“Not particularly.” I eyed the animal. It didn’t look overly pleased to see me. I seconded its sentiments. “I just haven’t done much riding.”
“Thor is Imogen’s mount. He has very nice manners. Gather up your gown.”
“Huh?” I stopped tentatively patting the neck of the horse in order to give it the (wholly false) impression that I was a competent horsewoman, and turned to ask Nikola what he meant, but before anything more could come out of my mouth, he grasped me by my waist and heaved me upward, plopping me down sideways on the saddle.
That was when I realized there was something wrong with it. Or rather with me. “This is—I’ve never ridden in a sidesaddle. Am I supposed to sit sideways? It’s kind of uncomfortable if I am.”
“You haven’t ridden at all?” Incredulity fairly dripped off his words.
“No, and you can stop with the superior attitude. I’m a San Francisco girl, born and raised. I haven’t been on a horse since I went to fat girls’ camp when I was eleven, and they had proper saddles. This one is seriously funky.”
“Hook your leg over the pommel,” Nikola explained, gesturing toward a curved piece that poked up off the front of the saddle. “Your other foot goes in the stirrup.”
I leaned back a little and pulled my knee toward myself in preparation to doing as he said, but ended up just continuing on backward, promptly falling off the horse.
“Ow,” I muttered, spitting out a mouthful of dirt and glaring up at the horse’s legs. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”
“Are you addressing Thor or me?”
“Both of you.” I took the hand offered and allowed Nikola to assist me to my feet, brushing off the front of my sundress, and covertly trying to dig out dirt from where it had gotten into my bra. “You know, I think I’ll walk to town. I’m less likely to end up with a broken nose.”
“Don’t be so weak,” he said, and hoisted me up onto the dratted horse again. “I can’t imagine how you never learned to ride properly, but now is not the time to give in to your fears. Hook your leg thusly.”
It took a good five minutes of coaching, but at last I had my legs arranged to Nikola’s satisfaction. I wobbled a bit precariously while he walked the horse in a circle and explained how to adjust my balance for the movement of the horse, but in the end, I decided to stick it out rather than walk the three miles into town.
Mostly because some unknown romantic part of me wanted a moonlit ride with a handsome man, even if there was the possibility that one of us had gone over the deep end.
“This isn’t so bad,” I said a short while later, after having released the death grip I held on a clump of the horse’s mane. “I think I’ve gotten the hang of this whole move-along-with-the-horse thing. Can we go faster? Without me falling off, that is? I could walk as fast as the horses, and I’d really like to get to town to see if it’s you or me who’s deranged.”
“If you like,” was all he said, and the next thing I knew, he clicked his tongue and the white monster he was riding took off like a rocket. One with four legs and a tail.
Here’s the thing about horses—evidently if they hang out together a lot, they buy into this whole “best friends forever” thing, and when one of them suddenly bolts, the other feels obligated to join in the fun and frolics.
“I believe the answer to your question is no,” a voice said to me when I groaned and rolled over onto my back to stare up at the night sky.
“Huh?” Gingerly, I moved my arms and legs to make sure everything was in working order. It was, although parts of me were slightly bruised. I was also somewhat dazed from the unexpected impact with the ground. “What?”
“You asked if you could go faster without falling off. The answer to that is no, you cannot. Are you injured?”
“I dunno.” I groaned again, just because I felt like I was due a bit of pity. I looked at Nikola to see if he was likely to feel sympathetic toward me, but caught him ogling my legs, which were exposed up to midthigh since my dress had gotten twisted around. “Hey, what did I say about eyes up here?”
“You objected to me enjoying your breasts. You said nothing about your legs.”
“It applies to everywhere.” I sat up and pulled down the skirt of my dress, giving him a really quality glare that I suspected he couldn’t see, even though he seemed to have no problem seeing my legs.
They would be a shame to miss.
“Whoa!” I scrambled to my feet before Nikola could even get out of my way. “Help me onto this horse. I have to get to town to get some serious medical attention.”
“You are injured, then?” Nikola asked, boosting me onto the horse.
“Not in the way you mean, but I keep—” I bit off the words, not wanting to tell him that I had suffered some sort of weird brain thing when I blacked out earlier, and was now experiencing delusions of the highest caliber.
You seem anything but delusional to me.
“Oh, god,” I sobbed, swinging my leg around the pommel, and using both hands to clutch the reins along with Thor’s mane. “We have to get into town fast. Does this horse have a turbo mode, or third gear, or whatever you do to make them go really fast?”
