The Lord’s Highland Temptation

She peered at him a long time as if assessing his health for herself.

He’d not seen her since his attempted departure. She looked like a vision from some bucolic painting, tilling the soil.

‘What are you doing?’ he asked. But what he really meant was, Why are you working in the garden like a labourer?

She lowered her gaze and stabbed the earth with her hoe. ‘Oh, I am turning the earth to ready it for autumn planting.’

A baron’s daughter? ‘Why you, Miss Wallace? Do you have no gardeners?’

She blinked and could not quite meet his eyes. ‘There is only Kinley, but he cannot do it all.’ She raised her head and lifted her chin. ‘And we must have food, must we not?’

‘What about your footmen? Can they not help?’ Robert was a strong young man.

She attacked the ground again. ‘Robert and Erwin are proud of being footmen. It would be beneath them to work in the garden.’

He tilted his head. ‘But not beneath the baron’s daughter?’

Her face flushed. ‘I do not mind the work.’

‘Your brother, then.’ Niven had seemed an energetic youth.

‘Niven is not at home. He is visiting a friend.’

That seemed quite frivolous when there was so much to be done at home—most of it falling to Miss Wallace. Or, rather, most she took upon herself. It bothered Lucas to see her performing such hard labour. And it bothered him that her plight affected him at all.

It was none of his affair, he told himself.

‘I will leave you to it, then.’ He turned away and walked a few steps, but turned back to her, inclining his head towards a pond he’d glimpsed in the distance. ‘I thought I might walk to that pond.’

She stopped hoeing. ‘Are you certain you feel well enough?’

‘You need not worry about me, Miss Wallace.’

She had enough worries on her shoulders.

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