To Catch a Flame by Kimberly Cates

Author:Kimberly Cates [Cates, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gnarly Wool Publishing
Published: 2020-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

It was a perfect day for a battle.

Griffin shielded his eyes against the dazzling morning sun and gazed across the woodlands that surrounded Darkling Moor; the lush vegetation sparkled with morning dew. The whole day lay before him. Today he was free—no weight of ledgers or financial snarls. None of Charles's devilment. Yet today's task might prove more formidable still. More formidable, and yet more entertaining, more enticing, more hazardous to life and limb.

For today the Devil's Flame was going to learn to ride like a woman.

His lips curved into a grin, his eyes flashing to a beautiful silver mare that stood trapped out in a gleaming sidesaddle. The mare was the most spirited in Darkling Moor's stable, a mount that few females would dare to ride. And yet Griffin knew instinctively that the sleek, skittish Moonshadow would soon be looked upon with blistering disdain. For even that spirited beast would seem like a bumbling child’s pony in comparison to the wild-eyed stallion Isabeau DeBurgh had been riding as she charged down on Griffin’s coach three weeks ago.

"Beau will be spoiling for a bout of fisticuffs even before she leaves her chamber!" Griffin muttered to himself. She'd be outraged the instant she saw what she was expected to wear when in the saddle. He grimaced, thinking of the garments he had seen laid out upon Isabeau's bed. A petticoat of lush blue Camlet trimmed in gold, a tight-fitting coat with an elegant frill of lace for her throat. And the hat—a cocky little beaver hat with a plume all dusted in gold.

It was a riding habit fit for a princess. He had seen to that, to the indignation of the seamstresses he had ordered to complete in an impossibly short amount of time.

He had promised the red-tressed "princess" a wild ride over the parklands, a reward for the way she had applied herself to "fan-waving and tea-sloshing" the past two weeks. He just hadn't mentioned that when they went for this wild ride she would be in full feminine regalia on a shiny new sidesaddle he had commissioned.

Even from his own chambers he had been able to hear the row she'd kicked up with the servants, but after almost a month of being without a horse he had trusted that Beau would do anything to feel one beneath her again. Even if she had to be "trussed up like a cursed partridge" to ride.

Griffin warmed, remembering the first time he had seen Beau hurtling down toward his coach, her cape whipping back in the wind. She had ridden as though she were born to the saddle. And yet, if any of the London set were to see her riding that way, reckless, her slender, breech-clad legs clamped about Macbeth, they would regard her with rigid scorn.

Griffin was determined that Isabeau would master the art of riding as a lady—master it so well that she would again have the freedom to race headlong into the rushing winds, sailing over fences and streams and the trees that had tumbled to the turf.

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