McAlistair's Fortune by Alissa Johnson Page A

knew the truth? The scheme would be called off—which seemed a fine idea at the moment—but Mr. Fletcher would only try again at a later date, and with more care taken to assure she didn’t discover the ploy in advance. That prospect seemed considerably less fine.
    And the possibility of scandal was fairly low, she admitted. The secretiveness of the whole ridiculous endeavor made certain of that.
    Though she didn’t much care for the idea, it seemed following McAlistair was her best option at present.
    So follow him she did, up and down more hills, fording streams, keeping primarily to the woods and entirely off the roads. They slowed to a walk from time to time, giving the horses a chance to rest, but for the most part they pushed their mounts, and themselves, as hard and as fast as the terrain would safely allow.
    There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the sun beat relentlessly on Evie’s head and shoulders. Under other circumstances, she would have relished the feel of it. Sunny days were not so common that she was in the habit of taking them for granted. Just now, however, she didn’t feel grateful so much as hot and increasingly sticky. The watered beer she drank offered little relief, and it didn’t help matters that she’d neglected to take her bonnet from the carriage.
    To top off what she was beginning to think of as the most disagreeable excursion of her life, her leg was beginning to give her pain. In the past, Evie had found that her weak leg always began to stiffen and ache after she’d been in a saddle for more than an hour. She could go a bit longer if she made regular stops to walk about and stretch, but even with that, two hours was really her limit.
    At a guess, she and McAlistair had been riding nonstop for well over four hours. The muscles in her leg had begun to protest mildly after the first hour; after the third they’d been screaming. Now, however, they’d become disconcertingly silent. She made an attempt to flex her toes and found she couldn’t feel them. She was dead numb from the top of her right hip all the way down.
    Dismounting, she realized grimly, was going to be a problem. Then again, that particular worry operated under the assumption that dismounting would, at some point, be on the itinerary. Given the way McAlistair was driving them, she wondered if he meant to ride straight through to Norfolk.
    More than once she opened her mouth to demand a break, and more than once pride held her back. She hated being seen as weak or fragile. She detested the looks of pity she received from others when her leg grew tired and her limp became apparent. And she despised the whispered comments she sometimes caught as she passed through crowded ballrooms: “Poor dear. Quite badly damaged in the accident, you know.”
    Damaged. She loathed that word above all others. She most certainly was not damaged, and if need be, she could stay on a horse as long as any man.
    Most men, she qualified after a time.
    This man, she qualified again after another hour. She could, and would, stay on a horse as long as McAlistair. Even if it meant she couldn’t move afterward, which was, unfortunately, becoming a more likely outcome with every passing minute.
    On the next occasion of McAlistair slowing the horses to a walk, Evie took the chance of awkwardly pulling her foot from the stirrup in the vain hope that even a slight change of position would help. It was a struggle to balance and to fit her foot back into the stirrup when they began a faster pace, but there was nothing else for it. She had to do something.
    Unfortunately, the somethings she tried appeared to be of little use, and by the time McAlistair brought the horses to a stop in a small clearing, she was nearly at her wit’s end. She was exhausted, annoyed, sore in all the places she could still feel, and rather disappointed with herself. It shouldn’t be so damnably hard to sit in a saddle for a mere half-day’s ride.
    She watched as McAlistair