Velvet by Jane Feather Read Free Book Online

right. And I can safely promise you that I am never indiscreet. I’ll not betray your confidence. Simon knows that. But then, he knows me rather better than you do, although I hope that will soon be remedied,” she added pensively.
    “Madame, that is a hope I am afraid I do not share.” With compressed lips he fell back as theyreached a hunting gate leading into a covert. The hounds surged forward and the hunt followed in relatively slow single file.
    Nathaniel hung back, allowing Gabrielle to get well ahead. There were only two ways to deal with trouble: confront it or run from it. The latter struck him as the only sensible course when dealing with the trouble embodied in the Comtesse de Beaucaire.
    Gabrielle rode on, wondering if she’d moved one step forward or two steps back. There’d been that moment of warmth and humor, but had she negated it by moving too quickly? But she had to move quickly. She had only this week. Once the spymaster left Vanbrugh Court, there was no knowing when she’d be in his vicinity again, let alone under the same roof. Certainly it was unlikely she’d have such a good opportunity another time to work on him.
    The huntsman’s strange vocalizing among his baying, searching pack suddenly changed tenor and her head snapped up, all thoughts of anything but the fox banished with the familiar surge of excitement that curled her toes in her boots.
    The huntsman’s horn blew, a long two-note resonance in the frosty air. The hounds in full cry tore across the covert, and then came the bellow from one of the huntservants that sent the blood coursing through Gabrielle’s veins.
    “Gone away!” Someone had seen the fox break from the covert.
    The huntsman blew the note for any who’d failed to grasp the message and the entire field surged forward, breaking out of the trees, hooves pounding the frozen ground, breath steaming in the frosty air.
    A long slope of meadowland lay ahead, and Gabrielle abruptly pulled her mount aside as the riders plunged past her.
    “Nathaniel!” she yelled as she saw him pulling ahead of the main body. “This way!”
    She was unaware that she’d used his name in her urgent need to attract his attention. She was aware now only that he was as eager and intrepid a huntsman as she was and she would share with him her own private knowledge garnered from hunting this land in childhood.
    He veered toward her without conscious reflection of his own, and she charged ahead of him, giving him a lead to the far corner of the meadow.
    He registered the massive bramble-studded thicket hedge in a kind of daze as Gabrielle’s horse gathered itself for the jump.
    It was impossible, he thought. A suicide jump. And then his own mount was collecting himself, adjusting his stride, and he was sailing through the air. Only when they landed on the other side did Nathaniel absorb the wide ice-covered ditch they’d also had to clear at the base of the hedge behind them.
    Of all the wild, reckless madwomen! But he had no time for further thought. She was racing ahead of him across a flat field toward a mercifully lower hedge at the bottom, and the excitement of the chase was in his blood, the frantic baying of the hounds sounding ever closer, the squall of the huntsman’s horn filling his ears.
    They sailed over the hedge and he saw they were way ahead of the field, right up behind the huntsman and his hounds, and the fox was a smudge of reddish-brown streaking toward a spinney to the right of them.
    Neck and neck, they pounded behind the hounds and into the spinney, the rest of the field some hundred yards behind them. The pack of hounds abruptly lost direction and began rushing around in confused circles, yipping frantically.
    Gabrielle drew rein just in time to stop herself from overtaking the hounds and committing the cardinal sin of destroying any scents in the process.
    “He’s gone to ground,” she gasped. “I don’t knowwhether to be glad or sorry. Wasn’t that a wonderful