She smiled, stepping closer and placing her hand on the horse’s wet snout. Samson was a pretty beast with wide, ponderous eyes and a few splotches of gray around his nose. The soft puff of air Samson snorted into her palm brought a delighted smile to her lips, and she gasped as he bowed his neck to nuzzle his nose against her stomach. She felt her smile leap into a grin. It was a delightful change, to feel joy so deep it finally showed.
    Barric circled around Samson to stand beside her, his hands never leaving the reins. “He’s fond of you,” he remarked as Samson dropped his snout against her hip.
    “Unsurprising, I suppose. Though he could also be searching you for a carrot.”
    Surprised to hear Lord Barric speak so teasingly, and pleased by the gentle light she found in his otherwise tired eyes, Rena laughed her faint agreement. “That will teach me to come empty-handed, won’t it?”
    Their smiles both dropped as a young, lanky stable hand came rushing out to take Samson, and Barric relinquished his hold on the reins, nodding his silent thanks.
    As soon as the stable boy had disappeared with Samson, Barric glanced back at Rena. “Are you going home?” he asked, nodding toward the dusty road looping down the hill to William’s house.
    She stepped back, realizing she had dawdled longer than she’d first intended. “Yes,” she answered. “I often come this way to avoid the other workers.”
    “Might I walk with you?” He turned to hang his whip on a peg. “Just a short stretch of the road?”
    Stunned by his request, and a bit suspicious of his motive, she nonetheless nodded. “Yes, of course.”
    Barric drew up beside her, his even strides betraying no unease, though he was silent for some time as they made their way down the golden-colored hill.
    “You have seemed tired these past few days,” he observed. Rena did not bother to deny it. She’d been working hard to keep up with the others, as Barric had told her she must, and felt wearier for it. She had tried to split her days in half, the mornings spent binding sheaves with the women and the afternoons spent picking for her own stores, but the work was backbreaking, and, as he had already pointed out once before, she was not used to hard labor. “I realize I haven’t really asked you how you are settling in,” he went on.
    “Perhaps you’ve been too busy provoking me,” she answered before she could stop herself.
    Barric’s eyebrow inched up as he slanted an approving smirk down at her. “Perhaps.”
    Rena cursed her honest tongue. She must have been more tired than she thought, to speak so freely to a man of title. “I have been well,” she tried again, a bit more diplomatically. “The house suits us, if that is what you are asking.”
    “The people here do not speak to you unkindly?”
    “The people do not speak to me at all.” She had meant to sound casual, unaffected, but heard the hurt in her own voice she hadn’t been able to weed out. As Barric’s expression tightened, she hastened to amend, “Except for you, my lord. Of course. And the Wilmots.”
    “They are good people,” he agreed quietly. “And will you be coming with them to the festival this evening?”
    She hesitated. According to Alice, harvest home was a yearly tra¬dition, a night of raucous drinking and dancing to celebrate the close of the harvest. All of Abbotsville would be there—landowners, stewards, even tenant farmers and common laborers. But Rena was none of those things, and she and Barric both knew it.
    “Come,” Barric teased, “do not tell me you are afraid to go. I would never have thought it of you.”
    “I am not afraid,” she insisted. “I just had not thought about it.”
    At her defensive tone, he smiled—a true smile—one that pinched the corners of his eyes and pressed grooves along the outer edges of his mouth. “You ought to come,” he decided. “Everyone in Abbotsville is welcome, and many are the men who would feel lucky to dance with you.”
    But, of course, Lord Barric knew this was not true. The men in his fields regarded her mostly with contempt and made no secret of it—they would not count themselves at all lucky to dance with her. Was Lord Barric trying to offer her words of comfort? Or was he trying to convey a message?
    Did he want to dance with her?
    This was hardly a safe question, and so she asked another. “Do you dance, Lord Barric?”
    When he met her gaze, so direct, she was all the more glad she had not stammered in her reply. The man walked a dangerous line whenever he deigned to speak to her. Far too close, she’d think, and then stern enough to cool her blood with a word.
    He surprised her with another smile, this one a faint twist at the corner of his lips. “Perhaps you would have to come to find out.”