She cocked her head.

“The first time we collided at Lady Wadley’s ball.”

She started. “Was I?” She quite despised both colors.

“Yes.”

The memory that had prompted his purchase of these particular flowers was both sweet and romantic, and she looked at him, made herself really look at him.

Tall and possessed of a wiry strength and sharp cheeks and a square chin, he really was quite handsome. His features were rugged, but not too chiseled, giving him the look of a Greek god cast in marble. Why, then, did the sight of him not make her heart race?

Why couldn’t he be enough?

Because there was another, and there would always be another. At least in her heart.

“Lauren, will you please see these are placed in water?” she asked quietly, and her maid was across the room in an instant, claiming the flowers and hastening from the drawing room, as had surely been Lord Exmoor’s intent. It was why he’d held on to this particular bouquet, when all the times prior he’d been content to give them to Caroline or Lauren or one of the other maids.

And then they were alone.

It was the first time she’d ever found herself so with the marquess.

Unlike every last time she’d stolen alone with Anthony, when she’d reveled in those precious moments with just the two of them together, dread lanced through her.

“May I?” Lord Exmoor murmured, motioning to the spot beside her on the sofa.

She stared at the vacant space and then at him and then back at the spot. “Yes?”

Even to her ears, it emerged as a question.

“Of course,” she blurted when he stared perplexedly at her. “That is, of course you may sit?” Again, her voice pitched toward the uptilt of a query, rather than an offer, so she gestured to the arm of the sofa and reflexively backed away, scooting herself toward the opposite arm of the Louis XIV bench.

The marquess slowly sat. Was it reluctance?

Please, let it be reluctance.

“Lettice,” he began, and it was the first time he’d abandoned the lady at the preface of her name, and in doing so, he further cemented the intimacy of this exchange, different from all the ones before it.

Her heart hammered.

“I wanted to—”

“Lettie!” That correction exploded from her lips, interrupting the flow of his words.

He tipped his head at a confused little angle.

“I quite detest the name Lettice, you know. Except, you don’t really know,” she rambled, helpless to stop herself. “I don’t believe we’ve spoken of it. We haven’t,” she answered for him. “It is hard not to think of a garden vegetable or a leafy green or—” At his stare, she made herself stop. “Please call me Lettie,” she settled for.

“It means joy,” he said quietly.

It was her turn to look at him. “Lord Exmoor?”