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“Yes,” she murmured and continued to stare at the horizon: golden hills and blue sky streaked with clouds she still hadn’t mastered. “I suppose it is.”
So. It had been a man after all.
Alec had been prepared for this ever since Florence, and yet the force of his disappointment was still crushing. He checked the instinct to reach for Lottie. He had forgotten how powerful that old urge was. No, that wasn’t true…he hadn’t forgotten. It had been deliberate. An act of self-preservation.
Though she sat mere inches from him, it might as well have been an ocean. She looked so forlorn, so utterly alone, that it rattled something deep within him. A long-neglected corner he had locked up ages ago. And for good reason.
But she wouldn’t want anything he could offer, least of all his sympathies. Alec was merely a forgotten relic from girlhood. Not the man she was obviously still pining for—and had clearly been dreaming of that morning. Even a man with hissuperior deductive reasoningknew that. So Alec settled for gripping his knee instead. Hopefully the marks wouldn’t be as deep as the ones he left on his thigh yesterday. When she was safely back in London, he would hunt down the bastard that broke her heart. No matter how long it took, Alec would find him and make him pay.
“And what of your life?” she began, thankfully rescuing him from those murderous thoughts. Her voice was steadier now that she wasn’t speaking of her negligent suitor. “Have you spent this whole time as a Venetian professor?”
“Only for the past two years. Before that I was mostly traveling—Greece, Egypt, a long stretch in Turkey; but Venice…” Alec paused and absently rubbed his scarred shoulder. “Venice always felt the most like home.”
His permanent station in the city was also Sir Alfred’s way of apologizing after nearly getting him killed in Turkey.
“That’s understandable, considering you—” Lottie paused when he met her eyes. She seemed startled by her own words. “You lived there before, I mean.”
It was only the second time Lottie admitted to remembering something about him. Admitted that they had once been so much more. A torturous spark flared in his chest. One that felt dangerously close to hope. Alec could think of nothing to say beyond a stilted “Yes.”
His earliest years had passed quite happily in Venice, until his parents separated. Alec still didn’t know what led his mother to desert them so suddenly. All he could remember was receiving a brief, teary-eyed hug from her one morning and later finding his father well into his cups.
She’s left us, boy. We aren’t enough for her, he’d mumbled.Our love isn’t enough.
Alec was devastated, but his father was in no state to offer any comfort. Edward Gresham was too wrapped up in his own grief and hadn’t been sober since she left. His clever, creative, funny father had been replaced with a ghostly shell of a man. One who drank day and night, and who couldn’t bear the sight of his own child, for fear of seeing even a shadow of his lost love. Within the year he would go to the grave nearly penniless, and Alec was told of his mother’s death a few weeks later. After that, young Alec had been carted between distant relations of his mother who wanted nothing to do with him until, strangely, Sir Alfred, an old school friend of his father’s, agreed to take him in.
Even to this day, Alec had no idea what possessed the man to do it. He could no longer tell if it had been the greatest blessing of his life, or if he was paying for the many sins of his parents.
“Do you like it?”
The question pulled him from his tangled thoughts. “Like what?”
Lottie arched an auburn brow, as if he was terribly slow. “Teaching.”
“Right.” He gave himself a shake. “Yes, I do. It’s nice to have a bit of purpose. To feel like I’m helping people.”
Her eyes lost some of their hardness. “Doesn’t your work for the Crown involve helping people?”
Alec shrugged. “Sometimes.” If he was lucky.
Espionage was an ugly business, and not one he ever would have chosen. But there was no need to bother her with his many regrets on that subject.
Lottie’s rosebud mouth parted slightly in surprise and immediately drew his gaze. Her lips seemed to tense under his observation. Nerves, maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s something else. Something more.
Alec had long prided himself on his ability to read people, women in particular, but he knew well before he set foot in Tuscany that he would never be able to read Lottie accurately anymore. There was too much history. Too much pain. His mind would see things it wanted to see, not what was truly there. Since the fateful morning when he had barged into Sir Alfred’s study and declared his intension to marry Lottie, Alec had learned to be cautious. To wait for the right moment. To uncover the right information. He credited this approach to his success in the field. Other men were far too cocksure, convinced of their own brilliance. But Alec tread carefully and he was rarely wrong.
“And what of living in Venice? Do you like that as well?” Her voice had gone a bit softer.
If he didn’t stop staring at her mouth, she would think him a lecher. “Yes.” He forced his eyes to meet hers. “It’s…it’s a lovely city.” And now he would get to show her. Something else sparked in his chest. “The closest thing to experiencing true magic is Venice at sunset.”
“How poetic.” She broke into a genuine smile he couldn’t bring himself to share.
He could still picture his father in his prime—tall, hale, and happy, with his arms wrapped around his mother as they stared across the Grand Canal from the big window in their palazzo’s front parlor. His eyes were filled with childlike wonder, even though he saw the image nearly every day. But then, his father had known what he had. And how precious it was. That was why he couldn’t survive when it was all ripped from him. Edward Gresham knew life would never be the same. That the magic was well and truly lost. Forever.
Alec shrugged again. “Someone said that to me once years ago. I suppose there are moments when I still believe it.”
Lottie continued to study him. “Only moments?”
