Undoing of a Lady by Nicola Cornick

Fortune’s Folly before Alice was wed. He had never asked her to dance, of course. He was a farmer and she was a lady and it would not have been suitable, despite the fact that his sister had inherited a fortune and gone on to marry a lord.
    Flora watched idly as Lowell and his men worked the field, cutting the hay. Lowell was as fair as Alice, and deeply tanned from so much time spent in the outdoors. There was a fluid strength about the movement of his body, a supple smoothness in the way that he bent and used the scythe. Flora could see the muscles in his arms cording as he worked methodically down the field. He led his farmhands by example, she thought. He was not the sort of employer who sat watching whilst other men toiled.
    Lowell straightened and pushed the fair hair back from his brow. He raised a stone flask to his lips and drank deep, his throat moving as he swallowed. Then he let the hand holding the flask drop to his side and looked straight at Flora. His eyes were the same deep blue as the summer sky. Flora’s heart skipped a beat. Suddenly she felt very, very hot indeed.
    He started to walk slowly toward her. A sort of panic rose in Flora’s chest and she scrambled to her feet, catching her skirts on the sharp stone, and hearing something rip. She slid down onto the track and hurried away down the path toward the village without a word. She could sense that Lowell was still watching her—every fiber in her body told her it was so—and after she had gone some twenty paces she turned to look back. He was standing by the wall and in his fingers was a scrap of yellow muslin torn from her gown.
    “Wait!” he said.
    Flora hesitated. Lowell came down the line of the wall and when he had almost reached her he jumped over in one lithe movement and was standing beside her before she had barely time to draw breath. He seemed so vibrant and alive, so different from any man that she had ever known, that her senses were stunned for a moment. She could smell the grass and the sun on him and when he smiled at her she felt her heart lurch strangely in her chest.
    “It’s a hot day to be walking up on the hills,” he said. He had more than a hint of the local accent in his voice. Unlike his mother and sister he had never erased it. “Would you like a drink?” He held out the flask.
    Flora took it from him and looked at it dubiously. After a moment Lowell laughed and unstoppered it for her and passed it back. She placed her lips where his had been and drank deeply. The liquid was cold and deliciously refreshing and tasted of apples. She swallowed some more and saw that he was watching her with the laughter still lurking in his eyes. She felt self-conscious then and passed the bottle back to him, wondering if she should have wiped the neck first.
    “Thank you,” she said.
    “Miss Minchin, isn’t it?” Lowell said. “Flora?”
    She liked the way that he said her name. It sounded very pretty.
    She nodded. “You are Lowell Lister.”
    He sketched an ironic bow. “What are you doing up here alone, Flora?” he said.
    “I wanted to think,” Flora said. She was starting to feel rather odd. The sun was filtering through the green leaves of the ash tree beside the wall and dancing in patterns across her eyelids. She wanted to sit down and rest her heavy head against the solid trunk. She looked suspiciously at the flask that was still in Lowell’s hand.
    “Is…Is that…cider?” She had heard that cider was dangerous.
    Lowell smiled. “It is. Would you like some more?”
    “No, thank you,” Flora said. “You should have stopped me. Cider isn’t a suitable beverage for a lady.”
    Lowell laughed. “Why should I stop you? Can’t you decide for yourself what it is that you want?”
    Flora looked at him. His eyes were the deepest blue but flecked with specks of green and gold and fringed with the blackest lashes.
    “Of course I can decide,” she said, offended. She sat down on the bank. “I canceled my