“I have brought a small luncheon as well, Lady Charlotte. The duke and duchess asked me to give you their regrets, my lord, and tell you that they have an unavoidable appointment. However, they would very much like you to join them for dinner. If you need anything further, perhaps you might summon me with the bell cord, as we have had to place the footmen elsewhere.” Campion bowed his way out of the room.

Very clever of the duke, Alex thought, instantly appreciating Marcel’s hand in all this unwarranted privacy that was being accorded to him and Charlotte.

Charlotte busied herself with the tea tray and tried to think what it was she really wanted to say.

“Do you love me?” she asked bluntly.

“Love you?” Alex was completely startled. His first impulse was to say “Yes, of course,” and press a kiss on her lips. But he wanted this marriage to be different from his first, he reminded himself. To begin without lies.

“No,” he finally said, deliberately. Charlotte’s body was rigid. “But, and this is a fair question, Charlotte—do you love me?”

Charlotte opened her mouth but Alex kept talking. “You see, I don’t think that love is something that happens the way writers pretend. All those lines like ‘who ever loved, who loved not at first sight’ were made up by poets, not by real people. I thought I loved my first wife the minute I saw her,” he continued slowly. “She looked so much like a girl I met before, here in England. She looked innocent, chaste, and beautiful … like a girl who had been living in a convent. To my mind, she was untouched and untouchable.

“So I told her I loved her, and she told me she loved me, and we married two weeks later to the great rejoicing of her family. But do you know why they rejoiced so much?”

Charlotte shook her head.

“Because no one else in Rome would have married her.” Charlotte just looked confused, so Alex smiled at her, a lopsided, self-condemning smile. “She had slept with a good many of the Roman gentlemen who danced at my wedding, you see.” Charlotte’s eyes widened. Alex shrugged. “More fool I.”

“I’m sorry,” Charlotte said rather lamely.

“I thought a good deal about love at first sight in the following year. Our life together was hell. She didn’t love me, and I found out within a week or so that I didn’t love her either. Love, I think, is something built on trust—and trust comes only with time. Do you see what I mean?”

Charlotte nodded. She was having a hard time putting together Alex’s turbulent black eyes, talking about his wife’s infidelity, and the fixed idea she had that he himself would be unfaithful once they married.

“Do you believe,” she half whispered, “that trust is a matter of … of not being with other people after marriage?”