He blinked and swallowed hard, desperately trying to wipe the distracting image from his mind, but he could not It remained there, tantalizing him, challenging him with the sudden revelation that Helena, despite her severe and serious exterior, was perhaps as much a sensualist as her mother, but she just did not recognize it— or refused to recognize it Prompted by her intimate knowledge of the pitfalls of her mother’s existence, she must have rejected it entirely and stifled every dangerous impulse that might possibly send her down a similar path. But deep inside her was a creature that gloried in the physical, a woman who enjoyed racing a powerful horse on a golden autumn day, who tilted her head to enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face, who reveled in the silky caress of the water on her fingers. What would she be like if she were awakened to these feelings? What would it be like to be the man who made her aware of her own sensual impulses?
It was dizzying thought. A woman as passionate as the mother, but as thoughtful and intellectual as the daughter. It would take a special man, a very special man indeed, to bring such a person to life. Idly he wondered if there were any man capable of such a thing as he mentally cataloged the participants at the Congress. No mere functionary or petty plenipotentiary would do. She had her pick of German princelings, Italian and Polish counts. Alexander? No, irresistible as the tsar might be to most women, he was too volatile. Metternich? No, the chancellor might be the soul of courtesy and diplomacy, but he was too rigid, too self-involved. Talleyrand? No, brilliant though he might be. Epicurean that he was, he was simply too old and too frail for someone as active as Helena.
Enough] Brett forced the dangerously tantalizing thoughts from his mind. “But a life shared is a life enriched. Do you not agree? Perhaps that is what your mother sought. Surely you do not intend to be alone the rest of your life?”
Again, the vehement shake of the head. “No. To depend on another for happiness is to delude oneself. In addition to that, it puts an enormous burden on that other person—to entertain, to comfort, to solve the problems of someone else’s existence. That is not fair. It is far safer and wiser to learn to solve one’s problems on one’s own. Then one never need fear being left alone.”
Brett was silent, considering. What she said made a great deal of sense. In fact, be had been operating on that principle for much of his own life, but now, hearing someone else describe it, it sounded like such a barren existence. He was about to protest when her next words addressed his very objections.
“I expect that that is putting it rather baldly. I do not mean that we should isolate ourselves from one another, just that we should look first to ourselves and not to others for support. And that is why I wish . . . well, at any rate, why I do not count on some man to look after me.”
He could not help chuckling at her scornful dismissal of his entire sex. “I can see that in your opinion. Miss Devereux, we men do present a rather poor risk. But you were about to tell me what you intended to do instead.”
She colored slightly. Lord, the man was observant. He did not miss a thing. “Nothing very startling or unusual. In fact, I believe that most women would go to any lengths to avoid being a governess, but I ... well, the truth of it is, I should like to be. I mean, I should like to start a school for girls. I am a good teacher. At least my stepsisters, Sophia and Augusta, seem to think so. I enjoy introducing them to new things, explaining things to them in terms they can understand. And I want girls like Sophie and Gussie to grow into intelligent women who can look after themselves instead of becoming clinging bits of fluff. There.” She drew her hand out of the water, shook it a few times, and wiped it on the skirt of her- riding habit. “Now you know why Mama gets that disparaging tone in her voice every time she refers to me.”
Brett reached in his pocket and drew out a clean linen handkerchief. Taking her hand in his, he proceeded to dry it off gently and thoroughly. “It is not a disparaging tone that I hear, but a reluctant pride.”
“Pride? In me? Mama?” She snorted in a most unladylike manner and shook her head, but she did not draw her hand away. Nor did she try to hide the hopeful gleam in her eyes.
“Yes. I can see that she does not know what to make of you. After all, the two of you are very different in many ways, but, yes, I do think she is proud of you for your quick and clever mind. She just does not understand what use it will be to you.”
