“Greetings, North.” Beck sat and tugged at his boots. “And yes, I am in need of a soak.”

“Maybe you didn’t get much rest this weekend,” North mused, “what with all that procurement to tend to?”

Beck threw his boot in the general direction of North’s voice.

“Cranky,” North observed, “but you’ve good aim. I take it Mrs. Hunt did not haul your ashes, Haddonfield, which must have come as a blow to your considerable charm.”

Beck fired the second boot at a higher velocity then nigh strangled himself getting his neckcloth undone. “She hauled everything I own or ever coveted, right out to the dung heap.”

“She’s trifling with an upright young sprout like you?” North put a world of dismay into his voice, and Beck was glad no lethal weapons were at hand.

“Stubble it, North.” Beck heard something rip as he yanked his shirt over his head. “I bloody proposed to the woman, and she bloody laughed and told me I mustn’t tease about such things on an empty stomach.”

Even North was temporarily silenced by that admission.

“You proposed?” Then, “You proposed marriage? The ‘do you, Beckman, take this woman…’ sort of marriage? To Sara?”

“That general idea.” Beck stood naked, fists clenched at his side, wanting to break something—or someone. North would have served nicely, except his back was already fragile. Then too, Beck, as usual, had no one else to talk to.

“Fast work, if you ask me.” North ambled out of the shadows, in a state of complete undress. “Maybe a little too fast. Shall we?”

“Why weren’t you already soaking?” Beck asked as he waded in. The heat felt good, but it made him realize how tense he was, how primed for violence.

“I come here to think.” North carefully negotiated the bank, and Beck could see well enough to realize the man was still moving gingerly. Very gingerly.

“You idiot,” Beck chided, “what did you do while I was gone? Patch up the west boundary wall by yourself?”

“You’ll see I did not when you ride out tomorrow and make sure the entire estate is exactly as you left it on Friday.” North eased one large foot into the water. “Now about this premature proposal you bungled so egregiously. I take it your manly charms were in adequate evidence to impress the lady?”

Beck had to smile at North in an avuncular role, or perhaps at the fool who’d heed North’s advice. “You are going to diagnose my love life?”

“Somebody had better. Sara is a sensible lady, and sensible women don’t turn down proposals from toothsome lordly pups like yourself.”

“What are you?” Beck found the underwater ledge and lowered himself to it. “Five years my senior? Three?”

“I am millennia your senior in experience, as is evident by my ability to perceive you rushed your fences.”

“I married a woman I knew far less well than I do Sara.” Which did not refute North’s point.

“And how did that turn out?” North asked, finding a seat several feet away, where the water would not be as hot.

“Disastrously, for her, anyway.” And for him. In some ways, it turned out worse for him.

“Maybe Sara doesn’t think she merits a man of your station. I, for one, am hesitant to ask any woman to shackle herself to me, and you must allow I am not the worst creature to crawl across Creation.”

“Not quite. Our womenfolk like you, so you must have some endearing qualities. In deference to your sensitive nature, I will refrain from enumerating same, but minding your sore back is not one of them.”

“A sore back will heal. A botched proposal will lie there, dying by inches, unless you revive it.”

“Or put it out of its misery. I cannot fathom why she turned me down, North. I am a toothsome lordly pup, for all she knows, and the next thing to an earl’s heir.”

North shifted to sink lower in the water. “You want to see a woman fidget, you ask her a question beginning with ‘Why did you…?’ Shuts her up faster than a loud fart in the churchyard.”

He fell silent, while Beck began to think rather than simply rant.

“I’m wealthy,” he said. “Not just comfortable, North. I’ve filthy, leaking pots of it, more than I could spend on three wives.”

“And the great good taste to keep this vulgar state of affairs to yourself.” North grunted as he shifted under the water.

“I’m not ugly.”

North sighed, as if finding a more comfortable position—or tolerating another man’s brokenhearted maundering. “I will allow you your petty conceits regarding your appearance, which is passable.”

“I have all my teeth.”

No comment.

“She’s says I’m kind, and I get on with Allie.”

“Allie is a tolerant little soul. Witness: she likes me.”

“Adores you and your horse, at least one of whom is passably good-looking.”

“A female of discernment.”