“What’s wrong? Why are you shaking? If you tighten those reins any more, Thor will assume you wish for him to rear, and you’ll end up on the ground again.”
“I’m going insane. I keep hearing voices in my head,” I said without realizing it until the words left my lips. I loosened up my death grip on the reins to clap one hand over my mouth, my eyes on Nikola to see how he’d react to my admission of insanity.
He simply raised one of his glossy black eyebrows. And for some reason, that seemed to make me feel much better.
It’s true that is odd, but there could well be a reasonable explanation.
“Ack!” I screeched. “There it goes again! Quick, I have to get to doctor before my brain erodes any further.”
12 July 1703
Nikola wasn’t sure what instinct warned him that the oddly named woman was close to losing control of her wits, but some innate sense given to men regarding women had come through when he needed it, and rather than point out to Io that her insistence that the nearest doctor could help her over her derangement was not at all reasonable (given that Herr Doktor Huebe had four-footed patients as well as those of merely two), he did as she demanded, and rode with her into town.
“You are not in the least bit good at riding, and in saying that, I use the broadest definition of the word ‘good,’” he said conversationally some ten minutes later when he managed to catch her as she almost slid out of the saddle. He set her aright again, wincing in sympathy with Thor when she dropped the reins and clutched the horse’s mane in a fierce grip. “You’re not even tolerably mediocre.”
“Well, that’s no thanks to this stupid saddle,” she snapped back in a wholly undeserved manner. “It’s got to be the most ridiculous, most sexist thing ever invented. I just bet that whatever man thought up this monstrosity of a saddle was bent on keeping women subservient and dependent on others.”
“Women are subservient and dependent on others,” he pointed out, catching her again as she skewed around to glare at him. “It is the way of things, and if you cease flinging yourself about in the saddle, you might stay atop Thor rather than repeatedly sliding off him.”
“Look, you may think you’re all Mr. Seventeen Hundreds Nobility and whatnot, but until I find out that I’ve really gone to la-la land, and not having a mental breakdown like I think I’m having because of the voices in my head, I’m not going to play your little game of how things used to be. So you can just stop trying to work my nerves, and tell me instead how to make this horse go faster. We’ve been riding forever and I still don’t even see the town.”
“If we went faster, you’d fall off again,” he pointed out, ignoring the gibberish part of her conversation despite finding it more than a little amusing.
He realized with a shock that he found her amusing, as well. How long had it been since he’d been entertained merely by conversing with a woman?
Chauvinist pig.
He frowned, wondering where that thought had come from. He wasn’t entirely sure where Chauvin was, or why their pigs would occur to him at that moment, but he assumed that something Io had said had triggered a long-lost memory.
“Oh, man, I’m so going insane. Distract my wonky brain, Nikola!” Io demanded.
He thought of pointing out that he was not accustomed to people making demands of him, let alone fulfilling them, but admitted that he did not find conversation with her tiresome, as he did so many other women.
Dawg!
“Well?” she asked, impatience quite audible in the single word.
“Hmm?”
“You’re supposed to distract me so I don’t sit here and freak out any more about going insane while we slowly amble our way down the side of this mountain, like a couple of slugs out for a leisurely stroll. So get on with the distracting. What are you thinking about right now?”
“I was thinking about dogs.”
“What sort of a dog?”
“I don’t know.” Absently, he reached out and grabbed her arm to keep her from slipping off the side of Thor.
The look on her face was priceless. “You’re thinking about a dog, but you don’t know which one? Maybe I’m not the only one who should be seeing the doctor.”
Nikola considered this. “He is certainly fairly conversant with their ailments.”
She blinked at him a couple of times. When she spoke, her voice was fairly strained. “Who is fairly conversant with dogs’ ailments?”
“Yes,” he agreed, turning his mind to the issue of what he was going to do with her. Oh, it was true she hadn’t begged him for help in escaping her local protector, whoever that should be—and he wasn’t entirely certain he didn’t believe her claim that she wasn’t a light-skirt, since she hadn’t once made an attempt to touch him, not in a sexual way, at least. Well, there was that little bite she had given him, but surely that wasn’t an overture. It hadn’t felt like a blatant sexual hint, and it had been his experience that women of loose morals made bold with their hands, something Io had most definitely not done. No, she most likely was not a doxy, and that meant he couldn’t just give her over to the local horse doctor and be on his way.
