At least with the wind gone, there was a little more signal for phones. After checking in with Adelaide and Evangeline, I’d learned that they’d made it out for their rescue mission just in time. The stream that wound through their land had burst its banks, flooding the only dirt road leading to the Fox and Hound Hotel.

That did not bode well for the rest of the village.

Thankfully, in such technologically centred times such as ours, there was an app for that.

Not all the roads were flooded—just the main one up to Arrowwood Estate, the road to the hotel, and some other minor areas in the village. A few shops near the river had taken minor damage, but the owners had enough sense to move their goods to higher ground, so their damage was minimal.

And for that, I was very grateful.

Aside from that, people had been displaced from their homes. The houses and cottages on low ground had taken a battering from the weather, and since the rain didn’t show many signs of letting up, there wasn’t a lot that could be done.

The only bright side was that nobody had been hurt or killed. That wasn’t unheard of in our storms, but it seemed as though everyone had been preventative as opposed to reactive in this occasion.

That didn’t calm Miles much, though.

“Are you sure they have enough food?”

“Yes,” I replied for the third time. “The hotel is run by my best friends, and I’ve known them my entire life. There’s no way Lady Vic would allow that place to be anything less than perfect.”

“Lady Vic? Beckham?”

I choked back a laugh. “No! Since when was she a Lady?”

He shrugged. “Thought David might have had his knighthood by now.”

“Not according to the media,” I retorted, hiding another laugh. “Lady Victoria Montgomery.”

“Your Lady or another kind of lady?”

“Mine, I guess.” I paused. “Her father is a Duke but she married a, um…” I trailed off. I hated the word commoner.

Trust me.

I’d seen some titled, fancy, upper-class people do some common as hell stuff, so the word just seemed horribly inappropriate.

“Commoner,” Miles said after a moment. “She married a working-class guy.”

“Yeah,” I replied slowly. “I hate that word. It seems so unnecessary.”

“How so?”

“Commoner? Really? In this age? Must we use it as an insult to people in a different position in life than ourselves?”

“All due respect, princess, you really don’t get it, do you?”

I was a hot second away from yelling at him about calling me that bloody nickname when I paused.

There was…something about the way he looked at me.

An earnest look in his eye. A genuine tilt of the head as he questioned me. An honest query that made me stop and stare.

“Don’t get what?” I asked softly.

“The truly classist nature of British society.”

He said the words so matter of fact, I couldn’t help but stop.