by Fiona Walker
Watching her, Dougie wasn’t entirely sure that she was just talking about swimming. It was impossible to read the expression on her face as the air danced and twisted in the heat above the fire. ‘Think you could get into the lake here on horseback this evening? Face your demon?’
‘Unlikely,’ she admitted, looking down at her cup. ‘This tea tastes weird.’
‘It’s Earl Grey, and don’t change the subject. If you want me to help you, we need to talk about that demon. What could possibly go wrong for a strong swimmer who is as clever and brave as you?’ When she didn’t reply, he said, ‘Your ex left you frightened of more than just open water, didn’t he?’
Again, she didn’t answer. Then Dougie realized she was looking straight at him and he almost couldn’t speak for the blood rushing through him. She looked haunted. She had looked at him in the same way last night. He wanted to wrap his arms tightly around her and make the demon go away, but she was already standing up, using the log as a mounting block. ‘Thanks for the tea, but I’d rather do a dare.’
He emptied his enamel cup and threw it down by the knapsack at the fire’s edge, casting a regretful look at the chestnut tree. ‘Okay, let’s ride.’
As soon as Kat was back in the saddle, she visibly relaxed, the big smile flooded with warmth, the thrill of a dare coursing through her. Sri quickly fell into step alongside Dougie on Worcester, and they rode beneath the long shadows of the woods, watched by two roe deer tail-twitching behind the first tree line. Dougie watched her profile, willing her to look at him, but she kept her eyes fixed between the mare’s curled ears.
‘See that sheep feeder there?’ He pointed far ahead.
‘Yup.’
‘I dare you to tell the truth before we reach it.’
‘That’s cheating.’
‘I’ve told you, I always cheat at games.’
‘Is this a game to you?’
‘No.’ It was Dougie’s turn to look away, aware of the hypocrisy in demanding the truth. And yet it didn’t feel anything like a lie when he said, ‘I enjoy spending time with you.’
‘Will Seth’s corporate-hospitality clients get to enjoy this level of personal service while they’re on the manhunts?’ she asked.
Dougie registered the renewed scrutiny with irritation. ‘As long as they call me Master and wish me good night before they leave.’
‘I shouldn’t think oligarchs are too keen on calling anyone Master.’
He looked across at her sharply. ‘What makes you think they’re oligarchs?’
Kat was threading her fingers through the mare’s mane, pulling out tangles, her brow creased. ‘I heard that’s who Arjan Singh does most of his business with these days. Big arms deals between Russia and India.’
‘Who’s Arjan Singh?’
‘Surely you know Seth’s real name? He’s your boss.’
‘None of my business as long as I get paid,’ he muttered, feeling foolish for not knowing.
‘So how does huntsman work compare with Hollywood rates?’
‘I was on a pretty low pay scale there,’ he admitted, trying not to think about the debts he’d left behind and the vet’s bills still racking up. ‘I was never going to have the dedication to make acting a long-term career. The fire made me wake up to reality. I love making movies and I liked my taste of stardom, but I found the film industry seriously dull.’ He hadn’t told anybody this, and found it surprisingly liberating. ‘Seth had been chasing me to do this job for a while. When I realized how much I’d screwed up with Kiki, I came here to sort my head out. Finding you was an added bonus,’ he said, wincing at the accidental choice of word. They were almost at the sheep feeder already and he was the only one baring his tarnished soul.
She was looking at him now. He tried for a big, flirty smile but it wouldn’t come. Her eyes hypnotized him.
She didn’t smile either, the big defensive show-stopper held in check, lower lip pressed beneath her teeth. He adored the way it emphasized her upper lip, curving up at its centre like a Scythian bow.
‘I want to help you, Kat.’ He tried the big smile again, but again it failed him as his eyes got caught up in hers, amazed at their greenness. ‘I want to see you ride the Bolt. And to do that, I need to understand what happened to you. I know exactly what it’s like to get such almighty flashbacks you can’t function. The first time I got on a horse after the fire, I froze, and it wasn’t just flames in my head. You almost drowned, but I don’t think that’s what made you run away from Nick to come here.’
Dougie had now seen a photograph of Nick in the research files that Dollar had left him – a smug, handsome no-necked rectangle of over-pumped testosterone. He disliked him instinctively.
‘How long were you together?’
‘Three years, and engaged for one,’ she said eventually. ‘Some mutual friends set us up – he’s a firefighter into free-running. I was a fitness-fanatic nurse who’d do anything for a dare. We both loved spicy food, adventure holidays, action movies and clubbing. We seemed the perfect match. It was fun and physical.’ She looked down at her hands, fingers slipping into the mare’s mane.
In the minute of silence that followed, Dougie became aware of her change in breathing over the hoof-falls, the clank and creak of tack. However hard Kat tried to hide it, the breath was punching in and out of her lungs, the oxygen diminishing. He wanted to breathe for her, a kiss of life that he knew was far more complicated than resuscitation. The realization shook him.