Helena stood mesmerized by his words, the look in his eyes, the sympathetic smile and the warmth of his hand. Her heartbeat, which had at last returned to normal after he had touched her lips, became erratic once more, her breathing irregular, and her knees, which were usually so dependable that she never spared them a second thought, now threatened to give way under her.
The twinkle in his eyes grew more pronounced and his smile went from sympathetic to impish as he read the telltale signs. Yes, Miss Devereux could be affected by such things after all, even if she did not know it yet. His own breathing grew erratic as he thought, for one breathless moment, what it would be like to introduce her to all the delights that could be shared between a man and a woman.
Ruthlessly, Brett squelched such a tantalizing notion. “Come, it is time that we pay attention to our horses before they become utterly disgusted with this tame excuse for a ride in the park and demand that we give them the exercise they deserve.”
Chapter Eleven
Unresisting, Helena allowed him to help her into the saddle. Ordinarily she took it as a point of pride to be able to get on Nimrod’s back unaided, but she was too bemused by a riot of conflicting thoughts and emotions to do anything but meekly accept his assistance. As he lifted her up, it felt, for the tiniest instant, as though he were going to kiss her. And, even more alarming, it had felt for a far longer space of time that that was what she wanted.
Settling herself in the saddle, Helena could not help wondering if she had completely taken leave of her senses. Never in her wildest dreams, not even at the height of her fascination with Ursula’s tales of heroic knights and mythical warriors, had she ever imagined one of those heroes kissing her. And now, here, with a perfectly ordinary man, cavalry officer though he might be, she was actually wondering what it would be like to be swept up in his arms, to feel his lips on hers, to be meeting him as though he were the lover he had teased her about meeting. What on earth was wrong with her? Even if she had indulged in such dreams as a foolish, impressionable girl, which she had
not,
Helena knew that such dreams were not for her, for she knew from her mother’s abundant experience that they did not come true. And she certainly had no intention of repeating her mother’s folly, especially with a man who was one of her mother’s many admirers.
With an effort she diverted her thoughts from such dangerous ground and faced the present. “Major?”
“Yes.” Settling into his own saddle, Brett looked at her curiously. It was not like Helena Devereux to sound anything except confident or knowledgeable, but at the moment she sounded neither. In fact, she almost sounded unsure, as though she found herself in a position that was unsettling or upsetting to her. It was a glorious day, no one else was around. There was nothing to cause her any distress, which left only Helena and himself as the source of her unease. Scrutinizing her carefully, he thought he detected just a hint of color highlighting her cheekbones, the faintest glisten of sweat on her upper lip, and a more rapid rise and fall of the tightly molded bodice of her gray riding habit.
Brett stifled a grin. So his insinuations had affected her after all. Good. He was glad she could be as affected by him as he was affected by her. Granted, it was he, and not she, who had conjured up his mental image of her lithe nude body swimming in the pool, but her actions had inspired it. Whoever had been ultimately responsible for it, however, did not matter; he knew that he would never view Helena Devereux with dispassionate complacency ever again, which was a prospect he found to be unnerving in the extreme.
“I was wondering if you could ... I mean, would you be so kind as to demonstrate the figures I saw you and your horse performing in the park before?”
“What?” Whatever he had expected her to ask of him, it had certainly not been that. “Oh, you meant the
haute ecole
exercises that
Rex and I have been working to perfect.”
He hoped his disappointment did not show, that she did not know he was hoping she was going to ask some special favor of the man and not the horse. “It is nothing, really, merely an expansion of the basic elements of dressage with the rider helping to bring the balance to the rear and lightening the forehand so the horse’s gait is shorter and raised without sacrificing extension and freedom of movement. I acquired Rex when he was quite young, so was able to teach him with the aid of a training rope, which allowed him to develop and perfect his gait at the outset. Naturally his cavalry training added to all that, but it was not until we arrived here in Vienna and I saw what was being done at the Spanish Riding School that we truly began our work. At the moment we are trying to perfect the
levade
so we can move on to the
courbette
and then the
capriole.
