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trouble of making it,” she said sharply, “I shall be sorry I bothered.”
    â€œIndeed, ma’am?” He raised his eyebrows. He had not had his fingers slapped for at least the past twenty years. “I shall pay you the compliment of returning the beef pie untouched after dinner, then, shall I?”
    She glared at him for a moment and then . . . dissolved into laughter.
    Lord, oh, Lord! Oh, devil take it! She suddenly looked very human indeed, and more than a little attractive.
    â€œIt
was
a foolish thing to say,” she admitted, humor still lighting her eyes and curving the corners of her lips upward so that he could see they were not nondescript at all. “Did you come in here to help? You may peel the potatoes.”
    He was still gawking at her like a smitten schoolboy. Then he heard the echo of her words.
    â€œPeel the
potatoes
?” He frowned. “How is that done?”
    She wiped her hands on her apron, disappeared into what he assumed was a pantry, and emerged with a pail of potatoes, which she set at his feet. She took a knife from a drawer and held it out, handle facing him.
    â€œPerhaps,” she said, “you are intelligent enough to work it out for yourself.”
    It was not nearly as easy as it looked. If he cut the peel too thickly so as to obtain a smooth, clean potato, he was also ending up with very small potatoes and a great mound of peelings. If he cut it too thinly, he had to waste another minute or so on each, digging out eyes and other assorted blemishes.
    His cook and all his kitchen staff would have an apoplexy apiece if they could see him now, he thought. So would his mother and sisters. His friends would not have an apoplexy, but they
would
be under the table by now, rolling around under there with mirth and holding their sides. Behold Viscount Sinclair, the consummate Corinthian, singing for his supper—or at least peeling potatoes for his dinner, which was even worse!
    At the same time he kept more than half an eye on Miss Frances Allard, who was lining a deep dish with the pastry, her slim hands and long fingers working deftly, and then filling the shell with the fragrant meat, vegetable, and gravy concoction that had been simmering over the fire, and finally covering the whole with a pastry lid, which she pressed into place all about the rim with the pad of her thumb and then pierced in several places with a fork.
    â€œWhy are you doing that?” he asked her, digging an eye out of a potato before pointing the knife at the pie. “Will the filling not all boil out?”
    â€œIf there were no outlet for the steam,” she explained, bending to put the pie into the oven, “the pastry lid would quite possibly blow off and we would be scraping half of both it and the pie’s contents off the roof of the oven and onto our plates. Onto
your
plate, I should say. I would have whatever was left in the dish.”
    And speaking of lids blowing off . . .
    She probably had no idea what an enticing picture she presented as she bent over the oven, her derriere nicely rounded against the fabric of her dress—proof positive that she was certainly not unshapely. She certainly had not gone out of her way to entice him since they had met. Indeed, her very first words to him, if he remembered correctly, were that he deserved to be subjected to any number of ghastly terminal tortures.
    But there—he had just been proved wrong again. First she had seemed shrewish and prunish. Then she had appeared gorgeous but unappealing. Now he was feeling as if the top of his head might blow off at any moment.
    â€œHave I peeled enough potatoes to please you?” he asked irritably.
    She straightened up and looked, her head cocked a little to one side.
    â€œUnless each of you men eats enough for a whole regiment instead of just half, yes,” she said. “This is the first time you have done this, I suppose?”
    â€œStrangely, Miss