in his arms again.
“Jack,” she whispered, her voice a rasping ache, and reached up to touch his cheek.
He sucked in a ragged breath at the contact of her fingertips against his rough morning beard. He covered her hand with his but didn’t put it away from his cheek.
“Let me be clear,” he warned. His fingers tightened on hers as if he could sense the longing in her and wanted to force it down before she said or did something they would both regret. “Seeing you again was completely unexpected, and I applaud the agreement you made with your father. But I’m in this race to win it, and I won’t let anything or anyone stop me.” He brought her hand to his lips and placed a tickling touch of his lips to her palm before lowering it away. “Not even you.”
She resisted the urge to blink away the stinging tears of rejection and forced out, “I would never expect you to.”
She gave a hard snap of the ribbons and sent the team onward, turning them onto the narrow lane that snaked up to Uncle Jonas’s rambling country house. They were so close that she could see the tops of the brick chimneys of the old manor poking out above the trees and hear the hounds barking from their kennels.
Oh, what a cake she was to be upset! Most likely, Shaw agreed with her father that marriage would do her good, that it would give her a more proper purpose than raising horses. That marriage to a society son would provide status, position, a respectable home…a respectable husband. After all, isn’t that what Shaw had told her when he’d refused to make love to her that last night before he left Willow Wood? That they could never have anything more than secret assignations and veiled flirtations?
She’d known that as well as he. But heavens, how much his refusal had hurt!
Just as it hurt now.
“To make it easier on everyone,” she announced, forcing her voice not to quaver, “I’ll switch Midnight’s training to the afternoons. That will give you the mornings without having to see me at the track when I take him out for runs.”
“No, you won’t. You won’t be riding that horse or any other, not for a very long time.”
To prove his point, he gently brushed the toe of his boot against her right foot. The light contact shot blinding pain up her leg and into the base of her spine, where it exploded in a burst of stars.
“Don’t ever…touch me…again,” she forced out as she panted down the pain. Only half of that statement was targeted at the nudge of his foot.
He shook his head. “As a jockey, you’ve just been scratched from the race. And from being an exercise boy, too.”
“I can’t be. I’m the only one who knows how to ride Midnight.” She handed him the ribbons so she could rub at her swollen ankle. “I have to win.”
“So do I.”
“Oh? Is your father planning on marrying you off to a man you don’t love, as well?”
His face hardened like stone. “No.”
“Then whatever your reason,” she said glumly as her uncle’s house came into sight around the bend in the lane, “it isn’t as grim as mine.”
He answered that with a silent flick of his gaze in her direction.
“So unless you plan on rescuing me by marrying me yourself,” she tossed out, the devil making her do it, knowing fully well that Shaw wouldn’t bite at the bait, “it seems that we’re back to where we started.”
He stopped the curricle in front of the house, tied off the ribbons, and jumped to the ground. “And where is that?”
“With my horse winning.”
“That is going to be quite the feat then,” he muttered as he lifted her off the rig, pulled her securely into his arms, and easily carried her toward the house. “The first horse in the Derby’s history to win without a jockey.”
She slapped his shoulder, but then couldn’t bear to move her hand away. Instead, she curled her fingertips inconspicuously into the hard muscle beneath his jacket that flexed invitingly with each step he took. “I’ll find a way to ride.”
“No, you won’t. Even if you aren’t found out as a woman the morning of the race in the jockey’s room when the handicap weights are assigned, you’re in no shape to race.” This time, he wasn’t at all teasing. “You have to put equal weight into both stirrups to control a racehorse, especially one