“You see,” Alex said, pulling Charlotte’s head against his shoulder so that he could punctuate his words with kisses dropped into silky curls, “I put together the fact that you looked like Maria, but I didn’t want to think too much about it. Mutton-head that I am, I never thought of the fact that I married Maria because she looked like the girl in the garden, and that meant that you looked like her too, and … that meant you were the girl in the garden.” He gave a wry, self-condemnatory grimace. “I’m an idiot, darling. You’ve married an idiot.”

Charlotte brought Alex’s hand to her lips, kissing his palm. Her mouth curved against his hand in an irrepressible grin. “Luckily, I’ve always been fond of fools,” she said, her teasing reply half muffled by his warm skin.

“I am an idiot, a dolt,” Alex continued indomitably. “There were so many times I should have known. Do you remember when I asked you to marry me in your mother’s Chinese Salon, and afterward I touched you?”

A rosy glow suffused Charlotte’s face, but she nodded.

“You said thank you.” Alex’s voice was full of tormented self-hatred. “And I thought—fool that I am—how surprising it was that for a moment you reminded me of my garden girl, but I didn’t think any further. Because, you see, the garden girl thanked me too, and you were the only two women who were ever so courteous…. I deserve to be whipped,” he said savagely. “I caused you so much misery—”

Charlotte broke off his speech by the simple expedient of clamping her hand over his mouth.

“Don’t!” she cried. “Don’t you see … Don’t you know how happy you make me? The only thing that matters is that it was you. It was you all the time. And now you know, and what does it matter that you didn’t remember immediately? You still wanted me, don’t you see?” she whispered achingly. “If you had come back and you had remembered taking my virginity, I never would have been able to trust that you wanted me for myself. I would always wonder whether it was your gentlemanly sense of honor. Do you know what I remember most clearly from the time we spent in the Chinese Salon?”

Alex shook his head, mesmerized by her glowing eyes.

“You said … you said that you didn’t want to continue kissing me because you would ruin me, and you didn’t want to do that. And all I could think was thank God you didn’t remember that you had ruined me before, because it meant you wanted me now. Not just to make up for a moment’s indiscretion in a garden, but for myself.”