Page 61 of The Lady Knows Best

“More flirtation?” The words were clearly meant as a scold, albeit a gentler one than he deserved.

“Yes,” he confessed. “Is it working?”

One brow arched higher yet, and she did not answer. But she did match her steps to his as they continued on the path, and a few moments later, she slipped a hand around his elbow.

“What happened here?” She plucked at the frayed threads along the split in his sleeve.

“Foolishness,” he answered dismissively. He hadn’t yet examined whether the tear had gone through to his coat beneath. And he’d be lucky his valet didn’t succumb to the vapors when he saw the state of his boots. He laid his hand over hers to stay her worrying fingers—and to keep her by his side.

“Foolishness and flirtation,” she repeated. “I believe I could’ve seen that without coming all this way.”

He let the gentle pressure of her hand on his arm steer them back toward the house. A retreat, of sorts. He supposed he couldn’t blame her.

“If you’re expecting to uncover a great depth of character,” he warned, “I fear you’re bound to be disappointed.”

She tilted her head slightly, as if she were looking him up and down. What, he wondered, did she see? The brim of her bonnet, combined with the disparity in their heights, meant he could glimpse nothing more of her expression than the upturned corner of her mouth.

“Am I?”

Good God. He couldn’t make up his mind whether she liked him or despised him.

Perhaps she couldn’t make up her mind either.

Her confusion was understandable. Probably the best he could hope for, under the circumstances. But it left his thoughts as convoluted as the maze of garden paths beneath their feet.

CHAPTER 19

Daphne flopped onto her back, her head striking the pile of down-filled pillows with a soft whump, then flailed about trying to free her limbs from the tangle of linens.

As it turned out, it was not as easy to sleep without Bell nearby as she had thought it would be.

But really . . . how long could she possibly lie there, staring into the dark, recounting snippets of dinner conversation in her mind?

One snippet, in particular.

It had been a pleasant meal shared among pleasant company, and no one, not even Bell, had been inclined to tease Miles about missing tea or remark on Daphne’s sudden propensity toward woolgathering.

They had been joined at the table by Lady Deveraux’s companion, Miss Palmer, and by Mr. Palmer, her brother and Lyneham Park’s steward. He was a man of at most thirty-five, clearly too young to have been hired by the late Lord Deveraux, as Daphne had at first imagined. A pleasant, gentlemanlike fellow, he had spent most of the evening discussing matters of estate management with Lord Stalbridge, who took an acute interest in such things.

The problem—and it was, to be clear, a problem only in Daphne’s mind—was when Lord Stalbridge had asked some benign question about livestock. Mr. Palmer, whose smile was almost as merry as his sister’s, had suggested that Lord Deveraux’s opinion be consulted on the matter. Upon having the question repeated, Miles, who had been talking about something else entirely with Lady Stalbridge, blushed.

And that was how it had come to pass that Lord Ryland regaled the whole table with the story of Miles’s assistance to the farmer whose ram had got his horns tangled in a hedgerow and couldn’t work himself free.

In Lord Ryland’s telling, the encounter had been amusing, rather than alarming, with considerable suspense in the outcome—whose stubbornness would win out in the end, Miles’s or the ram’s?

It also perfectly explained Miles’s muddy, disheveled state when he’d returned to the house.

Though it had produced much laughter—and a striking mental image—none of it would have been the sort of thing that kept Daphne lying awake, restless in her bed. No, the problem was Mr. Palmer’s quiet words to Lord Stalbridge, when the general conversation had moved on to another topic: “Lord Deveraux has never been a man for numbers, but he’s right good with his hands.”

The steward had clearly intended the remark as praise, though Daphne could think of few gentlemen who would regard it as such. During the rest of dinner, she had considered what it said of Miles that he was willing to get involved, to help his tenants, in such a personal, physical manner. She had thought first of what the butler had said that afternoon, about how a tour of the estate was always one of Miles’s first acts whenever he returned, to see for himself how things were. Such details spoke surprisingly well of him as a landowner.

In the drawing room afterward, while Miss Palmer played and Miles and occasionally Lord Ryland and Bellis sang, she had begun to reflect more on Mr. Palmer’s claim that Miles wasn’t good with numbers. In the garden, Miles had named the schoolroom as his least favorite spot at Lyneham. It was of a piece, she supposed. In her own family, learning had been highly valued for both boys and girls, but she understood that in the world at large, girls were often forbidden from acquiring much education, and many boys like Miles spent much of their time at school on things other than books.

Still, something about the exchange niggled at her.

By the time she was alone in her bed, her wayward thoughts had begun to dwell on the latter part of Mr. Palmer’s observation. And now, she couldn’t stop thinking about Miles’s strong, long-fingered, and surprisingly tanned hands.

Or perhaps not so surprisingly. He’d tossed aside his ruined gloves before going out to the garden and not bothered to don another pair. Which made the succession of pictures in her mind’s eye distressingly clear: his hand proffering a rose, his hand resting beside hers on the rough stone bench, his hand lightly pinning hers to his corded forearm.