Kiss and Tell

by Fiona Walker

  The red brake lights lit up and the bike waited, engine ticking, a terrier barking in the crook of the driver’s arm.

  As Lough drew level he realised Rory was aboard.

  ‘Hop on – you can have a lift,’ he called out.

  ‘I’d rather walk, thanks. Need to clear my head.’

  ‘Get on,’ Rory insisted. ‘The others will be coming back soon. Tash might be sober, but she doesn’t have the best eyesight in the world and you’re bloody difficult to spot.’

  Lough clambered on, deciding he’d rather be home and warm, not that the lodge cottage was ever really warm. But surprisingly the solid-fuel Rayburn was still lit and a fire glowed in the grate.

  ‘I was here until half an hour ago,’ Rory explained, crouching down and raking through the ashes to encourage the fire to burn down. ‘Not really in a party mood.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Lough said, heading for the stairs. ‘Thanks for the lift.’

  Rory looked over his shoulder. ‘Tell me, is Hugo taking you to the States? Nobody will give me a straight answer.’

  Lough shook his head. ‘I won’t go. It’s your gig. I told him tonight.’

  ‘Good.’ Rory turned back to stab angrily at the embers, making them spark. ‘Suits me. I can’t wait to get out of here.’ Then, as Lough moved away again, he added suddenly, ‘Is Lemon trustworthy?’

  Lough ran his tongue along his teeth doubtfully. ‘Depends what you entrust him with.’

  ‘Faith.’

  ‘Ah.’ Lough nodded, pausing to think. Lemon was as crooked as dog’s hind leg, yet fiercely loyal to those he cared for, most of them equine rather than human. He had few lasting relationships, but that’s why he and Lough had always worked so well together. ‘She’s one of his mates,’ he told Rory now, ‘and he looks after his mates. They have fun together. I reckon you can trust him to take care of her.’

  Rory blinked and nodded, briefly still staring at the fire, his shoulders hunched miserably.

  Three steps up the stairs, Lough paused again. ‘I’ll keep an eye on her if you like.’

  ‘Thanks. Happy New Year.’

  ‘You too, mate. Hope you get what you want.’

  Rory looked at the last glowing specks of red, matching the burning in his heart. He’d figured out what he wanted, but as usual he was too late. He’d missed the stroke of midnight and Cinderella had run off with one of the footmen before he got there.

  From now on he was going to stick to what he knew best: his horses, his sport and the occasional passing Fairy Godmother.

  ‘Beccy was very weird on the way home, don’t you think?’ Tash said as she and Hugo undressed in the early hours, yawns ripping at her jaw.

  She had hoped that he might undress her but his black mood and drunkenness was clearly not going to cooperate.

  He grunted, hopping around as he pulled off a sock.

  ‘I hope she’s all right. She seemed terribly out of sorts.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Hugo?’ She turned to check he was okay.

  He was lying on the bed, squinting at her because he was having trouble focusing – but what he could see he obviously liked. His erection was on full alert.

  ‘You. Are. Beautiful,’ he breathed.

  ‘Thank you. So are you.’

  ‘Then why don’t you take the weight off your feet and lower it on to this?’ He indicated his magnificent flagpole.

  Tash bit her lip, a giggle escaping out of one side of her mouth like a burp. She pressed her lips together to hide it, but it snorted out of her nose. Unable to stop herself, she bent double with laughter.

  ‘What?’ he wailed indignantly, flagpole lowering rapidly.

  ‘That is just such … a … bad … line.’ She was getting a stitch from laughing.

  Hugo sulkily turned off the light.

  Groping her way into bed, Tash located his mouth to bestow a pacifying kiss. It deepened deliciously. Then suddenly she felt something hard land on her tongue.

  ‘Oh Christ!’ she yelped, sitting up and spitting the little bullet into her palm. ‘It’s a tooth!’ Her panic-stricken tongue immediately probed her mouth for a gap.

  ‘Mine.’ Hugo retrieved it. ‘The king has lost his crown. Easy enough to fix. For now I’ll put it under the pillow and wait for the tooth fairy to grant my wish.’

  Tash stared into the darkness, remembering how heroic he had looked after he lost the tooth falling from Snob, his beauty all the more obvious because of that gaping flaw in his once perfect smile. She’d fancied him almost more than ever then.

