“I do prefer yours,” she said, as capable as she always was to keep a discussion between them going with only herself doing the contributing. “They are . . . interesting. They are real.” She looked up. “Do you think other gentlemen’s hands are like yours?” she asked curiously.

“I . . . don’t know. I’d wager not.” Those he’d kept company with had played cards, sipped brandies, with the largest extent of their physical activity being the rounds they’d gone against Gentleman Jackson and riding their mounts. “I would say most respectable gentlemen aren’t chopping their own wood or setting their own fires or doing anything that would leave their hands callused.” Like his.

“That is . . . unfortunate.” Her eyes grew sad, and at that pitying glimmer, Val stiffened. His whole body tensed as he was hit with an onslaught of . . . regret that he wasn’t the same man of his past. “I’m to have my Season,” she said, confounding him with that unexpected shift. “And it is of course expected that I’ll make a match, and I’ll likely find myself married to a man with soft hands who knows absolutely nothing about starting fires or doing anything with them.”

Images paraded through his mind, a great kaleidoscope of scenes all playing out one by one in his head in rapid succession: a glowing Myrtle making her debut. A team of suitors converging upon her to sign a dance card. Those same nameless, faceless strangers dancing with her.

“Val?” Her voice emerged haltingly, and there was a question there that snapped him back from insidious musings of Myrtle with another.

He drew his hands back, and this time she did not resist him. “You want a gentleman with hardened hands?” he asked incredulously as the meaning of her regret slammed into him.

A wry grin danced on the edges of her mouth. “Well, I certainly don’t want one with lily-white, soft ones,” she said dryly.

She’d not been pitying him before, but rather lamenting the gentlemen whose paths she’d eventually cross.

“Shall we?” she asked, even as she all but skipped over to the table.

A small iced white cake sat in the middle of the wooden servants’ dining table. Yet the confectionary treat was sizable enough to feed a family of at least five.

“You carried that by yourself?” he asked roughly as he joined her at the table.

“No.” She didn’t stop, flitting about the kitchen, and he followed her with his gaze, her quick, darting movements putting him in mind of a butterfly hopping from bud to bud in the summertime. “I summoned the servants back so that they might fetch it for me.”

Val stiffened and whipped his gaze about.

Myrtle laughed. “I’m jesting, Val. I fetched it myself, of course.” With that she headed over to a cabinet and fished around, muttering to herself as she searched cabinet after cabinet. “Where are they? Where are they?”