Lottie relaxed against the pillows. “Good night.”

He didn’t look up. “Sleep well.”

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 learning something about 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 mere shadow.

Lottie rolled her lips between her teeth. She could not smile. Not at that.

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.