  ‘Come to America with me,’ he spoke into the darkness. ‘I can’t leave you on your own here.’

  ‘I won’t be on my own. There’s a team here now. I’ll be safely under Lough and Lemon,’ she joked, kissing him again.

  Hugo’s lips yielded for a moment, revealing that delicious flaw, a temporary reminder of how dangerous his day job was, of how brave he was and vulnerable they all were. Tash found it a thrillingly sexy kiss. But the flagpole resolutely refused to raise its colours again.

  ‘Too many New Year toasts,’ Hugo muttered, falling almost immediately into a drunken sleep.

  Trying hard not to feel rejected, Tash lay awake, thinking back to her conversation with Zoe and worrying that by avoiding walking on the cracks in her marriage she was going to fall flat on her face. She soon worked herself up into a panic, convinced that he was put off by her mumsiness, that he no longer saw her as sexually desirable and so he was playing away with increasing regularity.

  ‘Hugo,’ she prodded him urgently at three in the morning. ‘We need to talk.’

  It took several more prods to get any response.

  At last he groaned in his sleep, apparently mid-dream: ‘Your bloody deadlock.’

  Tash’s hyped up mind immediately made word associations: deadlock … wedlock … stalemate … he must think they were in a terrible rut. ‘What deadlock, Hugo?’

  ‘Your bloody deadlock,’ he repeated, ‘if you lay a finger on her …’ His voice trailed away into muttered nonsense.

  ‘It’s not a deadlock if we talk about it,’ Tash bleated, suddenly even more insecure. Was he warning her off handbagging V while he was away in the States?

  She prodded and shook him for a response, but he was too deeply asleep to rouse.

  Also lying awake, just a few hundred yards away in the lodge cottage, Lough abandoned counting sheep – New Zealanders could always count more than anybody – and instead calculated the hours until his housemate and landlord crossed the Atlantic and left him alone at Haydown with Tash. Less than a hundred.

  He could start the countdown, knowing he must watch and think.

  Chapter 45

  Not long before the first daylight of the New Year, Lemon and Faith arrived for work at Haydown in her little Volkswagen, having slithered up the hill from Fosbourne Ducis on black ice and frozen snow, both feeling deliciously deflowered but determinedly not in love.

  ‘This won’t change anything, right?’ Faith checked, automatically looking up at Rory’s window as they passed to see if the curtains were still closed. They were.

  ‘Nothing at all, yeah,’ he agreed, hoping that they could do it again very soon.

  They were surprised to find no sign of Beccy, who always woke unnaturally early and would usually have started putting out feeds by the time Lemon got going or Faith drove in. But today the yard was deserted and the horses were banging on their doors. Jenny was still away in Germany with her fiancé’s family; Rory, Lough and Hugo weren’t yet in evidence.

  Lemon and Faith cranked up the yard radio and set to work, a bounce in their step, sharing knowing smiles as they passed.

  But by the time they had fed, watered and hayed the horses and were gathering barrows to muck out the smiles were faltering.

  ‘We have to check on Beccy.’

  When they went up to the stables flat she was in her little bed-sitting room, under her duvet, clutching Karma and shaking uncontr
ollably.

  ‘Are you ill?’ Faith reached for her forehead in concern.

  ‘Alcohol poisoning? Bad food?’ Lemon guessed.

  But Beccy shook her head wildly, imploring them to leave her alone.

  ‘What is it, Beccy?’ Faith pleaded, kneeling down beside the bed. ‘You must tell us.’

  For a moment a blade of panic lanced her chest as she wondered whether Beccy had been the one outside her room last night, had heard her and Lemon and was reacting like this because she was jealous.

  But then she whispered ‘Hugo’ and started crying.

  ‘What about Hugo?’ Perching on the opposite side of the bed, Lemon stroked Beccy’s shoulder the same way as he did when handling one of the more nervous horses: not his usual brash, tactless self at all.

  ‘It was all my fault,’ she sobbed. ‘He kissed me, but then it all went wrong.’

  Lemon’s gaze met Faith’s across the bed, his pale-lashed grey eyes bulging in alarm.