Then she started talking, a rushed account of her first big relationship and her sexual awakening. How Nick had been amazing to begin with. How she’d had boyfriends before and it was fun, but what she’d had with him had blown them all out of the water. How he could be very assertive, but she’d liked that, and he had seemed so self-assured and experienced. It just kept getting better.
Dougie glared at the horizon as he listened, seriously regretting his determination to know this. She was probably still hooked on him, he decided furiously, cut down by his own jealousy, wondering how fast he could ride to drum heroic Nick from his head. He knew he had asked for this, demanded it even, but now he wanted it to go away. Yet something in her voice kept him listening, the tight pinch of fear in her larynx, endearingly gruff and heart-breakingly honest.
‘He never made a secret of the fact he liked porn,’ she was saying. ‘All his mates watched it too. They’d download it at the fire station while they waited for shouts. He introduced me to it, and at first I thought it was amazing. We watched it together, got off on it, and it was a real kick. But as time went on, he always wanted to watch it when we had sex and do the things in the movie. I played along, but he got more demanding, less loving. He seemed to need more extremes all the time. I grew to hate it, but if I complained he got really angry and aggressive. He frightened me.’ She dropped one rein and rubbed her face, blinking hard. ‘God, what was in that tea? It’s like a truth drug.’
‘Don’t change the subject,’ he said softly. The relationship had been a long way off Aphrodite and Adonis. ‘Was he violent?’
‘Not violent exactly – overbearing sometimes, especially in bed, but that had been part of the attraction at first so he thought I was playing a part when I begged him to stop.’ She bit her lip. ‘My girlfriends all thought I was so lucky, with my own firefighting Christian Grey – but he took it way too far once or twice and it was hard to trust him after that.’
‘How do you mean “too far”?’ Dougie had become so familiar with her face now that he knew when it was about to put on its impenetrable defensive mask. ‘Please don’t smile.’
She chewed her lip harder with the effort of holding back the big smile.
He knew she must have smiled at Nick, the confused signal with which she charmed the world, both reassuring and defensive. It could make her appear ever-complicit when in fact she was protecting herself and even when she was terrified. She’d learned to use that smile in an abusive relationship as a pacifier. If Nick didn’t fig
ure out the smile in three years, he couldn’t have worked Kat out at all, Dougie thought furiously.
‘Sex became a performance,’ she told him quietly, eyes clenching shut. ‘There was no affection. He insisted on the porn every time and it grew more degrading. He said it was normal, that all couples did it, a communal dirty secret. After a while, I just went cold at the thought of having sex. I had to drink half a bottle of wine to go there. I did anything to avoid it. It affected our entire relationship. Nick said he worshipped me, but he pushed me around like meat and talked over me. He wouldn’t ever admit there was a problem. He said it was in my head. He accused me of being frigid.’ She screwed up her face, opened her eyes apologetically and glanced at him, embarrassed. ‘I’m only telling you all this for one reason, Dougie. I want the flirting to stop. You have to understand that I am not going to sleep with you. I am not an easy lay.’
‘I never thought you were,’ Dougie said quietly. All he wanted was to reassure her, but everything he said seemed glib and cavalier. ‘You don’t get rid of me that easily.’
He resisted an urge to crash his forehead on to Worcester’s hogged neck, certain she knew the fire and the tea had been accessories to a fantasy cowboy seduction, just as she’d always seen through his full-on charm offensive, which had started out as tongue-in-cheek but had intensified into a very real and overwhelming desire to take her to bed and savour every inch of her. His Don Juan approach must have horrified her after what she’d been through.
Dougie’s own hypocrisy was yet again battering at his temples. He’d screwed with triple-X movies playing in the background more than once. He was a big-ego horny show-off who thoroughly enjoyed performance-fucking occasionally. Yet right now, unable to take his eyes from Kat’s and unable to smile, he felt like a puritanical redneck determined to scorch hard-core filth from every hard drive on the planet, and to string Nick up by the part of him that had ruled his brain and messed with Kat’s head. He wanted to teach her to enjoy again what her body could do and feel with another’s. He wanted to look after her, to roar at anyone who threatened her. But he also knew that everything he instinctively wanted to do for her would make her feel more threatened – apart from riding like a maniac across a Herefordshire estate.
‘What was in that tea?’
‘Magic mushrooms.’
She dropped her reins, fingertips raking her forehead. ‘You drugged me?’
‘Actually, it was just Earl Grey.’
To his relief, she laughed. ‘Does getting pushed off a horse at speed give someone amnesia? I’d quite like you to forget what you just heard.’
‘There’s no point in running away from the past. You don’t learn from it,’ he said, surprising himself with his wisdom. ‘You had to be held under water to see what really lay at the other end of that aisle.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. Nobody saw me as an individual any more, least of all me. We were Nick-and-Kat, problems and all.’
‘How hard was it to cut loose?’
‘Very. Nobody knew how unhappy I’d become – I hid it too well. Our friends thought we were Ken and Barbie. We owned a house together – we still do on paper – his parents insisted I called them Mum and Dad and my mum worshipped him. Nick was the golden boy, the local hero. After I came out of hospital, he promised to change, but it was never going to work. He was just as controlling, couldn’t give up the porn or admit it was a problem. I found amphetamines in the bathroom cabinet, flushed them down the loo and he hit the roof when he found out. I was frightened of him by then, of what he might do if I tried to leave.’
