My Lady, My Lord Read Online Free PDF

wrong.
    At that age he already knew considerably more about the care of horses than any other boy around. But something about Corinna Mowbray always dug at his belly like a sharpened stick. The way she peered at him with her mossy eyes and spoke in short, chopped sentences as though addressing a simpleton never failed to crowd his chest with anger. For Ian, mild-tempered and amusement loving, that sensation felt like death.
    She’d stood there in her little white frock with pink roses sprinkled across the sleeves and skirt, her golden-brown hair bound by thick white ribbons, so tight-laced, starched, and prim... and Ian simply left all reason behind.
    He taunted her, teasing that she knew nothing of horses or anything worthwhile, only about baby things. The day before she’d showed off her insect collection in the drawing room like no girl he’d ever met. Privately he had been impressed. But faced with her alone in the stable he told her it was nothing but a jumble of dead bugs, most of them wingless and without the correct number of legs. She’d probably ripped them off when she killed them. As his
pièce de resistance
he said that a person couldn’t ride a dead beetle anyway.
    She turned every shade of red until finally she boasted that she might not be able to ride a beetle, but she could ride any horse in his father’s stables.
    He mounted her on Storm.
    Even now, so many years later, Ian cringed at the image wedged in his memory of the little girl’s twin braids flailing out behind her as the half-broken colt took off across the yard. He’d known then that he shouldn’t have done it. But no one had ever been able to goad him like Corinna Mowbray. Guilt prickling at his insides, nearly as awful as the anger she roused in his young breast, he’d grabbed up his horse and followed.
    He discovered her in a ditch beneath a hedge a half-mile from the stables. Storm had disappeared.
    Her ankle protruded at a peculiar angle beneath her dirtied skirt and she wept, great heaving sobs, tears staining her pale face, her nose running. But even through her pain and wailing, she managed to tell him in no uncertain terms that he was a cretin, unfit for human company, and she hated him. She refused to allow him to place her on his horse and carry her home. Ian had scowled, mounted, and rode like the devil to fetch the head groom.
    He spent the next week standing up at the dinner table, the caning his father gave him left such welts. But he vowed to never again allow Corinna Mowbray to get beneath his skin.
    He had, unfortunately, failed at that many times in the succeeding years. He didn’t see her often, and when he did he had every intention of behaving well. But he simply couldn’t seem to hold his tongue with that female. Today’s spitting match was no exception.
    Disgust with himself cloyed at his skin. He never treated women with less than the honesty and respect they deserved. Now Corinna Mowbray had him squabbling in public and insulting her as though he were the worst sort of lowbred scoundrel. As though he were his father.
    “What’s the trouble, Chance?” Stoopie clapped him on the shoulder. “You look like your five favorite horses just lost at Newmarket one right after the other.”
    Ian looked up from his scowl. He’d ridden all the way from the exhibition to Brooks’s already. He supposed he’d left his horse in the care of the club’s groom outside from sheer habit.
    He shrugged out of his friend’s grasp. “Must’ve been in a brown study, but it’s passed now,” he said and gave his greatcoat and hat to a footman.
    “You wouldn’t know what studying was if it bit you in the arse,” Stoopie chortled. “But I wouldn’t either, so I don’t blame you for it, old chap.”
    Ian’s stomach clenched. She’d always told him he had porridge for brains, that he would amount to nothing. Once, when they were older, she’d said he was so lacking in intelligence he would even have to resort to cheating