  ‘What went wrong?’ Faith asked carefully.

  But Beccy was muttering and sobbing nonsensically now ‘… in the stable yard … all those filthy rugs … so ashamed …’

  ‘Did Hugo attack you, Beccy?’

  ‘No! It was a bit rough, maybe, but he was frightened of getting caught. I feel so terrible. It was all my fault.’ The sobs stopped her being able to say any more.

  Lemon opened his mouth but Faith hushed him with her hand. ‘She’s had enough right now – we’ll talk more later. Make her a cup of tea, Lem. She can stay here. We’ll keep checking on her, and as far as the others are concerned, she’s ill today.’

  There were no bank holidays for horses. From first light, Lough and then Hugo appeared looking somewhat the worse for wear and began working in the indoor school. When he finally appeared on the yard Rory looked terrible, making Faith think that Lemon was right; he must have spent the night womanising. But he was the only one of the three men to notice that Beccy was missing.

  ‘Beccy overdo it last night?’ he asked.

  ‘Something like that,’ Lem replied.

  ‘Bloody lightweight,’ Rory grumbled, tacking up Rio to follow the others into the indoor school, which was the only safe surface until the frost thawed.

  Lemon and Faith went into a huddle once he was out of earshot. ‘Hugo doesn’t look remotely shifty or worried.’

  ‘Why should he?’ Faith sighed. ‘He doesn’t think he did anything wrong.’

  ‘He tried to rape her!’

  ‘Keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘We don’t know that for certain.’

  ‘As good as! You heard what she said. She should report it.’

  ‘What, her word against his? A highly strung ex drug trafficker with a proven history of dishonesty and unpredictable behaviour up against the nation’s favourite gold-medal-winning, happily married toff? I think not.’

  Lem reluctantly conceded the point. ‘I won’t let this drop. Hugo’s a heartless shit.’

  Faith lowered her voice to a breath: ‘We’re going to have to take care of her, Lem – prop her up. And that means she mustn’t know about what happened between us last night.’

  ‘Good though, wasn’t it?’ Lem growled, eager for a repeat performance at their earliest convenience.

  ‘It was great,’ Faith said quickly, ‘but we mustn’t tell her, and we mustn’t do it again.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘She’s sensitive. She needs to feel included right now. If we’re to stand a chance of finding out what really happened to her last night we have to support her totally. Totally.’ With that, Faith headed off to groom Humpty for Rory’s second ride.

  Watching her retreating back, Lemon groaned, hoping that they uncovered the full story as quickly as possible so that he and Faith could resume their sexual co-education.

  He took his frustrations out on the sack of rock salt by the horse-walker, hacking at it manically with a shovel to split the plastic before digging it in and throwing showers of it down on the rubber track so that they could get some horses moving safely in the mechanical exerciser to make up for the frozen fields.

  Unlike the dissolving salt, Lem’s hatred and resentment towards Hugo had crystallised still further. It had been building up slowly over weeks, but what had happened to Beccy, combined with Hugo’s murderous mood since Lough’s arrival, had accelerated the chemical reaction.

  ‘Fucking Hugo.’ He dug his shovel blade deeper and deeper into the split belly of the salt sack. ‘Stuck-up bastard. He deserves a fucking big fall.’

  But it was Rory who took a fall that morning when bringing Rio back to the yard. The horse caught a vein of untreated ice under one shoe, his leg slipping right underneath him so that Rory was forced to kick out the stirrups and bail out, landing on his feet before his own heels encountered the ice and upended him on to his bottom.

  ‘Emergency dismount!’ Rory joked when Faith raced over in alarm to check he was all right. It was an embarrassing fall, but both horse and rider were fine. ‘Guess I need some of that superglue I used to mend the china horse.’

  Faith looked at him blankly, wondering what he was talking about. She led Rio away to his stable, leaving Rory kicking the edge of the ice, lifting it with his toe into little sharp shards.

  When Hugo cornered him later that morning to confirm that he was the one going to the States, he felt only relief.

  ‘MC is very much looking forward to seeing you again.’ Hugo gave him a wise look.

  Rory sighed, realising that as one door closed, another porte had opened in the storm.

