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Applause rings out—aren’t we all just a clappy lot?—not just from me, but from Aunt Dottie, who despite her Eeyore routine is only a few steps behind me, looking the opposite of decrepit as she nimbly ascends the steps, and a girl I hadn’t noticed before sitting at the end closest to where the other horses are tied.
“Bravo!” The girl stands. She’s lanky in a particularly English way, gangly and uncoordinated, with arms that are too long and legs which—I find myself laughing at the absurdity of the memory—just like mine, go all the way up to her ass.
The rider wheels his horse to face the bleachers and his adulatory audience, only his grin visible beneath the brim of his helmet as he scratches his mount’s withers.
Then he looks up.
If this were a movie, there would be a tight closeup of his features, his mouth dropping open, interspliced with one of my own face doing exactly the same thing. The music in the soundtrack would swell.
But because this is real life, not a movie, I stumble.
A terrible clatter of boots against metal rings out as I nearly go down and my satchel goes flying, landing right next to Aunt Dottie with a loud, rollingthud thud thudas it topples down each step of the bleachers. My brain blaresred alert, red alert, red alertas I stare at the familiar face, the one face I never, ever in a quadrillion years expected to see in England at the heart of my mother’s latest business venture. I try to summon words, but every neuron and synapse fires simultaneously and short circuits, and instead of going straight to the recesses of gray matter where it belongs, the worst of all the thoughts I’ve been ceaselessly pushing into my subconscious blurts from my mouth.
“Mariano? But you’re off boinking your Lady Hickey-Hooha!” Thank the stars no clients are in earshot because that would be a terrible way to kick off this new chapter in my life, but what in the name of almighty Aphrodite is HE doing here? I should be trembling, my knickers in knots, but since I can’t string a coherent thought together, even that is just beyond the realm of beyond.
The horse is close enough that I can hear every huff and snort, see Mariano’s thighs directing traffic, feel the pull he has on me.
“Oh, goodness. He truly is the very definition of a dreamboat.” Aunt Dottie couldn’t keep her voice down if she was in Westminster Abbey, and seeing as she’s out of doors, she’s turned the volume up to stadium level.
I find my feet and the solid ground while the gangly woman bounds down to Dottie’s side. She thrusts her hand out in exactly the way I’d expect a well-heeled, privately educated woman of means to do it, which is to say, forcefully, with plenty of “rah-rah!” folded into the gesture. “Pippa Klaushoffer. And I couldn’t agree more. He’s in possession of one bodacious bod and then some!”
“He’s yours I take it?” Dottie has never been one to stand on ceremony. Why start now? Of course, I’m dying to hear the answer.
“I wish!” Pippa ogles Mr. Tightbritches as frankly as any woman has ogled a man, and the flame in my chest springs out my eyes and crisps her on the spot. But, of course, he’s no more my man than he’s hers, and it’s ridiculous to have feelings for someone who actively didn’t choose me. No, it was worse than that: he told mewhyhe couldn’t and wouldn’t choose me, and then tracked me down and kissed me (with some passion I might add). And then he did the same thing all over again! I don’t care how supposedly free and freewheeling his new mistress is, I’m not interested in being a third wheel or runner-up or leftover to anyone.
Even with my back to the arena, I know he’s right there, above me, looking down. As Dottie and Pippa chat, I turn, my face as icy as my loins are hot.Yup, think of yourself in clinical terms, Lolly, because otherwise, you’re going to implode.
“Miss Benoit. I’m so happy to see you.” He touches the rim of his helmet in a faux salute. My god, but I hate the fact that he makes me feel this way. Nothing about this is fair. He’s up there mocking me, and I’m down here burning up.
“You’re the trainer?” I am going to kill my mother when I talk to her. But only after I’ve extracted the deets. “Why?”
The blush rises up from his collar. “We must all eat, Miss Benoit. And to do so, we must work.”
Whaaat?The world has lost the plot. I’m like a friggin’ tumble dryer of emotions. He’snotboffing the middle-aged rich-o? He’s here? Working for my mother?With me?
I whirl and run for the barn, desperate for space. Mariano Arias is here.
Working for my mother.
With me.
He’s really, truly free? Impossible.
And if those are his horse’s hoofbeats galloping after me, I will most definitely scream.
SOMETHING PHYSICAL
Mariano Arias. Greenshoot Polo Ranch. Upper Wilmington, Gloucestershire, England.
Once again, Lolly Benoit is running away from me. Until this moment, my time at the polo ranch has gone exceptionally well. Our etiquette trainer, The Trunchbull, has me in her sights, but Pippa, my trusty sidekick, is always ready with a quip to dispel the unpleasantness, and the other student-teachers are almost uniformly hardworking and pleasant to be around.
With a mallet in my hand and a horse between my thighs, I could be anywhere in the world and be almost happy. This strange little English polo ranch has everything you could possibly want: top-flight polo ponies, stable hands who know what they’re doing, excellent tack, a fast course, a fleet of groundskeepers who stomp divots and rotate the pitches, like old-fashioned fallow-field farming. The one thing it didn’t have—broken record moment—was Lolly Benoit. Until now.
I trot to the gate, dismount, hand off Whiskey to the groom in charge of the rest of the ponies, and follow Lolly across the field. I haven’t taken ten steps before there’s a gentlewoman of some advanced years and a shock of blue hair standing in my way.
“Dorothy Hainbright, Friend to the Foundering and Champion of the Downtrodden.” She holds out her hand and shakes mine with vigor. “You certainly know how to handle yourself.”
“That’s very kind.”
