“I’ve spent all these years thinking—knowing—I wasn’t good enough for you. I always blamed it on things beyond my control—my circumstances, your uncle, my parents. But it was my fault all along.” He let out a weary sigh. “I let other people’s opinions determine our future when I should have fought for you. For us. Instead, I diminished your feelings and ignored my own. And I will always consider that the greatest mistake of my life.”

“Oh, Alec,” Lottie whispered thickly. She could not let him shoulder this burden alone. “I should have made more of an effort to understand your silence about your past instead of taking it so personally. I don’t blame you for keeping the truth about your parents to yourself. You were in an impossible position.”

“It’s no excuse,” he burst out, turning away in anger. “I destroyed everything between us that morning in your uncle’s study. Then again in Venice. And I wish to God I could take it all back. To start over with you, but I can’t––”

“You’re being much too hard on yourself.”

He stubbornly shook his head, still refusing to look at her. “But you would never have done that.”

Impossible man.

“Only because I never had the chance to!” Lottie let out a frustrated cry as she reached for him. “I’d like to believe that I would have accepted you without worry five years ago. That I wouldn’t have cared about your parents or my reputation. That I would have taken Uncle Alfred’s disappointment in stride and run off with you. But I was a different girl then. And more concerned with what people thought of me than I’d like to admit.”

She gripped his shoulders and forced him to meet her eyes. He was no longer the boyish young gentleman who had wooed her one evening. The careworn man that stared back had a few more wrinkles and had likely seen things she could never imagine. But he was also the man who had bounded up a mountain to find her, who made sure she saw Venice, who brought tears to her eyes both in pleasure and pain––and been prepared to die for her.

In so many ways, they were still the same people who had slept side by side in this very room years and years ago. But they had grown so much since then. Perhaps more than they ever would have if they hadn’t been forced to part.

She brought a hand to his jaw and stroked the rough bristle. “I think we both needed time to become who we are today. And I’m grateful for it. I only wish that you hadn’t had to endure so much pain.”

Alec stared for a long while, as if he was seeing her for the first time. Then the corner of his mouth lifted. “Very well. If you insist on being less than perfect, I’ll try to accept it.”

“Perfection is not what I aim for, Alec,” she said gently. “And it is not what I expect from you, either.”