Lottie focused on the horizon and fought to control her breathing. “That is the only reason you can think of for me running away?”

Enjoy your time in Florence, my dear, and prepare yourself. Because jilt or no, you will be married by the end of next season.

“The only one that make sense,” Alec muttered.

Lottie closed her eyes and exhaled through the disappointment—the anger. But it was always better to be underestimated. She had been foolish to think Alec might understand. He was so like Uncle Alfred. The last thing she owed him—either of them—was her truth.

“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 his superior deductive reasoning knew 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.