"She's trouble," Nathaniel stated without compromise.

Miles's eyebrows shot into his scalp. His friend's reaction to the Comtesse de Beaucaire was clearly far from indifferent, even if it wasn't warm. However, he only said lightly, "She's always been something of an enfant terrible, I grant you."

The hounds caught a scent and with a great hue and cry set off after it, the field following with rather less enthusiasm than they'd shown at the beginning of the morning.

"The problem with hunting," Miles observed as he and Nathaniel cantered side by side, "is that it alternates frantic bursts of energy and excitement with long periods of boredom and idleness in the cold. How about peeling off here for some sustenance? There's an inn across the next field which does a very tolerable shepherd's pie. And an excellent stilton."

Nathaniel shook his head, his eyes on the black horse and his black-clad rider ahead of them. He realized with a sense of the inevitable that he had no intention of leaving the field before Gabrielle de Beaucaire. "I'll see what this run brings, Miles."

"As you wish. I'm for a tankard of ale and some nuncheon. My toes are frozen." Miles turned his horse aside and galloped away from the hunt.

A few minutes later the fox broke cover and the hounds were in full cry. Nathaniel gave his horse his head and came up with Gabrielle as they charged hell for leather across a plowed field. She shot him a quick sideways glance as he reached her and he called, "This time, Madame Reckless, I am going to give you a lead."

Her laugh was rich and exultant. "You won't lose me, Lord Praed, I can assure you."

"Oh, I know that," he called back, his eyes glittering. And neither of them missed the underlying meaning of their words. Something had been started that would not soon be finished. But neither of them was as yet prepared to put a name to what it was.

The chase took them across four fields and Gabrielle was at his heels throughout. They sailed over hedge and stream and he could almost feel her breath on his back. The frigid January air whistled past their ears; the hooves crashed over the hard-ridged furrows of the plowed fields; they plunged into a copse and he heard her laughing curse as a branch whipped her cheek and she dropped low on the horse's neck.

And at the kill she sat her panting horse steadily, with no sign of flinching from the swift and bloody slaughter.

Nathaniel felt again the power emanating from the tall, taut figure. He was responding to the wildness, the passion, the force that drove her, and he couldn't help himself. Fearless and unconventional, Gabrielle de Beaucaire spelled a form of trouble he didn't think he could resist, not if he stayed in her vicinity.

He waited for her to show some fatigue as the day wore on. Or at least to say that she was hungry. But she stayed at the head of the field, unflagging and uncomplaining. He was famished and knew she must be too, but he couldn't bring himself to admit a need that his indomitable companion ignored. They exchanged few words but their paths never veered. Sometimes Gabrielle took the lead, sometimes he did. And Nathaniel began to feel they were engaged in an unspoken competition. Which of them would call a halt first?

In the end it was Gabrielle who said, "We'd better turn back. We're about ten miles from Vanbrugh Court and we'll be lucky to make it home before dusk."

"The horses are tired," he offered in assent.

Gabrielle shot him a quick glance at this bland observation and her lips twitched. "So am I."

"Oh, are you? I feel as fresh as I did this morning."

"That's a Banbury story if ever I heard one," she said, refusing to rise to provocation. "If we go this way, we can clip a mile off the ride." She gestured with her whip across a style.

"And how many times do we risk breaking our necks 7"

She seemed to consider the question. "Twice." Chuckling, she turned her horse and jumped the style.

It was nearly dusk when the weary horses trotted up the drive of Vanbrugh Court. A postchaise with the Vanbrugh arms on its panels was being driven away from the front door. "Simon must have just arrived," Gabrielle observed.

Nathaniel made no comment. Once he'd spoken his mind to his host, he would be free to leave the trouble and temptation resident in Vanbrugh Court before matters became any worse. He'd be on the road by dawn.

Gabrielle swung down from her mount without assistance, but Nathaniel's sharp eyes noticed that she wavered for a second as her feet touched solid ground and the straight back curved slightly, her shoulders drooping.

So she wasn't completely invincible. It was a small satisfaction. He put a hand lightly under her elbow as they went up the steps to the open front door. The touch was electrifying, and he heard her sharp indrawn breath.

"Oh, there you are!" Georgie came out of the library. "You're the last to come back. I was beginning to worry."

"Gabby's always the last to return from a hunt.” her husband commented, following her into the hall.

Simon Vanbrugh was a rotund man with a genial expression enlivened by a pair of very shrewd gray eves. His assessing gaze ran over the new arrivals. Had Gabrielle managed to win over the prejudiced spymaster? It was hard to tell, but they'd presumably spent the day together and there was a promising informality to Nathaniel's supporting hand beneath her elbow.

"Did she wear you out, Nananiel?" He laughed lightly as he bent to kiss his wife's cousin. He and Georgie had grown up as neighbors and had been childhood sweethearts, so Simon had known Gabby almost as long as his wife had.

"Did I, Lord Praed?" Gabrielle turned to look at her escort with a cool arch smile.

"I don't believe so, madame," he said, suddenly stiff and formal. His hand dropped from her elbow. "If you have a minute, Simon, I'd like a word with you."

"Georgie, will you come and talk to me in my bath?" Gabrielle asked as the two men disappeared into the library. "Or must you play hostess for the next hour?"

Georgie shook her head, interest sparkling in her eyes. "Everyone's dressing for dinner. Besides, nothing can take precedence over an account of your day with Nathaniel Praed."

Gabrielle laughed, linking her arm through her cousin's as they mounted the stairs. "I've a tale to tell, Georgie."

In the library Nathaniel flung himself onto a leather sofa with an audible sigh. He stretched out his legs to the fire and examined his mud-splattered boots.

He came to the point with customary lack of ceremony. "What the devil do you mean by foisting that wild woman on me, Simon?"

"Wild? Gabby?" Simon turned from the sideboard, a cut-glass decanter in his hand. "She's not wild, Nathaniel. Oh, a trifle spirited, I grant you, but she's got as cool a head on her shoulders as anyone I know."

"Oh, is that so? And it's a cool head that leads a woman to climb through my bedroom window at one o'clock in the morning? It's a cool head that leads her to jump a ten-foot stone wall as if it's a stack of firewood?"

"Claret?" Simon inquired, a chuckle in his voice. "Did she really climb through your window?"

"Thank you." Nathaniel took the proffered glass. "Yes, she did, presenting me with that ridiculous scrap of velvet… of all the absurd, fanciful notions. Obviously she thinks the business of the service is some great game of secret signs and amusing clandestine ex-cursions. I tell you, Simon, you had no right, no fight at all, to compromise me by revealing my identity to a headstrong, reckless, wild woman."

Having thus unburdened himself, Nathaniel drank deeply of his claret.

Simon sat down in a wing chair opposite him and thoughtfully sipped his own wine. "You're not compromised, Nathaniel. You should know better than to imagine I would reveal your identity without good cause."