Page 15 of My Dark Horse Prince

“Hello?” A short, stocky man wearing a dark uniform and an ushanka, with the ear flaps dropped down and tied under his chin, salutes. “Who are you, and what business do you have here?”

I yank again on the stupid horse’s mane, but he still doesn’t budge. Instead, he whinnies. Loudly.

“Um.” I clear my throat, trying my hardest to sound legitimately Russian. “I’m hoping to use your phone.” I sound like an idiot. “I was recently, er, I’m lost. And I’m cold.”

“You’re in Russia in April.” The man scowls. “Where’s your coat?”

I pull my jacket tighter. “If I could just use a phone.”

“This is not a halfway house,” the man says. “Nor is it a government owned property any longer. It’s a privately owned estate, and you need to keep on going into town. Maybe someone there can help you.” The man sniffs.

Charlemagne is, inexplicably, furious. He paws at the ground and neighs. He snorts and prances. And then he takes off, trotting quickly enough that my leg protests.

No, it screams.

“Ow,” I say. “That hurts. Can you slow down, at least?”

But apparently, he cannot slow down. Moments later, we’re circling the edge of the fence, and I realize where he’s headed. There’s a low spot—where the gate has broken down and sags sideways. Charlemagne circles around and heads straight for it.

With me on his back.

“No,” I shout. “You have to stop and let me off.”

But he doesn’t stop. He glances back at me over his shoulder, and he bobs his head and whinnies, and then he picks up more speed, and before I can even object, we’re sailing over the low spot.

Without even thinking, I drop into jump position, my hands gripping his mane tightly, my thighs gripping his body, and then we land. The staccato force of the landing, front and then back, slams into my leg like a freight train.

I choke on my shout, because the man must have known where we were going. He’s standing in front of us now, glowering, and a half dozen others are filtering toward us from the big house, clearly responding to his agitated shouting.

“I’ve called his lordship,” the man says, “and he was already on his way to check on the progress with the bathrooms. You’d better stay right there, because when he arrives, he’s going to be livid.”

“I told him to repair that fence.” A matronly woman near the top of the rise is shaking her head. “I told him, and he said we could do that after we finished cleaning up the house.”

My horse takes it into his head to circumvent all of that, and starts moving again, heading up the hill. I yank and pull, and I even sit back, remaining as stiff as possible, in spite of the pain it causes my leg, hoping the discomfort will make my idiotic horse stop.

None of it works. We’re nearly to the front of the house, with servants and grounds staff jogging after us and shouting, when a black sports car roars around the corner and stops at the front gate.

“He’s here.” The sour-faced ushanka man from the front gate shouts and points. “His lordship’s here.” The smug smile on his face makes me all kinds of nervous.

But my horse seems utterly unconcerned. He neighs loudly and dives forward again, heading for the front of the home.

Clearly possessing some kind of entry button, the gate swings open for the black car, and it revs loudly and flies up the drive until it reaches the circular driveway in front of the home. It screeches to a halt, and the driver’s side door’s thrown open.

“Grigoriy?” A tall man with dark hair who looks familiar leaps from the car. His eyes are wild, and his hands are gesturing broadly. “Grigoriy!?”

“Aleks?” My best friend in the world, Kristiana Liepa, opens the passenger side door and hops out. When she turns around, her eyes meet mine and widen. “Mirdza?”

4

My mom’s always been a pretty decent mother. She loved us. She fed us and cared for us, and unlike a lot of other moms, when things got hard, she didn’t drown herself in a bottle. If it hadn’t been for meeting and marrying Martinš, which she thought was prudent at the time, she’d have been practically perfect.

She worked hard to support us after Dad died, and that’s how I met Kris, actually. My mom got hired to be their housekeeper, and it came with a little apartment in the corner of their barn. We moved in there, and a window to a whole different world with a very kind and welcoming window-keeper opened up.

My mom’s general goodness is why I felt so guilty for pretending, after we moved, that Amelia Liepa was my mother.

She was just so beautiful, and so graceful, and so talented, and while my mother worked hard to clean and cook inside her home, Amelia spent all her time outside, working with the most majestic creatures I’d ever seen. Horses were animals I’d never have the funds to own or the knowledge to work with at all.

Except, that angel of a woman taught me.

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