She turned her head away to look at the hills. Servants— and really a land steward was just a superior sort of servant— should have no gender. Of course, one knew they were people with their own lives and all that, but it made things so much easier if one saw them as sexless. Like a chair. One wanted a chair to sit in when one was tired. No one ever thought about chairs much otherwise, and that was how it should be. How uncomfortable to go about wondering if the chair had noticed that one’s nose was running, wishing to know what it was thinking, or seeing that the chair had rather beautiful eyes. Not that chairs had eyes, beautiful or otherwise, but men did.

And Harry Pye did.

George faced him again. “What will we do with the third horse?”

“We’ll have to leave her here.”

“In the rain?”

“Yes.”

“That can’t be good for her.”

“No, my lady.” Harry Pye’s shoulders bunched again, a reaction that George found oddly fascinating. She wished she could make him do it more often.

“Perhaps we should take her with us?”

“Impossible, my lady.”

“Are you sure?”

The shoulders tensed and Mr. Pye slowly turned his head. In the flash of lightning that lit up the road in that instant, she saw his green eyes gleam and a thrill ran up her spine. Then the following thunder crashed like the heralding of the apocalypse.

George flinched.

Harry Pye straightened.

And the horses bolted.

“OH, DEAR,” SAID LADY GEORGINA, rain dripping from her narrow nose. “We seem to be in something of a fix.”

Something of a fix indeed. More like well and truly buggered. Harry squinted up the road where the horses had disappeared, running as if the Devil himself were chasing them. There was no sign of the daft beasts. At the rate they’d been galloping, they wouldn’t stop for half a mile or more. No use going after them in this downpour. He switched his gaze to his employer of less than six months. Lady Georgina’s aristocratic lips were blue, and the fur trimming the hood of her cloak had turned into a sopping mess. She looked more like an urchin in tattered finery than the daughter of an earl.

What was she doing here?