Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 146289 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 731(@200wpm)___ 585(@250wpm)___ 488(@300wpm)
It waits for me.
Chapter
Nine
Ican’t stand being in this cottage for another day.
Two days of restless work in the studio. Two evenings of looking at the dark bay from the kitchen window and pretending I’m not looking at it, pretending I’m not searching for him. The castle is like a splinter under my skin, one I can’t get out no matter what I do.
So I walk.
I take the path behind the cottage, the one that climbs the slope through the bracken to the moor. The morning is clear and warm for once. The dew has evaporated and the bees are buzzing merrily in the heather. I’ve brought the sketchbook and the canvas bag I’ve started using for cuttings, and I’ve told myself I’m going to do my job.
I’ve told myself a lot of things.
I’m maybe half a mile up the moor, sitting on a stone with the sketchbook open on my knee, when I hear it.
The hollow tread of hooves on peat. A rhythm that isn’t the wind.
I look up.
Alasdair is coming across the moor toward me, and to my utter surprise, he’s astride a brown horse.
No saddle. No bridle. His hands rest loose on the horse’s neck like he’s resting them there, not steering. He’s in black trousers and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled, and his feet are bare. His hair is loose against his jaw.
He pulls up about ten feet from me. The horse, a stocky bay mare with a long black tail and the rough coat of something that lives outside, stands and watches me with liquid eyes. I know a good horseperson can have complete control over a horse by just steering with the calves alone but generally there is some sort of verbal command to stop and I didn’t hear him give the horse one.
“Good morning,” Alasdair says in his thick brogue. I’m suddenly very aware that I am down low and he is on a lofty perch, peering down at me.
“Good morning,” I reply as I quickly shut the sketchbook and get to my feet.
“You seemed in a hurry earlier,” he comments.
I can’t help but narrow my eyes at him. I don’t know why I have such animosity toward him this morning but I do. Maybe because it’s getting a little annoying being watched all the time.
“I had to get out of the house.”
“Aye.” His eyes flick down the slope toward my cottage, then back to me. “I thought I’d find you on this side today.”
I raise a brow, wondering what that means.
“After the other day when you went exploring,” he finishes.
Ah. So he knows I was poking around his property. Only he doesn’t seem to be bothered by the idea the way I’m bothered by him showing up around the cottage.
I ignore the comment though and gesture to the horse with my sketchbook. “Pretty well trained. No bridle.”
“She prefers it.”
“The horse does?”
“Aye. We’ve an understanding.”
The horse watches me with the deep liquid patience of an animal who’d rather be eating. Unlike the white one, this horse seems perfectly ordinary. Though the man on its back is anything but.
“Speaking of horses.” I tuck the pencil behind my ear. “I saw a white one in the trees. On the road to your castle.”
“Ah,” he says with a small nod. “I wondered if you would. Did you go near him?”
I shake my head. “No. He was off the track in a clearing. I waved at him like an idiot, of course. He just looked at me so I kept walking. Got the feeling he wasn’t that friendly.”
He looks at me for a long second.
“Your feeling was correct. He’s not friendly, and you’re not to go near him.”
“All right,” I say, though I feel that pathological avoidance thing that Maddie is always talking about rearing its ugly head, that urge to do the opposite of what I’m told to do.
He studies me, squinting for a moment, as if he can read this defiance on my face. “I mean it. He’s wild. He bites.”
I open my mouth, then close it again.
The part of me that read The Black Stallion thirty times in the third grade is sitting up in the back of my head, alert. He bites is a challenge, she’s saying. He bites is exactly the thing the hero says to the girl in the book before the girl tames the horse no one else can ride! As you can see, I have not entirely outgrown her.
The other part of me, the part that’s grown some sense in the last year since I got my ass handed to me by life, points out that wild horses in the Scottish Highlands are not Walter Farley’s wild horses, and that he bites is what people say when they’re trying not to alarm you. There’s something worse than biting.
“Okay, I get it,” I respond carefully. “I’ll stay away.”