“We could have been friends,” she heard herself say.

“Could?”

“Would,” she corrected, and she was smiling. It seemed the most amazing thing. How was it possible she had anything to smile about? “I think we would have been friends, if not for…If all this…”

“If everything were different?”

“Yes. No. Not everything. Just…some things.” She began to feel lighter. Happier. And she had not the slightest clue why. “Maybe if we’d met in London.”

“And we hadn’t been betrothed?”

She nodded. “And you hadn’t been a duke.”

His brows rose.

“Dukes are very intimidating,” she explained. “It would have been so much easier if you hadn’t been one.”

“And your mother had not been engaged to marry my uncle,” he added.

“If we’d just met.”

“No history between us.”

“None.”

His brows rose and he smiled. “If I’d seen you across a crowded room?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” She shook her head. He was not getting this at all. She wasn’t talking about romance. She couldn’t bear to even think of it. But friendship…that was something else entirely. “Something far more ordinary,” she said. “If you’d sat next to me on a bench.”

“Like this one?”

“Perhaps in a park.”

“Or a garden,” he murmured.

“You would sit down next to me—”

“And ask your opinion of Mercator projections.”

She laughed. “I would tell you that they are useful for navigation but that they distort area terribly.”

“I would think—how nice, a woman who does not hide her intelligence.”

“And I would think—how lovely, a man who does not assume I have none.”

He smiled. “We would have been friends.”

“Yes.” She closed her eyes. Just for a moment. Not for long enough to allow her to dream. “Yes, we would.”

He was quiet for a moment, and then he picked up her hand and kissed it. “You will make a spectacular duchess,” he said softly.

She tried to smile, but it was difficult; the lump in her throat was blocking her way.

Then, softly—but not so softly that she was not intended to hear—he said, “My only regret is that you never were mine.”

Chapter 16

The following day, at the Queen’s Arms, Dublin

Do you think,” Thomas murmured, leaning down to speak his words in Amelia’s ear, “that there are packets leaving directly from Dublin port, heading to the Outer Hebrides?”