Page 28 of The Black Trilogy

“Once or twice. I wasn’t too bad.”

“You said you used to race. Why did you stop?”

“When my father died, I had to run his company and start living in the real world.”

I recognised the flat tone in Luke’s voice and the blank look on his face. I used both when I wanted to hide my own feelings.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “It must have been hard to give up something you loved.”

Luke didn’t answer, just walked off to the horsebox. Rather than standing there like an idiot, I went to fetch Samara from her stable. After a brief pause at the foot of the ramp, she followed me into the back of the lorry, and we set off.

“Do we have far to go?” I asked.

“About ten minutes.”

Neither of us spoke on the journey, but the silence was strangely comfortable.

“Still hopping lame, isn’t she?” the vet said when I trotted Samara up.

“Looks that way. A night’s rest doesn’t seem to have improved things.”

I scratched the mare’s neck as she hung her head. Poor girl.

“We’ll need to sedate her to do scans, X-rays, and nerve blocks. Can you leave her with us for a couple of hours?”

I raised an eyebrow at Luke. I could stay, but could he hang around?

“Sure, no problem. Do whatever you need to.”

The veterinary nurse took the horse, leaving Luke and me on our own in the exam area. Now what?

He turned to me and shrugged.

“Looks like we’ve got some time to kill.”

In my old world, the phrase meant something totally different, but I’d left that girl behind in Virginia.

“I should have brought a book.”

“There’s a TV in the horsebox.” He tapped away at his phone for thirty seconds. “Or we could get lunch?”

If Luke was offering food, that gave me a respite from beans on toast. Burned toast, seeing as my toaster was kind of temperamental.

“Sure. Lunch sounds good.”

He strode off, but down the driveway rather than towards the horsebox. After a moment’s hesitation, I followed.

“Where are we going?”

Not far in this icy wind, I hoped.

“There’s a pub along the road. It’s small, but the food’s good.”

“Anything I don’t have to cook is fine by me.”

Another plus point was that we weren’t going to The Coach and Horses, which seemed to be one of the main sources of village rumours. If I walked in there with Luke, the Women’s Institute would be celebrating our engagement by evening.

We arrived at our destination a few minutes later, and Luke hadn’t been kidding about the size of the pub. You couldn’t fit more than two dozen people inside comfortably. The old wooden bar looked like a relic from the Middle Ages, and a tiny room beyond held a handful of tables. Luke led me to an alcove at the rear beside a roaring log fire.

---