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“Don’t be silly.” Miss Travers leaned sideways to give the fractious Hercules’s ears a stroke and he calmed instantly.

“She has a perpetual list of requests. Some of them necessary, the other half nebulous, and at least a quarter, wholly unreasonable—but I like the challenge. She likes to test me, and because I am ridiculously competitive by nature, I love to exceed her expectations.”

“Aunt Almeria has always been a hard taskmaster. Only she would send you miles and miles to Maidstone just for éclairs.”

She winced. “About that afternoon—”

He held up his palm, annoyed that he had inadvertently injected some awkwardness into their pleasant exchange.

“There is nothing to explain. It was none of my business and I should have added that to my apology the other day. Who you choose to… um…” Why the blazes had he brought bloody Maidstone up?

Latent jealousy? Futile hope? Pointless when his relationship with Miss Travers was blessedly transient.

“… spend time with has nothing to do with me.”

“The man you saw me with—Dan—”

“Oh, Mr. Handsome is called Dan, is he?” The curt note of sarcasm in his tone was unconscious, so he tempered it with a chuckle in case she thought he was jealous of her Adonis.

Which, much to his chagrin, he was. Enough that the invisible storm cloud over his head rumbled with thunder.

“You must know him very well to be on first-name terms.”

“Daniel is my brother.” She was too focused on steering Juno around a molehill to notice his visible relief at that.

“One of them, anyway. Because the universe clearly wanted to punish me, so it gave me four of them. All older and all beyond irritating. Dan is the youngest and the closest to me in age. Only one year separates us, so, yes—I do know him very well. Sadly.”

“Ah.” Guy tried to mask how overjoyed he was at that welcome revelation. “Then we must add me making improper assumptions to the list of things I’ve not reacted well to. My apologies again for jumping to conclusions.”

By the emphatic shake of her head, Miss Travers made it plain she wasn’t going to accept it.

“I should have explained when you queried it and told you that your aunt knew I was going to briefly visit my family that afternoon. They are dealing with”—her eyes clouded briefly before she forced those clouds away—“some difficult things at the moment and so I bought them the cakes you saw me with to cheer them up.” Her gaze flicked to his, contrite.

“They live just a few miles from Maidstone. In Aylesford, actually. But rather than correct your misapprehension, I was curt and rude to you, and I shouldn’t have been. ”

“Yes, you jolly well should have.” If she could be humble in her honesty, so could he. “I was typically rude and ungentlemanly, had unfairly besmirched your character, and had as good as accused you of impropriety. Therefore, I thoroughly deserved to be put in my place.”

“That is very decent of you—even if impropriety is my middle name.” She sent him a grateful smile that quickly morphed into one of mischief. “Please desist being decent or I might have to like you, Lord Wennington, and that wouldn’t do at all.”

She liked him? How… marvelous. “Am I allowed to ask what sort of difficult things your family is dealing with at the moment, or is that another impertinent invasion of your privacy?”

“They are farmers and, as I am sure you know, farming isn’t always easy.”

“Is that the mind-your-own-business answer, Miss Travers?”

“It was actually the I-won’t-bore-you-with-the-details answer, Lord Wennington. Unless you have a burning desire to hear a tale of woe about persistent blight, that is.”

“Blight can be a blighter.” Before she did, he rolled his own eyes at that pathetic pun. “How persistent is it?”

“It first reared its ugly head three years ago and ruined a third of the wheat crop. My father left the infected field fallow for twelve months, hoping that would sort it, but it didn’t.

This year, it decimated the entire barley crop.

” As if he wouldn’t understand how devastating that was, she sighed.

“We don’t have infinite land or infinite resources, so the loss of both the crop and that field for the foreseeable future is a blow. ”

“I am sorry.” And he was. Farming was hard and those with smallholdings suffered the most. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“ No! No, of course not but thank you for offering.” He hadn’t meant to embarrass her but could tell he had. “We can manage.”

