enough to be forgiven most things. Besides, she belonged to Bay
and he was the homme ideal of the charmed circle, and his girl was naturally sans peur et sans re-pro che.
The sun slanted in a gale of gold across the fields, the pounding of hooves had a rhythm of their own, constant as a distant drummer. A hint of dusky flame was burning among the trees, which made spires where dark birds had their hauntings.
The moment had come for Dina to break free of the hunt, and with a sudden smile she did so, turning Major in the other direction and allowing him to release his muscles in a long, loping stride. A quick thrill of relief blazed in her eyes, setting them alight beneath the brim of a jaunty suede hat, worn with a checked riding coat, suede waistcoat underneath, and pale beige breeches tucked into suede boots to the knee. Most members of the club wore the traditional hunting clothes, but Dina had put her boot firmly down on the notion of wearing the garb that proclaimed one a lover of a blood sport, and the further away she rode from the clamour of the hounds—a shrill note in their baying, as if quarry had been scented at last—the happier she felt.
She knew that Bay would be riding alongside the master of the hounds, and that he would have forgotten for the time being that she was taking part in the chase—or supposed to be taking part. Later on he would ask her casually if she had enjoyed herself, and if, as now, she had managed to break free and ride alone she would be able to reply with
truth that she had loved the gallop.
Bay was an extrovert who rarely delved into her private thoughts; he admired her looks and liked her cool composure, and like many other young men of his class he didn't wish to associate passionate loves or hates with the woman he took as his wife. He didn't dream how passionate was Dina's dislike of the cruelty that ended a chase. He hadn't the remotest idea that her coolness was like the icing on a bombe of tangy fruit baked in hot brandy.
Dina didn't fully know herself ... except that she was Lewis Caslyn's daughter, and he had been no angel!
There was silence except for Major's rhythmic hoofbeats, and then across that silence echoed the sound of a hunting horn, and the nerves of her heart tightened. 'Go!' she cried at Major, and he bounded into a full gallop, taking a rise that dipped into a hollow, darkening into a tunnel of tall trees. It made a sounding chamber for the pounding of his hooves, and it closed out whatever shrill echoes might have come from over the hills, where she sensed that a fox had been trapped and was probably being torn to pieces at this very moment. Anger and pity so blinded her eyes that she didn't notice that a barred gate of some height lay ahead of her galloping mount. When he braced his muscles and jumped it, Dina was unprepared for the sudden leap, though instinctively she kicked free of the stirrups as she felt herself being ejected from the saddle. As it happened there were plenty of leaves in the woods, which had fallen into piles, and she landed not too badly, stunning her right elbow in the fall, but even so she was anxious
that Major wouldn't dash off and leave her stranded. She gave the whistle which should have signalled him to a halt, but something seemed to have spooked him and he went cantering off among the trees, dragging his reins and leaving Dina to scramble to her feet, her left hand cradling her stinging elbow.
'Major!' She whistled him again, but he refused to respond, and annoyed with herself for taking a tumble which was entirely her own fault, she said, 'Damn!' and stamped a booted foot.
'Temper, temper,' drawled a voice, and she swung round on the instant and found herself confronting the man she had so fervently hoped she would never see again.
'You!' she exclaimed.
'I, signorina.' He gave her a sardonic bow and swept his eyes up and down her dishevelled figure.
Already shaken and in a temper, Dina was in no mood just then to choose her words. 'You've been following me,' she accused. 'Making quarry of me like—like those hounds after a vixen!'
'Have I now?' His left eyebrow slanted, and the play of lacy sunlight on the strong dark angles of his face made him more sinister in this moment than she had yet seen him.
'You didn't wave your sorcerer's wand, Don Mephisto,' she said cuttingly. 'Magic belongs in children's story books, so the conclusion is that you've been tracking me down!'
'Are you really so certain that you don't believe in magic?' His smile was subtle, there in the darting gleams of gold and shadow. 'I knew the hunt was out, but I thought you'd be in the thick of it with your fiance, eager for the kill.'
'I hate the kill!' She angrily brushed leaves and twigs from her breeches, and then tautened in every nerve as she felt his hand brushing her jacket. 'Don't do that—I can manage!'
'I had the impression that your elbow took a nasty whack.'
'It's only a bruise. I've tumbled out of the saddle before and lived to ride again.' She stepped away from his proximity and flung back her head with that instinctive air of pride and independence, and a shading of the fear she couldn't quite banish from her eyes. A ray of sunlight tangled itself in her hair, from which her suede hat had fallen, and the cleft in her chin was so beautifully marked as to seem almost a shadow in her fine bone-structure.
'So you hate to see the fear-crazed vixen being torn by the hounds and watched by the intrepid hunters, waiting to take their trophy in the shape of the poor brute's tail. How the high and mighty find their pleasures!'
'How do you find yours?' she shot at him. 'In hunting women? Are they your prey, signore?'
'At least it's a more humane sport, for the woman is permitted to run away when the game is over.'