Rex is comfortable enough balancing on his hind legs for the
levade,
but going from that to the jump for the
courbette
is something that still makes him uneasy.”
As he finished his explanation, the enormous horse rose in one fluid-movement on its hind legs, drawing in its forelegs until it was perfectly balanced while the rider, seemingly expending no more effort than his mount, remained as calm and unruffled as he had been moments before when all four legs had been firmly planted on the ground.
Helena held her breath in awe as she watched. Animal and rider were so perfectly controlled, so in tune with one another’s movements that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. Indeed, each motion seemed to begin in one and end in the other, just as the horse’s balance flowed smoothly from its forelegs to its hind. Only an experienced equestrian could appreciate the effort and the skill involved, a skill built upon understanding, trust, and communication between man and animal, a trust that was so deep, so complete that it seemed more magic than anything else.
Slowly they returned to earth, transformed from a mythical figure to earthly horse and rider once again. “Magnificent, truly magnificent.” Helena was not sure whether she had uttered the words or only thought them, so overwhelmed was she by the sheer power and beauty of the demonstration.
“Thank you.” Brett patted Rex’s shiny neck as he tried to sort out the welter of emotions her reaction inspired in him. The look of wonder in her eyes and the undisguised admiration in her voice were strangely moving, and he realized that while women of all types had cast admiring glances in his direction often enough, they had always seemed contrived, as though they were adopted for effect rather than an expression of any true emotion. Furthermore, anything that they had admired was purely superficial, his physical presence or his social connections. The look on Helena’s face was an unaffected, unrehearsed tribute to his accomplishments, pure and simple. The fact that he knew her to be an accomplished horsewoman herself only added to the meaningfulness of her appreciation, for it meant she was able to appreciate the effort, patience, and skill that it took to perform such a feat, and he felt oddly grateful to her for recognizing it.
“I know you explained it all to me, but I still cannot fathom how one even begins to work up to such an accomplishment, though I would dearly love to try.”
Brett grinned. The thought of Helena Devereux on a rearing horse was quite enough to take anyone’s breath away, but from the little he had seen of the way she rode, he felt quite certain that if anyone were equal to the challenge, she was. “It is like anything else. One does these things slowly and in sequence. You walked your horse before you trotted; you trotted before you cantered or galloped. And I would say, judging from the looks of your horse, that he is itching for a gallop at this very moment. Shall we?” Leaning forward over Rex’s neck, he urged his own mount forward.
By the time they had reached a gallop, he heard her thundering behind him. ln no time at all, she had shot past him, a magnificent picture of power and speed as she sat the big bay with all the assurance and poise of an Amazon. Horse and rider were so perfectly molded that the animal’s legs almost seemed an extension of hers, as though she herself were galloping at a breakneck pace, urged on by the pure joy of speed.
When Brett finally caught up to her, he was overwhelmed by the sheer exuberance of the moment. With her cheeks pink from exertion, her lips parted, and her eyes shining, Helena Devereux was a lovely woman indeed. Though not so classically beautiful as her mother, she radiated the same image of vitality and energy, and a love of life that was all her own.
And as their horses trotted shoulder to shoulder matching stride to stride, Brett felt as close to her as he had felt to any woman. There was something oddly intimate about it. He had only intended to catch up with her, but when he had discovered that he could not easily pass her, everything had changed. He had leaned forward over the neck of his horse and urged Rex to even greater speed, but the only result was that she too had done the same thing and they had remained neck and neck as though frozen in space and time. Gritting his teeth and throwing all his effort into it, Brett had again urged Rex forward, but to no avail.
In all his life he could not remember ever having competed against a woman; certainly not on such a physical level. In fact, there were few, if any men who had offered him such a challenge as Helena did. Competing against her was a heady feeling indeed. As every muscle had strained in the effort to beat her, he could sense hers straining-as well, the very evenness of the match binding them together in a bond that was closer than any he had shared with anyone.