“I dunno.” He stacked one crate on another, then a third, and picked them all up like they were nothing. “I’ll tell you what I didn’t like—Poldark.”

“Really? I figured you’d relate to old Ross Poldark.”

He snorted, setting the crates down with a thunk. “Please. That guy’s a douchebag. The second he cheated on Demelza with Elizabeth, I was out. I played Candy Crush and half-listened to Mom fume through the rest of the seasons.”

One of my brows rose as I picked up one measly crate, which might as well have been a sack of bricks. “Look at that—Luke Bennet, the monogamist.”

“Elizabeth married some other dude instead of waiting for him to come back from the war!” he shot.

“She thought he was dead,” I argued.

He was mad, actually mad about it. “Fuck her. If she’d really loved him, she would have waited. And instead of writing her off for being the cold bitch she was, he pined after her like a teenager, even after he was married.” He made a noise. “Stupid asshole. Demelza gave him everything, that ungrateful shit.”

My amusement bubbled out of me by the way of my laughter, which surged when he aimed a solid pout at me.

“I’m not wrong,” he said petulantly.

“No,” I said around a laugh. “You’re not wrong.”

“Then what’s so funny?”

My mouth opened, looking for words as I moved another crate. “I’m just surprised is all.”

His arms folded, this time making him look like Paul Bunyan, with tree-trunk arms and brawny shoulders as he looked down at me. “That I watch historicals?”

“No, that you disapprove of him cheating on her.”

Oh, how his frown deepened, forming an expression of betrayal. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I hedged, suddenly unsure of myself, “only that … well, I just didn’t think you were one to attach emotions to sex.”

“That is mighty presumptuous of you, Tess.”

“It’s just that you seem to really enjoy women,” I clarified, avoiding his eyes by keeping myself in motion.

“Sure, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them.” He picked up another stack of crates and loaded them a little harder than necessary. “If I’d nearly died in war and come home to find the girl I loved married to someone else—my dickface cousin named Francis, no less—I’d have been broken. But I would have gone on. Because if she’d loved me, she would have waited. And if I’d found someone who loved me like Demelza, I wouldn’t have looked back.”

I watched him stack the last crates with that pout still on his face, unable to reconcile the man who watched BBC with his mom and ranted about the love story and the guy I’d thought had zero regard for anyone’s feelings other than his own. Not that he did it on purpose. His head really was that far up his own ass.

Or so I’d thought.

“Well,” I started, grabbing a couple of buckets of flowers, “I’m with you. And when she punched him in his stupid slack jaw, I jumped off the couch and did a Herkie.”