As it wasn’t his place to press the issue, Guy racked his brains for something else to talk about in the five minutes they had left before their loop was completed. But it was Miss Travers who filled the void.

“By ‘we,’ I actually mean my menfolk because my father is too stubborn and overprotective to include me in his plans. If Dan hadn’t written, then I wouldn’t even know that they were struggling and I wouldn’t be able to give them my wages to help.

” An admission that touched him and bothered him in equal measure.

“Not that my father yet knows that Dan took my money, of course, as he’d have returned it with a lecture.

He would rather starve than bother me with our family’s collective woes.

Never mind that I want to help—and can. Honestly! Why are men so… idiotic?”

“We prefer the term ‘proud’ when we are being insufferable.”

“Even though pride always comes before a fall? It is exasperating to have to go to all the lengths we women must go to in order to circumvent that collective obstinacy and get them to see reason.” For the first time since he had known her, her confident, bold, effervescent ray-of-sunshine facade slipped and he witnessed how burdened she was beneath it.

“And it is so frustrating to be left out of things simply because my family thinks that they know best. Because surely there is something that they haven’t thought of that could prevent my pigheaded father from having to sell half our dairy herd to the butcher?

That is just robbing Peter to pay Paul when their milk is worth more in the long run than the beef. ”

Guy couldn’t argue with any of her logic because she wasn’t wrong. But commiserating wouldn’t help. “There are many new ideas for all manner of pests detailed in the farming journals. Does he subscribe to those? What else has he tried beyond leaving the infected field fallow?”

She shrugged, exasperated, as the paddock came back into view. “All I know comes from the snippets Dan deigns to share with me and even he tends toward overprotectiveness too if the mood strikes him.”

“But if I could find a newfangled treatment that they haven’t tried in one of my journals, Dan would be able to convince your father to give it a go?”

“I suppose so. Dan is a man, after all, and so are you. In this world of men, that seems to be the single qualification a person needs to be taken seriously.” She huffed out her irritation to offer him a wry smile. “Good heavens above, now I sound like Portia.”

“Who is Portia?”

“A friend. One so outspoken she makes me look like a shrinking violet.”

Guy pulled a face of disbelief and she giggled.

“A fair point. I am more a gaudy sunflower than a shrinking violet.” Then a very different expression softened her features.

“But despite your rudeness in pointing that out, thank you for allowing me to vent and for trying to help when none of this is your problem. The Travers clan are no strangers to adversity, and we always manage to overcome them. I apologize if my outburst just spoiled what has been, up to now, a very lovely ride.”

“I meant what I said. I will try to find something.” In this precise moment, he was prepared to slay dragons for her, so hunting through over a hundred journals was the least he could do.

“It really is no trouble. In fact, it gives me an excuse to escape that tedious hour after dinner while my mother castigates me for ruining her life because I have curtailed all her hideous plans for my birthday.”

Her golden brows kissed as she frowned. “A birthday celebration planned with love isn’t hideous, my lord.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her to call him Guy. “I’d honestly rather stick pins in my eyes than suffer through the small gathering I have condoned, let alone the sort my mother would have thrown given half the chance.”

“Suffer?” She brushed that away. “It will be fun. You’ll see.”

“It might be fun for someone like you who is comfortable in your skin around others, but I loathe being the center of attention.” Why had he admitted to that last part?

Now he sounded pitiful. Socially inept and out of his depth in front of a woman who was neither but who he was still, pathetically, keen to impress.

The only way out was to make a joke out of it.

“A dull, serious, and curmudgeonly storm cloud like me would much rather read about blight. And who knows, I might find something useful.”

Her smile was unconvincing. “I cannot deny that a miracle, sometime around now, would be welcome.”

“Wouldn’t it?” But as he gazed at her, he was starting to wonder if one had already happened. Because there was an odd stirring in his wary, shriveled heart, and much to his surprise, it didn’t completely terrify him.