“And has Italy lived up to your expectations?” His voice had gone a bit thick.

Lottie gave him a soft, sad smile. “In a way.” Then she sighed. “But I hadn’t realized that he wasn’t writing about a country so much as the nature of love.”

Alec’s fingers gripped the railing even tighter. “Yes. My mother was quite a woman.”

She was immortalized in his father’s poems as a dazzlingly beautiful but humble laundress whose hazel eyes and silky, gold-spun curls had arrested him from across a canal. The pair had fallen deeply in love before they even spoke, and she was rescued from a life of hard labor.

A devastatingly romantic story. Not a word was true.

Lottie gave Alec a puzzled frown. “That was part of it, certainly,” she began slowly, as if she was choosing her words with the utmost care. “But I wasn’t speaking only of romance. He loved the both of you; the life you all had together. I found that most affecting.” She paused to take a breath. Or to gather her courage. Alec braced himself for what was coming. “And it helped me to understand later why he…he—”

“—drank himself to death.”

Lottie closed her eyes against the words. Only then did Alec realize he had practically shouted them. He heard Sir Alfred’s chiding voice, as he always did in moments like this:

A gentleman never breaks.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to upset you.” When she opened her eyes, they glistened like two emerald pools.

Alec wanted nothing more than to sink into them, to be swallowed whole by their fathomless depths until he was enveloped in suffocating, comforting numbness. An impossibility. “I’m not upset. It was ages ago. I barely remember either of them.” He didn’t bother trying to mask the flat, hollow tone in his voice. For Lottie wouldn’t dare challenge him.

It was widely accepted that his father had died from “heartbreak” after his wife’s passing. This fitting, understandable, and, most important, sympathetic explanation likely contributed to his posthumous reputation as a romantic hero. Alec would always be grateful to Sir Alfred for covering up the truth—that his mother had actually been married to another man, had chosen to leave, and had died years after Edward Gresham, a rather important revelation Alec had not known until it was far too late.

“He did love you, Alec,” she offered. “You mustn’t ever think he didn’t.”

Now he understood the wisdom of Lottie’s second condition. Hearing her say his name in such a sweet, gentle tone sent a thundering shiver of longing down his spine that would have brought a weaker man to his knees. Her eyes filled with tender sympathy as she slowly reached for his hand, on the verge of breaking her second condition. But Alec would not let her soothe him as if he were a little boy crying over a scraped knee. He simply couldn’t. If she touched him now, he would never let her go. He would pull her down into the murky depths with him, and she deserved so much more. Even a Florentine con man was preferable to what little he could offer.