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She turned on her side and furrowed her brow. Only then did she catch sight of the dressing screen. She had thrown her dinner gown haphazardly over a chair and, thanks to the angle of the fire, the shadowed outline was clearly visible on this side of the screen.
Alec must have seen her changing.
She cut a glance toward him. His back was still to her as he looked over a map, but his entire frame radiated tension. Lottie’s gaze lingered over his form until she noticed the sizable bulge at the front of his trousers. She wasn’t exactly an innocent. Many of her friends had been married for years, and she hadn’t spent all that time in Florence looking at statues without learningsomethingabout the male anatomy. Alec was clearly aroused.
He, who had so easily stopped kissing her and seemed entirely uninterested in repeating it, had been thoroughly unnerved by her mereshadow.
Lottie rolled her lips between her teeth. She could not smile. Not atthat.
One big hand moved to rub the nape of his neck and he turned his head slightly toward her, but Lottie shut her eyes and pretended to be asleep.
In a few moments she drifted off to the image of Alec’s rattled expression.
Alec was used to sleeping in all sorts of odd, uncomfortable places, but it wasn’t the floor that kept him tossing and turning for most of the night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw Lottie. Five years keeping thoughts of her at bay, and now he couldn’t stop remembering their last encounter.
Lovely Lottie, nineteen and fresh out of finishing school, on the night of her coming out ball. Though most girls were eager to debut at seventeen or eighteen, she claimed the thought filled her with dread, so she had asked Sir Alfred to delay her own, and he had been happy to oblige her.
She and Alec had not seen one another since a brief visit at Christmas, as Sir Alfred had sent Alec to help with the excavation of a Roman ruin outside Edinburgh once he completed his master’s work. It had been a thinly disguised punishment for Alec’s reluctance to join the Foreign Office. Though he secretly harbored hopes to return to Oxford and become a history lecturer, Alec had dutifully gone to Scotland as a kind of mea culpa. Yet when the opportunity arose to escape the dig for a day or two, he didn’t think twice. Not even the threat of invoking his guardian’s legendary ire could keep him from this.
In their letters, Lottie admitted to feeling nervous at the prospect of waltzing in public:You know what a tomboy I always was. Now I can’t help but worry I’ll step on a gentleman’s toe or turn the wrong way.
Alec wrote back that he had complete faith in her abilities but promised to waltz with her himself one day:I’ll gladly sacrifice a toe for the honor.
So of course he would take the train down from Edinburgh.
Of course he would buy a new pair of evening gloves, both expensive and impractical.
Of course he would surprise her.
She was his oldest friend. A sister, really.
Except his friends didn’t seem to cherish letters from their own sisters, half of which were written in ciphers they created, or talk about them quite so much. Alec had never noticed how often he mentioned Lottie until another fellow on the dig made a crack about apron strings. Alec asked if he wanted to settle it outside. He didn’t, but Alec made sure never to mention Lottie again, either.
Lottie was his secret. His safe space. His home.
And he would never do anything to jeopardize that.
When Alec arrived at Sir Alfred’s grand town house in South Kensington, rather than have the hackney cab pull up alongside some of the finest carriages in the empire, Alec requested to be dropped off across the street. He had learned long ago how to navigate these upper echelons—smiling through the subtle jabs, laughing at his own expense first and loudest, showing that he knew he wasn’t one of them and didn’t particularly care. It was true most of the time. And much easier when he wasn’t surrounded by the wealth and status he would never possess.
He watched as fashionably late guests entered the stately home just in time for the dancing to begin before looking toward the darkened landscape of Hyde Park close by. He and Lottie had mostly been together at Haverford, the Lewis family seat in Surrey. But on the rare occasions when they both weren’t away at school and found themselves in London, they had spent drowsy afternoons wandering around the park with picnic baskets and one of Lottie’s hawk-eyed governesses.
A kind of wistfulness came over him as he stood there in the shadows, listening to the easy laughter floating across the road. The men’s freshly polished shoes glinted in the gaslight while they escorted women in glittering gowns that cost more than most people’s annual salaries. Alec’s own evening suit was in excellent condition, but it was also four years out of fashion, and someone was sure to remark upon it at some point this evening. As with everything else of quality he possessed, it had been given to him by Sir Alfred. Alec took a deep breath and unclenched his fist. “Remember why you’re here,” he muttered. Then, before he could lose his nerve entirely, he set off across the street, but instead of joining the increasingly long line of guests at the front entrance, he headed toward the back of the house.
The kitchen was a madhouse, with servants rushing back and forth as Mrs. Houston barked orders. She traveled between London and Surrey at Sir Alfred’s insistence, and was considered one of the most exacting housekeepers in the city. Many had attempted to lure her to their own households over the years, but Mrs. Houston turned them all down.
As soon as she spotted Alec, her commanding expression melted into a heart-stopping smile. She gave a few more directions to a footman, then came over. “Oh, it’s such a treat to see you here, Alec,” she said as she grasped his hands. She still retained a soft lilt from a childhood spent in Ireland’s West Country, and her doe-brown eyes glistened with genuine warmth as she took him in. “My goodness, how handsome you look!”
Alec couldn’t help blushing at the compliment and glanced down at the remarkably spotless floor. “Commanding the troops, I see. Don’t go too hard on them now,” he teased.
Mrs. Houston threw back her head and laughed. “Oh, they’re useless. The lot of them,” she said with a wave of her hand. “But it will do for tonight.”
She had been a great beauty once, and was handsome still, yet she had never married, preferring instead to dedicate her life to Sir Alfred. Alec had never given it much thought when he was younger, but now he suspected something far greater than money had kept her in the Lewis household all these years.
“And Miss Lottie will be so pleased you’ve come,” she added, watching him carefully.
Mrs. Houston had been a sort of motherly figure to both Lottie and himself. Back in Surrey they had often spent rainy afternoons in front of the hearth in her sitting room, sharing cups of milky tea and listening to stories of her wild Irish childhood. Alec could nearly taste the shortbread she always served.
He swallowed past the tightness in his throat and forced a smile. “I noticed quite the well-heeled crowd outside. No doubt she’s too busy dancing with a duke to pay me any mind.”
