“Oh.”

Because, well, really what was there to say?

Goodbye.

That would be a wiser start.

So why didn’t he?

Why couldn’t he?

Why did he remain rooted to the blanket alongside the sister of the man whom he’d betrayed, a woman who knew his greatest transgression?

“Did you love her?” she asked quietly.

Did he…?

Anthony blinked, and it took several very long moments for her question to actually penetrate.

“Lillian Hart?”

“Is that her name?” she murmured. “Rhys did not tell me. Only that—” Her cheeks pinkened.

The fact that she knew and had talked to her brother about it made him go even colder inside. “He told you only what?” he asked; his tone sharp. “That I had her in my arms?” Each question, pulled furiously from his lips, came harsh and hardened, full of the same bitterness he’d carried all these years. “That Rhys walked in to discover us in an embrace?”

She winced and then gave a slight, uneven nod.

Suddenly, the fight went out of him. “I didn’t love her,” he said tiredly. “I didn’t even know her.” His shoulders sagged slightly.

“I… And yet, you…you…”

“Kissed her?” he supplied bluntly.

Lettie nodded.

“Aye, I kissed her.”

“But why?” she pressed, refusing to let the matter rest.

He’d sworn he’d never discuss the matter again and certainly not with this woman of all women. So why, then, did he speak of that long-ago day now?

Because it was so very easy to speak to Lettie. Because their relationship was comfortable, even when, because of her identity as a Brookfield daughter and sister, it should be anything but.

“Your brother was madly in love with Miss Hart. I was attending the same theater performance when he first spied her. The day she entered upon that stage, he hung on the edge of his seat and just watched her. Love at first sight, he said.”

Odd that he should recall that day so clearly. The din of the theater as the performance had come to a close, and they’d quit Anthony’s family’s theater box, was still so familiar and loud in his mind.

“After he saw her perform, he told me to go ahead without him, that his days of haunting clubs were over and that his heart was otherwise engaged. I…” He weighed his words. “had reason to believe the young woman was only interested in the power that would come from a marriage to him and a place in the peerage.”

Or that was what he’d been told, almost precisely that, by Rhys’ most desperate mother, as she’d called herself.