Saving Lord Whitton's Daughter: A Regency Romance Novel by Susan Tietjen

Author:Susan Tietjen [Tietjen, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sunbright Press
Published: 2016-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

It wasn’t so bad on her own, Bethany scolded herself, realizing that she could now do as she pleased. She could ride to her heart’s content, all day if she wanted, and on as many of her horses as she liked. Or on her husband’s horses, for that matter. Locke had welcomed her to them.

Motivated by the thought, she took a quick trip to her room and changed into her favorite riding clothes, a simple cotton blouse and thigh high boots tugged over riding breeches. She wanted to work Raven like she used to, and skirts were hot, in the way, and uncomfortable. They were also ridiculous when she straddled the saddle, and she refused to use a sidesaddle for serious work, regardless of whatever fashion dictated. She was in the country, at her own home, and riding alone, for heaven’s sake.

Donning a skirt to hide the breeches for now, she intended to remove it before boarding Raven. Tying on her straw bonnet, she headed downstairs.

When she arrived, however, neither Mr. Treadwell nor the stablehand assigned to accompany her that day were present, and only two of the workers were working there. At first annoyed, she shrugged it off, tired of the whole affair. She wasn’t even leaving the immediate grounds, for heaven’s sake.

With no stablehands in the stallions’ stable either, she groomed and saddled Raven herself. Lady Katherine would have scolded her, but Bethany didn’t mind. It soothed her to care for her own mounts, and she swore they knew and performed better for her because of it.

In exploring Moorewood’s grounds, Bethany had discovered a small stone paddock to the rear of the stables. Dimity used it for training and exercising the horses, a perfect place with few distractions and containment for the horse if it got loose from its handler. Bethany led Raven inside, latched the wooden gate behind them, removed her skirt, draped it over the top rail of the gate, and climbed aboard, pleased by the ease of doing so without the encumbrances of petticoats and yards of irksome fabric.

Raven’s coat shown blue-black in the late morning sunlight, his dark eyes bright, his thick neck arched and tail held high. He could hardly wait to stretch his legs. He carried her briskly around the paddock in his warm-up paces. From a swift walk, Bethany sent him into a jog then finally a collected canter.

From her early childhood and despite being a girl, Bethany’s father had taught her dressage, the maneuvers used on horses trained at the Imperial Spanish Riding School of Vienna. A cue to double-back had Raven repeating his actions in the opposite direction, executing figure eights with flawless changes of leads. His pirouettes, side-passes, and serpentines were near-perfect, and though Bethany considered some of her own cues clumsy, the stallion interpreted them correctly. He moved into the piaffe with a single prompt, and performed the passage as if he’d read her thoughts. Such incredible grace and power had Bethany feeling on top of the world.

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