Page 74 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
The horses milled about the stable yard, white steam pouring out of their nostrils. It was only half past eleven but already the light was dim. The weather was overcast, drizzly and bitterly cold. Nory hoped the ride would warm her up. The stables had been hung with fairy lights, and the water droplets on the cross beams glittered in their reflected twinkle. A Christmas tree decorated with wooden painted horses on strings and small silver horseshoes had been erected at one end of the yard.
Isaac saw her and smiled. She felt the secret he had shared with her tethering them like invisible twine. It had taken Nory ages to drop off to sleep last night after Isaac’s revelations about Heba, not to mention the delightfully painful sexual tension that continued to fizz between them.
The party were due to hack across the castle farmland and down to the Mead and Medlar pub in the village—one of the few pubs that still kept a stable for peckish passing riders—for lunch. Since it got dark so early, the plan was to have the horses back safely in their warm stables by four o’clock.
Dev, looking long and lean in his riding gear, mounted his horse like he’d been riding since birth.
“Is there nothing he can’t do?” asked Jenna.
Ameerah was shaking her head, mystified. At that moment Dev smiled at Ameerah, and Ameerah smiled back in a way that Nory could only describe asgoofy.Really, what was happening to everyone?
Pippa appeared to be horse-whispering a determined, glossy-black Arabian into doing her bidding, while Charles was talking with one of the stable hands as they walked around the muscular form of a chestnut thoroughbred who knew precisely how amazing he looked.
“Need a hand getting on?” Jeremy asked Nory as Isaac brought a dappled, hardy-looking cob mare to stand near her. Katie was due to arrive this afternoon after a brief visit to her parents’ house, and Jeremy had been as skittish as any wild stallion all morning.
Nory gulped at the size of her horse. They never seemed that big when they were frolicking in the fields, but up close, they were intimidatingly tall. She was a fairly good rider; she could certainly hold her own hacking across the fields, but she’d always struggled with mounting. Clearly Jeremy remembered her ungainly attempts from their school days. She wished sexy Isaac with his sexy eyes and ridiculously sexy smile wasn’t here to watch her climb onto a horse. Every ounce of last night’s allure was about to be obliterated.
She looked around: Ameerah, Pippa, and Charles were now sitting on their mounts, and Jenna gracefully swung one leg over hers and nestled her perfecto gym-bottom into the saddle.
“Come on,” said Jeremy. “I’ll give you a leg up.”
“Thanks, Jez.”
“I’ll help too,” said Isaac.
Oh, fantastic, this isn’t embarrassing at all.
Nory lifted her leg to hook her foot into the stirrups. Whywere the stirrups always so high up? Clearly they were designed for people with longer, more flexible legs than hers. She sighed, resigned, and looked at Isaac.
“This isn’t going to be pretty,” she told him. Isaac raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
Using both hands beneath her thigh—cheeks blazing with embarrassment—she hoisted her leg up high while Jeremy, remembering the drill from their gymkhana events, held the stirrup firm and guided her boot into it.
“We’ll head on down the lane to the meadow and wait for you there,” said Ameerah. Nory felt a glow of gratitude to her friend; Ameerah knew Nory wouldn’t want an audience. The others trotted off down the lane, their voices and the braying of the horses becoming fainter as they disappeared out of sight.
Nory threw both her arms over the saddle and pushed off the ground with the other leg. She felt two sets of hands on her backside propelling her upward. The heaving noises they made did nothing for her already disheveled ego. As she swung her other leg over and finally settled herself into the saddle, she wished that this wasn’t Isaac’s first experience of grabbing her bottom and wondered if he’d evenwantto grab it again after watching her ungainly performance. She ventured a look down and found Isaac smiling up at her.
“Sorry about that,” she said.
“Don’t be. I enjoyed it.”
He was smiling in a devilish way, and Nory wondered if maybe she hadn’t blown it after all.
“I’m actually very good in the saddle once I’ve mounted,” she said.
Isaac’s smile widened, one eyebrow lifted. “Good to know,” he replied.
Jeremy had just mounted his own horse when a shout made them all stop in their tracks. Nory looked over to see Guy rounding the corner of the stables. He was stumbling, clearly drunk.
“Oh, good, I thought I might have missed you,” he slurred. “Where’s my horse?”
“You said you were going to give the ride a miss, remember?” said Jeremy, patting his horse.
“I changed my mind.”
He zigzagged across the courtyard and came up beside Nory. Her horse snorted and stepped back.
“Guy, you’re drunk,” said Nory, leaning forward to stroke her horse to reassure her.