'Oh, don't you fake their scalps and hang them on your bedpost?' The words were out before Dina could stop them, and the hand she flung upwards couldn't push them back in her mouth.
'So you are human and not made from beautifully chiselled ice.' He gave a laugh and lounged against the trunk of a tree, clad in a brown shirt and matching trousers, a light-coloured jacket cloaking his shoulders. 'Are you aware, by the way,
that vou and your horse are.trespassing on private
land?'
'Nonsense,' she said at once. 'These woods are part of the old Penrose estate, which has been empty and abandoned since Adam Penrose died a dozen years ago. He and his wife lived a rather odd sort of life and some people said she was—mad, that's why the house has been difficult to sell. Bella reckons it will eventually be pulled down and the land parcelled off to a speculator.'
'Bella Rhinehart is a shrewd woman, but upon this occasion she has fired and missed the bullseye,' he drawled. 'Adam's Challenge has been sold and will once again be occupied, when the necessary repairs and adjustments have been made by the new owner.'
Dina gazed at him in sheer amazement. 'You have to be kidding,' she said. 'The place has gone to seed and it would take a man of quite some means to put it back in shape. Only a speculator would bother with such a property, su
rely?'
When he just stood there looking at her, sliding a hand into his pocket for his cheroot case, a premonition touched her and warned her that she was facing the new owner of that brooding Colonial mansion, white-stoned and proud half a century ago, but now a lonely and sombre hulk with its windows shuttered to keep out vagrants. It had a large rectangular courtyard, curving bays, and stood on a knoll overgrown with weeds and vine-strangled shrubs. Few people went near the place after dark, for the Penrose couple had been strange and solitary people. He had been a folk-lorist, who tramped the countryside in a wide-brimmed hat and a great cloak, like some character from a
Victorian gothic novel, and his wife had kept to her rambling garden, singing to herself in a language no one had fully understood. The sound of her tuneless incantations floating over the garden walls had led to the belief that she was crazy ... all that was really known that was after she died Adam Penrose became even more morose and in a few short years followed her, leaving no heirs or known relatives, and the old house known as Adam's Challenge had fallen into decay, no one being resolute enough to live there and recharge the property with new life.
Raf Ventura clicked shut his lighter and blue smoke clouded about his face and streamed off into the red-gold rays of afternoon sunshine, prodding their way through the boughs of the trees.
'Would not an entrepreneur have the audacity to do it?' he drawled.
'Yes, I suppose so,' she admitted, and she hardly dared to face the fact that he meant to live at Adam's Challenge; to make of it his home ... which would then be only a few short miles from Satanita. 'Are you going to have it bulldozed and rebuilt into an estate of bungalows, Mr Ventura?'
'You would like to think so, wouldn't you, Miss Caslyn?' The wreathing smoke intensified his sardonic look, playing about his steely grey eyes under the slanting black brows. 'I wonder what turn the gossip will take when the matriarchs of Pasadena learn that an Italian restaurateur is going to make his home among them? Will they try and have me run out, do you think, and will your godmother lead the chase?'
He hit very close to a nerve and recalled vividly for Dina the way she had pleaded with Bella not to
make an enemy of this man by getting her lawyer to probe into his private life. If he had purchased the house, then Bella would ultimately learn of it and Dina knew she would be powerless to prevent her godmother from hounding him. Why did Bella feel driven to do so? Because years ago Lewis had got himself disastrously involved with a gambling syndicate of this man's nationality? Or because she saw in him a threat to Dina and the forthcoming marriage she had so skilfully encouraged?
Dina bent down to retrieve her hat and because her nerves were shaken she gave it an extra hard thump against the side of her breeches in order to remove the leaf dust. 'I must catch hold of Major if I can ... may I go and find him? He'll have ventured right into the grounds of the house by now.'
'We'll go together,' he said at once. 'You might even permit me to show you around my newly acquired property.'
'I—I don't think I shall have the time-'
'You're over eighteen, aren't you, and not completely shackled to the godmother. You might like the house—some of its rooms are beautifully proportioned, and the place might take on quite an air once I've licked it into shape. I'm going to, Dina. I've been looking for a suitable home for a long time, and this is it, and I don't care a sizzle in hell what Bella Rhinehart and her coterie say, or attempt to do. I plan to make Adam's Challenge my home, whenever I can snatch -the time from my business concerns to enjoy the novelty of being a householder.'
'Oh, so you won't be here all the time?' Try as she might Dina couldn't keep the note of relief out
of her voice, and he gave a sudden, rather hard laugh that startled some birds in the trees overhead; there was a flutter of wings as they flew out from their perch, circling restlessly, as if, Dina thought, a tiger had prowled into their forest.
'I can't quite make out if you genuinely dislike me,' he said, 'or find me a trifle too intriguing for comfort.'
'You've a dollar on yourself,' she rejoined. 'Why should I find you even a trifle intriguing?'
