Page 9 of Emma & Edmund

She could be angry with him and completely ruin her chances with a man of such standing.

Or she could also pretend nothing happened.

Pushing the memory of his furious eyes as deeply inside of her as she could, Emma chose the latter.

"We would have been here on time, had you not changed your clothes entirely upon the final moment," Victoria joined in, twirling her parasol against the ever-greying sky. If it got any worse, they would all need far more protection than the thin, delicate fabric.

"I wonder for whom." Margaret elbowed her in the side, whispering into her ear, eyebrows raising suggestively. Emma chose not to wonder why her throat clenched painfully at the thought.

"Ah, finally!"

With Jonathan's exclamation, all eyes turned across the lawn where barn hands led three horses each, tacked and ready for their riding pleasure.

"Good Lord, the man has a full stable!" Jonathan continued to exclaim, although Emma couldn't deny the accuracy of his aghast. No one she knew owned more than five, with space limited within London and beyond, so to see nine beasts in total was quite a shock.

"Indeed sir," the eldest of the hands confirmed, the only one not to be leading anything. He was reserved for mounting, a task he got to at once. "And we made sure to bring nine of the best."

"You mean there's more?"

"Our mare stable is bursting at the seams, sir. Although, we are looking for a stallion - the ones we have rented for years are a bit too old now."

"I'll let you know if I find any."

Before she knew it, Emma was thrown upon the saddle as if she had done so every day. As others were helped to their leather seats, Emma could barely manage to lay one leg beside the other. In her ear, she heard her riding instructor yelling at her in his thick Scottish accent, telling her how easy it was. How it should come naturally to her.

And a half-decade later, it still didn't.

Not to say that she didn't appreciate the beauty and power of the beast, far from it. Just as man wasn't meant to traverse the stars or deep ocean, she firmly believed man did not belong on the back of horses, no matter how gorgeous. Not when carts and carriages did just fine.

Yet, that did not stop the line from beginning to form, each mare taking its rider down a path it had probably known its whole life.

Somewhere deep inside of her, below the surface thoughts that only demanded Emma clutch the reigns as tightly as possible, it was almost admirable how the animal knew just where to go. Did Lord Lockhart truly have each of the many mares brought down this specific forest path enough that it was just instinctual to them?

The confidence of the horse under her gave her a modicum of the same, trotting along, chatting as much as she could with Margaret in front of her, and Miss Tate behind her.

If she weren't mistaken, she could even classify it as a good time.

That was, until there was an almost negligible rustling from the bush just to the right of the path.

With her minuscule confidence, as a thick green snake slithered right between her steed and the mare ahead of her, sending her horse rearing with a loud whinny, taking off through the thin bush of the forest, there was nothing she could do to stop it from happening.

"Stop!" She screamed uselessly, heels digging into its side, tugging the reigns as hard as she could. Despite her best effort, the horse barreled along wildly, forcing Emma to desperately hold on as branches scraped at her face and arms.

For endless minutes, the horse sprinted without pausing, without breaking its gait. Emma's screams were lost to the foliage, only dragged deeper and deeper into the woods.

Try as she might, as tightly as she clung to the saddle and reigns, she was no match for the force that took her when the mare turned on a dime. Emma was flicked off of her back like nothing more than a fly.

Hitting the ground blindingly hard, the breath was stolen from her lungs and stars burst in her vision. Before she could even take a breath, she tumbled uncontrollably down the steep ravine that caused the sudden turn, the world nauseatingly spinning around her. Mud clung to her cheeks and her bones rocked against sharp stones.

A collision with a stump stopped her momentarily, but only proved to batter her even further before the decline took her once more.

With a wet slap, she landed face-first into the bottom of the hill, a stabbing pain piercing her temple.

All went black.

Chapter 3

Flashes of consciousness came and went. Only moments after the world blackened, with her face still pressed into the dirt, she was able to open one eye, seeing her open palm, covered in filth and scratches. She tried to move her fingers, but awareness fell away again before she was able to succeed.

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