‘So you ran away here without saying anything?’
‘I handed in my notice at the hospital in strict confidence and joined an agency to look for a job with accommodation where I knew he couldn’t find me. I never intended to come this far west, but Eardisford was so perfect. There’s no phone reception here, so ignoring his calls and emails was easy. Constance paid cash. I wrote Nick a long letter explaining why I was doing it, and I trusted a couple of very close friends with my contact details, but apart from that, I cut all ties.’
They’d ridden the full circuit of the meadow and were almost back at the fire, weary dogs gravitating towards it.
‘And you’ve not seen him since?’
She shook her head. ‘From what I’ve heard, he basked in sympathy and self-pity for a few months, after which he took up marathon running and never looked back. When Constance died and the news story about Lake Farm made a couple of nationals, he contacted me through solicitors to ask me to sign over my part of the house, but I didn’t reply – I’m a bit rubbish about things like that. I think they’ll go away if I put them in a drawer. The last I heard, he was living with a sports masseuse.’
‘Meanwhile you were shacked up with Badger Man.’ As soon as he’d said it, he regretted the dismissive kneejerk comment that placed his foot firmly in his mouth, especially after what she had just confided. ‘Sorry. That was crass.’
‘Russ was good to me, but it was never going to work.’
‘Did he try to help you beat your demons?’ he asked jealously.
‘He has too many of his own.’ She looked at him and this time she didn’t look away.
The explosion of fierce emotion in his chest could have brought down a cooling tower. ‘I’ll take on all your demons.’ He leaned out of the saddle to reach for her hand. ‘I’ll help you beat them. You and I are going to be sensational together. That’s a promise.’
To Dougie, it was among the most romantic declarations of his life. He was carrying her through battlefields as shells rained down, holding her on the prow of the Titanic, wrestling Red Indians from horses to rescue her from a burning tepee.
Kat looked put out, gathering up her reins and urging Sri forwards. ‘I asked you not to flirt.’
‘I’m not flirting!’ he protested. ‘I’m —’ But Sri had already broken into a canter and put five lengths between them, flying into top gear now, hoofs thundering across the turf. ‘I’m baring my soul.’ He set off in pursuit.
The big heavyweight Worcester took longer than Sri to reach maximum speed, but his big stride was soon eating the ground between them as he caught up.
‘Are you always so arrogant?’ Kat shouted across.
‘You do seriously scary truths as well as dares,’ he shouted back.
‘Your turn, then.’ She crouched low as they flew beneath the heavy overhanging branches from the wood. ‘Truth or dare?’
‘Truth.’ Kicking the horse faster, ignoring her shouts behind him, he streaked the full length of the Lush Bottom meadow, straight towards the nursery lake where its shallowest corner was shadowed by the woods. Flat-bottomed and reed-ringed, he’d ridden through it several times that week and trusted that there were no hidden hazards.
Worcester pounded in, big legs sending up great arcs of water in front and bow waves in his wake. As Dougie reined back and turned to look for Kat, he saw she’d pulled up on the bank.
‘Come back out! I want a truth. It’s only fair!’ She glared across at him and he realized again just how extraordinary her eyes were, like iridescent opals.
‘Come in here and ask.’ He looked down, the water foaming and eddying around him as Worcester pawed at it. ‘It’s barely past this boy’s hocks. A bath is deeper.’
Not taking her eyes from his, she rode in. Her knuckles were as white as marble, sinews leaping in her neck. He knew just how much guts it had taken.
‘Well done!’ he breathed, the unfamiliar lump back in his throat as more detonations took place in his chest.
‘I think I’ve earned a truth, don’t you?’
He nodded. He couldn’t deny it.
Her eyes were totally bewitching, the deep green reflecting through that opal luminosity. He nudged Worcester closer so that their knees brushed, close enough to reach out and touch her face if he wanted to, to kiss it even. He wanted to do both very badly, but he managed to stop himself, just as he stopped himself smiling
or his eyelashes lowering seductively. Instead, he stared at her with wide-eyed honesty, struggling to hear himself speak above the artillery tattoo taking place in his chest.
‘I wasn’t just hired as a huntsman,’ he told her. ‘I was hired to target somebody.’
She went very still, the big green eyes watchful. ‘You mean there’s really truth in the manhunt story?’
‘I’m here to make you marry me, Kat.’
Chapter 45
Kat’s hearing wasn’t serving her too well. Her own heartbeat was thundering in her ears, much as it had been on and off since she’d ridden into the meadow to see Dougie waiting there, now more amplified than ever from plunging into a lake with a horse. Riding into the water had given her the mother of all adrenalin spikes, but that had been nothing to the moment she’d thought Dougie was going to reach across and touch her, kiss her even, the kick of desire almost knocking her out of the saddle. Her skin still burned from the anticipation of it, a half-breath caught between throat and heart, like a stitch.