'Because I'm different from your set, Dina, and come from another world. Because I've washed dishes in restaurant kitchens hot and seething as the back premises of hell itself. Because I got born as near dark as the devil without actually having the cloven hoofs.'
'You might have those, for all I know.' Their combined footsteps fell together on the leaf-strewn pathway, and she glanced as she spoke at the hand-tailored gleam of his mahogany-toned shoes. He had long and narrow feet, and he walked with the noiseless grace of the Latin. She was intrigued by him, and there was no denying it. He was different from the people she had grown up with ... from those athletic boys who wouldn't know how to put dishes in a sink without splashing themselves with greasy water from neck to knee.
It was incredible that this well-shod, darkly groomed, subtly intelligent man had ever washed and stacked dishes; served food and smiled upon the diners in that abstractedly polite way of waiters. To say she was intrigued was to put it too tamely. The awareness evoked by his vital, restless, untamed personality made her want to dash away into the heart of the woods and escape his sorcery.
Yes, he was casting a spell which she was afraid of, for there was a dark excitement to it that was leading her, even at this moment, into the house of strange secrets which he had bought for himself. Why had he bought the place? To infuriate people like Bella? To compensate for youthful poverty? Or to be close enough to Satanita to come upon herself as he had this afternoon?
As the shadows of the woods lifted and they came out by a side gate that had fallen brokenly to one side, Dina caught the jingle of a bridle and knew that Major was nearby. She hurried forward, calling his name, and found him fetlock-deep in a patch of tall grass, filling his belly with the lush green stuff.
'There you are, you bad old boy!' Dina ran to him and caught hold of his reins. Raf Ventura strolled forward and stood there giving the horse a thorough scrutiny.
'Good blood, eh, and quite a bit of speed in those sleek muscles. You must be a very capable rider to be able to manage him, Dina.'
'I've been riding since I was a child,' she said, stroking a hand down Major's long glossy neck. 'He can go at quite a lick, can't you, my handsome grey?'
'You'll have to challenge me to race, when I've got things straightened out and can stable a horse or two at Adam's Challenge.' The grey eyes swept over Dina as she stood there beside her mount, very slender in her riding clothes. 'It crosses my mind that with your cap of flaxen hair you look rather like a Renaissance pageboy,' he added lazily.
'I'd prefer it, signore, if you didn't say things like that.' Her pulses had quickened and she was
strongly tempted to leap into Major's saddle and be off like the wind, and as if he sensed this impulse in her body he came across and took hold of the horse's reins and latched them around a nearby tree.
'Would it be different if I were part of the local beau monde?' he drawled, lifting lean fingers and letting Major nuzzle them. Dina stared, for it was unusual for the proud grey to accept so readily the caress of a stranger.
'What do you mean—different?'
'Acceptable. Able to pay you a compliment without putting you into a panic'
'I'm not in a panic,' she denied. 'Why should I be?'
'Because we're alone, Dina. Because we're a man and a woman—oh, to hell with the diamonds on your hand, if you're about to throw in my face that you are all too soon to be a married lady.'
'It's true, all the same.' For the life of her she couldn't stop her voice from shaking a litde. 'I—I don't mind being friends, if you want that?'
'Ah, what a concession from the princess !'
'Please—just be friends.'
'We don't appear to be enemies, Dina.'
'I'd hate that, to be enemies with you-' She
broke off sharply and could have bitten her tongue for such an
admission.
'What a confession,' the edge of his moustache lifted in that ironic smile of his, 'and drawn from you without the aid of rack or fire.'
'Don't I' She shivered in the shards of sunlight falling down from the treetops. 'There's something curiously medieval about you, signore.'
'Shades of Cesare Borgia and Cagliostro, eh?'
'Oh yes—you are in some ways a sorcerer, aren't
you?'
'From dishes to riches, do you mean, in the course of twenty years?'
'Yes—you let nothing stand in your way. You meant to be part of—of my world, and so you bought this place.' She swung round and gestured at the house, so long neglected, so possibly haunted, with sheets of lichen clinging to its side walls, its steps meshed in cat's foot ivy, great hands of fern, and ribbon grass gone wild, twining around the elder trees like petrified witches.
And yet ... Dina was too sensitive, too imaginative not to see that despite its neglect and its decadence Adam's Challenge had a strange sort of charm.
The roof tiles sloped at an angle, they curved in almost a poetic way and were rusty red. Gabled windows were set high and deep in the roof, where long attics were situated. Below ran a carved stone frieze with heraldic designs, to which at intervals the pillars of the great porch were attached. Set in the porch itself was a fine oriole window, like Penelope's web, and the colonnade stretched to left and right, curving into great bays. Behind the house rose the wooded hills, so close they seemed part of it, as if the place grew out of them. It was impossible to deny the worn beauty and weathered charm that still clung to the house which Raf Ventura had decided to own.
'No,' he shook his head at her, T have no desire to be part of your world, but come with me and be part of mine for just a while.'
'I really should be getting home-' And yet
she was curious to see inside, and it seemed as if a
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