“You won’t ever make new friends if you don’t try,” she continued as her lips curved in an impish smile. She was only teasing him. Possibly even mildly flirting with him. Attention from women was hardly anything new, but Alec’s ears still grew hot. They hadn’t been alone in a room together for many years. He scratched his fingers against the smooth surface of the mantel as he tried to brush the thought aside, but it stubbornly remained.

“I don’t need any more. Apart from you.”

This wasn’t entirely true. Alec had friends, but they kept a polite distance, both of their own accord and his. At school everyone knew about his father, the tragic dead poet, that he had married a servant—a foreign one—and how his uncle, the current Viscount Gresham, still refused to acknowledge Alec’s very existence.

Lottie was the only person who had ever seemed interested in him. Not where he had come from or what had happened. Just him. What else could one call that but friendship?

Her teasing smile faded but her steady gaze seemed to bolt him to the ground.

“I enjoyed your letter from Cannes,” he pushed on while the air thickened between them. “Are you disappointed not to have gone on to Italy?”

Lottie openly stared at him for another excruciating moment, until Alec’s ears grew hot once again, but then she shrugged and glanced away. “No, not really. I’d rather not have my first experience tainted by Mr. Thorne’s complaints. Besides, Italy isn’t going anywhere. I’ll journey there some day.”

“Yes, you will.”

How innocent they both had been. Alec’s chest ached with a useless desire for the impossible. To travel back to that exact moment and make the opposite of every decision that had followed. A vicious longing now flooded through him to storm back into the compartment, to tell Lottie the truth about everything, to fall at her feet and selfishly beg forgiveness for all his sins. It was sheer madness, and yet he shifted a foot, braced his hands on the table, and began to rise from his seat, determined to do just that, when someone called out his name. Alec looked up as a fashionably dressed older man sauntered down the aisle toward him, and his heart plummeted.

“I thought that was you, Professor! Enjoying your school holiday, I see.”

It was none other than Signore Cardinelli, one of Italy’s more unscrupulous businessmen and a major player in the country’s constantly shifting political scene. He counted several of the more corrupt cabinet ministers among his closest friends—though less clear was whether these friendships stemmed from camaraderie or coercion.