Page 75 of My Queendom for a Horse

“After telling the grooms not to come into your stall no matter what, I guess?”

“Yes, after that.”

I’m fuming by the time I finally lug his enormous bag—what’s in there, rocks?—all the way to the racing stable and chuck it at his feet. “Have fun.”

I hate how amused he looks as I snarl and leave. I can’t stop thinking about it as I get ready to meet Sean and his family, but I really need to. I have to focus. Meeting his family’s a big deal. I need to put my best foot forward. I didn’t even get this far last time.

His parents rejected me without once meeting me.

If I’d planned to meet them today, I’d have agonized over what I would wear for hours and hours. As it is, I slide into my nicest pair of riding breeches—no holes at all and only one tiny stain just below the knee that my boots will cover—and a button-down white shirt. It’s plain, but that’s who I am.

Plain, but hard working.

And if they hate it, well, I guess that’ll be the end of that.

I unhitch the truck from the trailer and climb inside, bracing myself to follow my phone’s GPS to Sean’s family’s ancestral home. It’s only six miles away. I could practically run there. I guess I’d never realized quite how close he lived to Kempton Park.

The racetrack’s located on the west side of London, out in the suburbs a bit, but the whole area’s pretty consistently full of people and businesses. Compared to Latvia, it looks like urban sprawl. Of course, having completed uni here, it’s not as stressful to navigate as it was when I first came.

But then, from one minute to the next, the surrounding area transforms. It’s like a huge park springs up in the middle of the city, and as I turn into the drive the GPS tells me to take, there’s nothing but a blanket of trees, from fragrant Leland cypress, to horse chestnuts with their bizarrely spikey conker seeds still clinging to branches here and there, to towering oaks that look naked and bare against the winter landscape.

As I approach the estate, it’s clear that someone has taken great care to cultivate plants that thrive even in the winter. No snow blankets the ground yet, thankfully for our race in two days, and the winter rye grass they must have planted is bright green, in carefully manicured rows. I wonder how many people must work here full time on the grounds to keep things—

And then my mind goes blank, because Sean’s house comes into view.

Calling it a house seems inadequate somehow, like comparing a pair of Steve Madden pumps to a pair of Valentinos. It’s utterly absurd. I knew that Sean McDermott was heir to the Earldom of Coventry, but I had no idea what the home that went with that title would look like.

I remember Sean describing it to me when we were in school. I told him about my home—the bright shutters, the long porch, an American-style home in Latvia. It had begun simply, but when Mom moved in, she changed a lot of little things to make it look like the houses she was used to back in the United States.

Sean told me about his house a few weeks into dating, saying it was old, out-of-date, and that while his mother would say it was neo-classical, designed by the late and great Charles Parker in the mid-seventeenth century, he wished that he could level it and build something that wasn’t overlarge and drafty.

I had, stupidly, pictured a plantation-style home with tall ceilings and a lot of windows. I thought it might be twice the size of my family’s home, or even three times that size.

I was very, very wrong.

This place would absolutely work as the setting of any regency-era romance television series, right down to the terribly tall windows every fifteen feet along the front and the carefully manicured hedges. The circular drive’s paved now, but I can imagine how it looked for the past few centuries, with dukes, earls, and princes circling round in their carriages. The home’s made up entirely of white and grey stone, three stories high, lined with so many picture windows that I finally stop counting.

I’m spinning out a little bit, made worse when a man in a ridiculously formal tuxedo comes to take the keys to my truck the second I shift into park. He just shot out of the two vast, double doors. Is he a butler? A driver?

Another man is standing at the top of the stairs, also in a tuxedo. How many people work for Sean? This is so much worse than I expected.

“Wait,” Sean says. He’s beaming at me as he jogs down the front steps. Thankfully, he’s not wearing a tuxedo or even a suit. Just his normal slacks and a polo shirt with a wool coat on top and a nice, billowy grey scarf blowing behind him. He could be on the cover of Horse and Rider or Town and Country without shifting a single hair. “Mother’s arguing with Ursula again. We’ll just head down to the stables for a moment while they argue about the cheese soufflé.”

He had me at stables.

When he smiles that broad smile of his, I can’t help grinning back. “The stables?”

“I knew you’d want to see them right away.” He pauses. “I hope they’ll meet with your approval.”

A little thrill runs through me at the thought that he wants me to approve. . .because he wants me to consider this as a possible future home.

When we turn the corner, one of the most beautiful gates I’ve ever seen comes into view. It’s made of some kind of black metal—titanium?—and it’s shaped into a large arch, clearly made to mimic a horseshoe. The opening must be ten feet tall, easily tall enough for a horse with a rider to pass underneath, and it’s probably two horses wide. Once we’re close enough, I notice that it frames the view of the barn perfectly.

Of course, it’s one of the most staggeringly stunning barns I’ve ever seen.

Even the house didn’t take me aback like this does.

My stables back at home are top of the line—I still thank my grandparents at least twice a year for their generous gift, because nothing makes me happier than knowing our horses are safe and well cared for. Plus, well-designed stables decrease my workload by a metric ton. It’s one of the reasons that selling them makes me feel so sick.

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