“For which I daresay I’m fortunate. A room like that would suffocate a soul.” She paused. “Though it does say a good deal about their intent that they should converge upon your townhouse in this weather.”

“Yes, it says there likely isn’t a brain to be built among the bunch of them,” he muttered.

Lettie laughed. “You never did become the romantic, did you?”

As she was being rhetorical, he offered no response.

She was correct on that score, however. Yes, he’d had mistresses over the years, but there’d certainly been none who would ever call him a charmer.

“What of Lord Exmoor?” he asked before he could call the question back.

She wrinkled her nose. “I… No, he’s not at all the romantic either.” She paused. “How…? Ah.” Understanding lit her eyes. “You heard Caroline last evening.”

They reached the front door, and he’d never hated a door in his life the way he hated this one that brought an end to whatever else she might have said about Lord Exmoor, a gent he’d a sudden urge to thrash.

A servant came forward with Lettie’s cloak, and she accepted it with a word of thanks, clasping it at the throat and then reaching for a giant wide-brimmed hat trimmed with pink and white roses.

He felt his lips twitch. “That is quite the hat.”

“Oh, hush,” she said as she accepted her umbrella and promptly jabbed him in the arm with the tip of it. “I love my hat. I have several just like it.”

“You collect hats?”

“Indeed.”

And there was…such an intimacy to that personal piece she’d shared about herself that he stored it away so that he might recall her and this moment at a later time.

His butler, Timothy, extended Anthony an umbrella and then headed to open the doors.

“Surely you don’t intend to escort me to my carriage,” she said with the same level of shock she might have reserved for the discovery that he’d intended to join her in a jaunt through hell. “I assure you I’m quite capable.”

He couldn’t resist. “As capable as you were of hitching yourself over that wall?” he murmured for her ears alone.

Lettie tapped him a second time with the tip of her umbrella. “Be nice.”

“I was not being mean, just truthful.”

She gave a roll of her eyes. “Good afternoon, Anthony,” she said, popping her umbrella open.

Anthony inclined his head. She was leaving. It was for the best. “Lettie.” Why did he have this regret, then? Why did he find himself enjoying the repartee between them?

The moment his butler drew the doors open, a gust of wind whipped through the entryway, sending her skirts slapping against his legs. “As I said, fine weather,” she said, raising her voice loud enough to make herself heard over the din.

Anthony laughed.