Devil's Daughter (The Ravenels #5)(21)

Obligingly Mr. Ravenel launched into an anecdote of the time he’d visited a tenant farmer and rescued a runt piglet from being culled. Soon the attention of the entire table turned to him.

He was a gifted storyteller, drolly casting the piglet as a waif from a Dickens novel. After having rescued the newborn creature, he related, it had occurred to him that someone had to take care of it. Accordingly, he had brought it back to Eversby Priory and given it to Pandora and Cassandra. Over the objections of the rest of the family and the servants, the twins had adopted the piglet as a household pet.

As the creature grew older and considerably larger, Mr. Ravenel had been blamed for the multitude of problems it had caused.

“To make matters worse,” Pandora added, “we weren’t aware until it was too late that the pig should have been ‘altered’ while still in infancy. Sadly, he became too smelloquent to live inside.”

“Lady Trenear threatened to kill me every time she saw the pig trotting through the house with the dogs,” Mr. Ravenel said. “I didn’t dare turn my back to her for months.”

“I did try to push him down the stairs once or twice,” Kathleen admitted with a perfectly straight face, “but he was too large for me to gain sufficient leverage.”

“You also made colorful threats involving the fireplace poker,” Mr. Ravenel reminded her.

“No,” Kathleen retorted, “that was the housekeeper.”

The story continued its descent into farce as Mr. Winterborne volunteered that he’d stayed at Eversby Priory while recovering from eye injuries and hadn’t been told about the pig. “I heard it from my sickbed, and assumed it was another dog.”

“A dog?” Lord Trenear repeated from the head of the table, staring at his friend quizzically. “Did it sound like a dog to you?”

“Aye, with breathing problems.”

The group dissolved in hilarity.

Smiling, Phoebe glanced at Mr. Ravenel and found his gaze on her. A curious and inexplicable spell of intimacy seemed to have settled over them. Swiftly he turned his attention to an unused fruit knife near his plate, picking it up in one hand, scraping his thumb across the blade to test its sharpness.

Phoebe’s breath caught with concern. “No, don’t,” she said softly.

He smiled crookedly and set aside the knife. “A force of habit. Forgive my manners.”

“It wasn’t that. I was afraid you might cut yourself.”

“You needn’t worry. My hands are as tough as whitleather. When I first came to Eversby Priory—” He paused. “No. I said I wouldn’t talk about farming.”

“Oh, do go on. When you first came here . . . ?”

“I had to start visiting the tenants, which scared the wits out of me.”

“I should think they would have been more scared of you.”

A breath of amusement escaped him. “There are many things that scare farmers, but a pot-bellied, half-drunk buffoon from London isn’t one of them.”

Phoebe listened with a faint frown. She’d rarely, if ever, heard a man speak so unsparingly about himself.

“The first day,” Mr. Ravenel continued, “I was somewhat the worse for wear, having decided to stop living like a swill-tub. Sobriety didn’t agree with me. My head ached, I had all the balance of a toy sailboat, and I was in the devil’s own mood. The farmer, George Strickland, was willing to answer my questions about his farm as long as he could do it while working. He had to cut oats and bring them in before it rained. We went out to the field, where some men were scything and others were gathering and binding the cut stalks. A few were singing to keep everyone in rhythm. The oats were as high as my shoulder, and the smell was so good—sweet and clean. It was all so . . .” He shook his head, unable to find the right word, his gaze distant.

“Strickland showed me how to bind the stalks into sheaves,” he continued after a moment, “and I worked along the row while we talked. By the time I reached the end of the row, my entire life had changed. It was the first useful thing I’d ever done with my hands.” He smiled crookedly. “I had a gentleman’s hands, back then. Soft and manicured. They’re not nearly so pretty now.”

“Let me see them,” Phoebe said. The request sounded more intimate that she had intended. Heat crept up her throat and cheeks as he complied slowly, extending them a bit lower than the tabletop, palms down.

The noise all around them, the fastidious clatter of flatware against china, the shimmers of laughter and light conversation, receded until it seemed as if they were the only two people in the room. She looked down at his hands, sturdy and long-fingered, the nails filed until only the thinnest white crescents were visible at the fingertips. They were immaculately clean, but the tanned skin was a bit dry and roughened at the knuckles. There were a few small scars left from nicks and scrapes, and the last vestige of a dark bruise lingering beneath one thumbnail. As Phoebe tried to picture those capable hands being soft and manicured, she found it impossible.

No, they weren’t pretty. But they were beautiful.

She shocked herself by imagining how his hand might feel on her skin, rough-textured and gentle, with wicked knowledge in his fingertips. No, don’t think of it—

“An estate manager doesn’t usually have to work alongside the tenants, does he?” she managed to ask.