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He patted her head again, and left her sitting at the table, staring at the pile of letters, bills, and a financial situation that looked about as hopeful as a hospital patient circling the drain. Oh, and now she needed to add in a tractor repair bill. Assuming that it could be repaired, and she didn’t need to replace the entirething. She sighed. Maybe Tommy had a point. Maybe she should get a couple of oxen.

She had no intention of selling. But equally, she had no idea how to fix her current predicament. She’d saved where she could, she’d cut corners where she could, but the truth of the matter was that farming was a dubious proposition these days. Most small farms didn’t make money. She’d thought that she’d be the exception. And it was looking more and more like she wasn’t.

“Right,” she muttered to herself. “Options. I need options.”

She could take out a loan. Except she already had one, and she was unlikely to find anyone else willing to give her another at this point.

She could apply for grants. Except those took time to come through, and, honestly, by the end of a hard day on the farm, she couldn’t bring herself to look at the complicated forms and attachments that she needed to provide to get her hands on some money.

She could, she supposed, win the lottery. That would definitely work. Well, except for the part where she’d have to find the money to buy a ticket. Maybe if she scrounged down the back of the couch she might come up with fifty pee.

“Danni?” Tommy’s voice came from the doorway. He poked his head in, looking far too cheerful for someone who had spent the morning watching her descend into financial ruin.

“What?”

“Just checking to see that you haven’t topped yourself out of financial desperation,” he said. “Or finally decided to sell.”

She grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a used tea-bag, and lobbed it at him. Tommy ducked, laughing, and the tea-bag splatted on the wall behind him.

“I take it that’s a no, then?” he said.

“Get out of my house, Tommy. Make sure that hole under the chicken fence has been filled in and stomp it down well. Those bloody foxes think they’re digging their way out of Colditz.”

“I think that was Stalag-luft,” Tommy said doubtfully. “Colditz was a castle on a hill, wasn’t it?”

She glared at him.

“Alright, alright, I’m going.”

Danni sat back in her chair, staring at the ceiling, every crack of which belonged to her and her alone. Well, ninety percent of the cracks technically belonged to the bank, she supposed.

She didn’t need a miracle. She just needed a break. She wasn’t asking for a fortune. She was willing to work hard. She needed something, anything, to get her through this rough patch.

She had a terrible feeling that whatever was going to happen next was going to be dramatic.

Little did she know, she was absolutely right.

Chapter Three

Eleanor, in general, prided herself on being a calm and collected person. There was no need to make a fuss, as her grandmother had told her many times growing up. She didn’t like a fuss. She didn’t like mess. She liked… order. She liked things to be the way they should be.

Which was perhaps why today she wasn’t quite as calm and collected as she usually was. Having picked up the minimum of shopping from the local market, she was maneuvering her sleek MG down the winding country lane toward home, tapping her perfectly manicured fingers against the leather steering wheel, and running through the ever-growing list of problems in her life.

There were, unfortunately, quite a few.

Firstly, there were the renovations. Samson seemed competent enough, despite his predilection for calling her by the wrong title. But the whole endeavor still meant trusting her beloved house to a group of strangers. Would they really respect the centuries-old woodwork? Would they understand the delicate balance between restoration and ruination? Would they, God forbid, want to do outlandish things like install an open-plan kitchen?

She’d need to keep a close eye on matters.

Which brought her to her second worry of the day. Just where exactly she was supposed to be staying. Should she moveinto a hotel until the works were finished? The idea of living somewhere where breakfast arrived via buffet made her faintly uncomfortable. Plus, there were the additional costs. Not that she was particularly hurting for money at the moment, but who knew how long the renovations would really take?

She could hardly move in with her grandmother. But the alternative was to move through different rooms of the house as the renovations progressed. A solution that was messy, discombobulating, and would ruin her routines. Hardly satisfactory.

Then, underlying it all, was the marriage problem.

She had spent years ignoring the fact that she would need to marry. She was the only direct heir to the house. But that counted for nothing, as Isabella had frequently reminded her. In its long history, the house had been passed down to adopted sons and bastards, to distant cousins and foreign spouses. Exceptions would not be made for her.

Her grip tightened on the steering wheel. It was absurd that she had to marry just to inherit the home that was already, in every meaningful way, hers. She loved Brewster Manor with the kind of devotion that people typically reserved for pets or firstborn children. It wasn’t just a house. It was her history, her future, her entire identity wrapped up in stone and ivy.