  The following week, five of Haydown’s top horses, including Rio and The Fox, flew out to Florida accompanied by Jenny. Hugo and Rory were to follow two days later.

  Hugo had been making this annual excursion for many years with Tash, traditionally leaving his staff to get the top competition horses fit at home. The decision to take the best of the four-star horses to the States with him this time was a new tactic that he was using as a part of their fitness campaign, taking advantage of the warmer climate and the early competitions to start tuning them up himself.

  Determined to break the deadlock Hugo had drunkenly alluded to, Tash planned to use her wifely wiles to give him a send-off that would linger in his mind. She knew they needed to talk more, but didn’t want a last-minute showdown, and she was secretly terrified of hearing something she couldn’t handle. Instead, she felt actions should speak louder than words.

  But her attempts at romance were blighted from the start. Her first proper period since Amery was born arrived that week, coinciding with a streaming cold that she must have caught from a New Year’s guest. Soon her temperature was leaping well over a hundred and she was wiped out with fatigue. With spare tissues, cold capsules and panty-pads lined up in the bathroom, she donned her best new La Perla combination for a final seduction, but was a vision of snotty-nosed, red-eyed, sneezing ill health. Hugo charitably declined to take advantage, so she gratefully knocked back more paracetamol and slumped into a deep, feverish sleep while he headed downstairs to gather more riding gear to pack.

  When he finally rejoined her in the bedroom, clanking about so noisily she woke up, it was the early hours, but she was feeling far too ill to worry what he’d been up to, or that he had to set off for the airport at dawn. Her throat full of razorblades, she got up to refill her water glass and take painkillers for her stomach cramps. The reading light was on and Hugo was sitting up in bed when she returned, making notes on a printed list.

  ‘I’m leaving written instructions.’ He looked up as she staggered around the bed. ‘I don’t trust Lough to do anything I say.’

  ‘I’ll make sure he does,’ she croaked, sagging back against the pillows, sweaty and shivery from her excursion.

  ‘No. Leave him alone, Tash. He can figure it out, and Lemon’s been here long enough to know the score. I want you to keep away from them both, understood?’ The harshness in his tone surprised Tash, but she was too weak to argue. She
just longed to sleep again.

  But for once Hugo had chosen this moment to open up. Casting the list aside, he wrapped an arm around her and pressed a kiss to her clammy temple.

  ‘You mustn’t trust Lough,’ he said softly. ‘He’s a loner. He hates people, especially women.’

  Grateful for the warmth of his arm as her body fought to regulate its temperature, Tash nodded vaguely, lead weights of tiredness on her brow and eyes.

  ‘He has his own agenda.’ Hugo’s voice was so quiet it acted as a lullaby. ‘He understands horses a lot better than he understands humans. He uses people, and I don’t want him to use you to get at me.’

  Drifting off to sleep, Tash’s cold-filled brain took a while to register what he was saying. Now, her itchy eyes reopened. She was suddenly feeling very hot.

  ‘Why would he want to get at you?’

  There was a long pause. She swallowed flaming ashes, her face burning, sinuses screaming with the effort of staying awake.

  ‘That’s not important.’ Hugo stroked her sweaty hair. ‘It’s what he might do that matters.’

  Pushing away his arm, which was making her overheat like mad, Tash struggled to sit up, head spinning. ‘You don’t think he’s going to hurt us, surely?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ he said quickly. ‘I’d just rather you kept your distance.’

  She sagged back against the pillows. ‘What is it between you two?’

  A muscle was slamming in Hugo’s cheek, although his voice stayed calm. ‘He has a lot of secrets, none of them very nice.’

  They could hear snuffling on the baby monitor, indicating that Amery, who also had the cold, would start bawling at any second, but as Tash peeled back the covers ready to go and comfort him, Hugo reached across and tucked her back in. ‘You need to rest. I’ll go.’

  Soon she could hear him on the monitor, whispering to his son as he settled him back to sleep. She closed her eyes in relief, not sure if they were streaming so much because of the head cold or the panic tears that were starting to mount. Within minutes her nose was an unstoppable tap as she used tissue after tissue, trumpeting and snorting like a drowning elephant. Hearing Hugo’s soothing noises on the monitor made it all the worse as she thought about their young family, her little fortress of love that was under threat from Lough.