“I don’t give a damn whether you think you need it or no,” he snapped. “You’re getting it. I will not have you try to cross two hours of unfamiliar terrain by yourself, with no one to help you if you get stuck or overturn—”
“The terrain is perfectly familiar! I crossed it this very morning.”
“You were inside the carriage!”
“It has windows! I have eyes!”
She was so busy shouting nonsense at the earl that she failed to notice the zebras.
But the horses did. The horse beneath her caught up short, pulling the one beside it back, and Lydia squeaked and grabbed for her mount’s black mane.
Her fingers caught hold, and she squeezed her thighs into the horse’s flanks. As she did, she looked for what had made the horse startle.
Her mouth came open. Nothing but a soft wheeze emerged.
This morning she and Georgiana had seen a single zebra, wandering down the lane in front of the castle. Now they numbered more than a dozen. They were distant, probably several minutes away, but it was easy enough to make out the churning mass of stripes and hooves.
And they were running.
A stampede. It was a stampede of African zebras, coming toward her at top speed down a poorly maintained dirt track in Perthshire, Scotland.
Lydia whispered an oath.
Beside her, the earl cursed quite a lot louder. “Bloody hell, I forgot about the zebras!”
“Youforgotabout yourzebras—”
Her mind whirled at the inexplicable nature of this man, her circumstances, and the existence of a stampede of zebras in her general vicinity. She ground her teeth and regained the horse’s reins, trying to force her brain to function properly, for all it wanted to freeze in panic and let the zebras trample her into the ground.
“All right,” she said. “You and your horse stay back. I need to get the carriage off the path so we aren’t run down.”
“Do it,” Strathrannoch ordered.
“Iam,” she muttered under her breath.
Strathrannoch’s reply was a decidedly unfamiliar Scots word, which she chose not to attempt to interpret.
She urged the horse beneath her into motion again, nudging it with knees and reins toward the side of the road. The horses looked at the approaching herd nervously, their ears flicking back and forth between Lydia’s instructions and the hoofbeats and churning dust ahead. Lydia’s mount was the worst, stepping more quickly than she liked and arching its neck.
Georgiana, meanwhile, stuck her head out the window. “Is everything all right? I heard a peculiar noise and then we…”
Lydia shot her friend a quick glance when her voice trailed off. Georgiana was staring at the approaching stampede, her pale blue eyes roughly the size and shape of robins’ nests. “I… see,” Georgiana choked out. “Carry on, then.”
Georgiana’s head vanished back into the carriage. Lydia kept her gaze on her horse and her fingers locked around the reins.
At her side, she heard Strathrannoch begin to speak, his voice a low, rough-yet-soothing murmur. “You’re doing fine. All’s well. Just a bit more, my bonny one.”
Lydia’s mouth nearly fell open before she realized he was talking to her horse.
They had almost eased the post-chaise off the road when catastrophe introduced itself in the form of a fat little black-and-white bird. As the carriage’s outer wheels tipped from the packed-dirt road into the softer loam near the forest, the bird burst up from the ground directly in front of Lydia’s horse. The bird gave a short, sharp cry at having been disturbed, fluttering its wings wildly.
And Lydia’s mount promptly panicked. She had just enough time to wrap her fingers in its mane as she felt it gather itself beneath her.
Then it leapt forward and dragged the other horse and the carriage behind them into a mad, frantic flight.
Chapter 5
… I know it pains you not to oversee the proceedings personally. But you needn’t fret. She’s stout of heart, our Lydia.