Beck swirled his hand through the steam rising from the pool. “I wonder if it’s not so much that Sara won’t marry me, and more that something impedes her from choosing freely.”

North was silent for a few heartbeats. “Haddonfield, you have your moments of inspiration, few though they are in number. Did you bring your nancy soap?”

“My future is imperiled here, and you want to scrub up?”

“I fail to see how your love life, as you call some pretensions toward romping, will benefit by my eschewing a good wash. I can be both sympathetic and clean. How much do you know about Sara’s first marriage?”

“I know Reynard was a cad who exploited her shamelessly,” Beck said slowly. “He was selfish in all the ways that matter—every one of them—and she hasn’t said it, but she was relieved when he died.” For which, Beck of all people did not blame her.

North shrugged in the water, causing concentric ripples to fan away from him. “Maybe she’s just reluctant to remarry. Were you going to get that soap?”

Beck rose in a shower of steaming water. “You don’t have to dissemble with me, your enfeebled lordship. I watched you try to navigate that bank.”

“I don’t want to go sailing onto my arse when I’m naked as the day I was born, and have only you to lend assistance.”

“Idiot.” Beck slogged to the bank, retrieved the soap, and lobbed it across the water at North. “Your back is killing you, and you are afraid if you fall, you won’t get up.”

There was silence from the water, perhaps because North was as appalled as Beckman himself at this bald pronouncement.

“Not killing me, precisely.” North put the soap to use on one muscular arm. “But muttering threats to that effect. I might have overdone it a bit riding into town on Saturday.”

“On horseback,” Beck pressed, rejoining him in the water, “or did you for once show a little common sense and take the wagon?”

Another silence.

“If it wouldn’t threaten you with permanent lameness, I’d thrash the daylights out of you, North. What can you be thinking?”

“Well… as to that.” North swished around in the water to rinse. “I wasn’t really thinking.”

“Oh?”

“No, I was not. Soap?”

Beck swiped it out of his hand and began scrubbing vigorously. “Did something rob you of your feeble wits?”

“Someone.” North’s teeth gleamed as he smiled wistfully in the dark.

“Hauled your ashes, did she?” Beck paused to smile back at him, relieved at least somebody had enjoyed their weekend—more like two somebodies.

“Not quite.” North’s smile faded. “But she appended a little lecture to our dealings, you see, and I was disconcerted to be told I needn’t be proposing, for she’d turn me down flat were I to wax inconveniently chivalrous. I’m well suited to a little rustic diversion, but not the kind of man who need offer marriage. I believe this rejection was offered in an attempt to encourage my dishonorable attentions on future occasions.”

He shut Beck up for about five long seconds, because a speech of that length from North required pondering.

“Sorry, North.” Beck pitched the soap onto the bank. “You didn’t even get to propose before she was handing you your boots.”

“Rather puts your situation in perspective.”

“Women.” It was said in unison, part prayer, part curse, and all bewilderment.

* * *

“I think North’s back is finally improving,” Sara said as she helped Polly with the last of the tidying up after supper.

“It should have taken days, not weeks.” Polly blew a strand of hair out of her eyes. “He is the most stubborn man I’ve ever met, and if it were getting cooler, not warmer, I doubt his back would be healing at even this rate. Shall we have a cup of tea?”

“We shall not. I’m going to tuck Allie in, and then get the laundry handed around.”

“Wasn’t Allie supposed to do that?”

“She did the chickens for me instead. I don’t think she’s cut out to be a housekeeper. She will always choose the outdoor task over the indoor task.”

“You’re outside plenty.” Polly rinsed out a washcloth, and started going over the counters one last time while Sara did the same with the table.

“I am, but if I were keeping house in a less rural setting, say in Bath or York, I’d be a creature of the house, and the maids and footmen would be the ones beating the rugs and so on.”

“And are you thinking Bath or York might bear consideration?”

She was. With a third polite, ominous letter from Tremaine, Sara was indeed thinking of housekeeping elsewhere. Sara glanced at Polly over her shoulder and saw her sister expected an answer.

“When did you get so perceptive, little Polonaise?”

“When I turned sixteen. I do not want to leave here, Sara. The place is just coming to life, and Allie is comfortable here.”