Lord March’s love of exotic plants was legendary. He’d spent much of his life traveling the globe, from the wilds of America to the highest peaks of the Himalayas, bringing back rare seeds to nurture into bloom.

A distracted fellow at the best of times, but a kind one, too, as far as Anne recalled. It had been a long time since she’d darkened his doorstep. A lifetime, it felt like.

She tugged restlessly at her black kid leather gloves as she paced the worn carpet in front of the library’s cavernous marble fireplace. She’d never excelled at waiting for unpleasantness to arrive.

Fortunately, she didn’t have to wait long.

“Hello, old thing.” A familiar deep voice sounded from the library door.

Anne spun around, her traitorous heart giving an involuntary leap in her breast.

Mr. Felix Hartford stood in the entryway; one shoulder propped against the doorframe. Lord only knew how long he’d been observing her.

She stiffened. After all these years, he still had the power to discompose her. Drat him. But she wouldn’t permit her emotions to be thrown into chaos by his attractive face and figure. What cared she for his commanding height? His square-chiseled jaw? For the devilish glint in his sky-colored eyes?

And devil he was. The very one she’d come here to see.

“Hartford,” she said. Her chin ticked up a notch in challenge. It was a reflex. There was no occasion on which they’d met during the course of the past several years that they hadn’t engaged in verbal battle.

This time, however, he made no attempt to engage her.

He was wearing plaid trousers and a loose-fitting black sack coat worn open to reveal the dark waistcoat beneath. A casual ensemble, made more so by the state of him. His clothes were vaguely rumpled and so was his seal-brown hair. It fell over his brow, desperately in need of an application of pomade.

There was an air of arrested preoccupation about him; as if he’d just returned from somewhere or was on his way to somewhere. As if he hadn’t realized she was in the library and had come upon her quite by chance.

An unnatural silence stretched between them, void of their typical barb-filled banter.

Greetings dispensed with, Anne found herself at an unaccountable loss. More surprising still, so did Hartford.

He remained, frozen on the threshold, his usually humorous expression turned to stone on his handsome face.

At length, he managed a smile. “I knew one day you’d walk through my door again. It only took you”—withdrawing his pocket watch from his waistcoat pocket, he cast it a brief glance, brows lifting as if in astonishment at the time—“seven years to do it.”

She huffed. “It hasn’t been seven years.”

“Six and half, then.”

Six years and five months, more like.

It had been early December of 1855, during the Earl of March’s holiday party. She’d been just shy of seventeen; young and naive and not formally out yet. Hartford had kissed her under a sprig of mistletoe in the gaslit servants’ hallway outside the kitchens.