He couldn’t stop his thoughts from racing back through the years to when he and Lydia had last spoken. To that fateful summer ten years ago.

The daughters of the eccentric branch of the Wiltshire Makepeaces, their father a scholar who although born into it largely shunned the ton, their mother a well-bred matron who juggled her wifely duties with those of a mother as best she could, throughout their childhoods, Lydia and Tabitha had been sent every summer to stay with their mother’s cousin’s family, whose estate shared a boundary with Gerrard Park.

Although six years older than Lydia, he’d noticed her instantly. She’d captured his attention, his eye, his imagination, even when she’d been six years old and he a superior twelve. The difference in ages hadn’t mattered, not then, or later.

Later, when she’d been sixteen, innocent and untouched, and he’d been an already polished, already experienced twenty-two. The polish and experience hadn’t mattered either, not on that day he’d met her in the orchard, as he often had.

They’d walked, talked, as they always had. She’d been full of plans for her come-out the following year, excitedly looking forward to waltzing and being courted by gentlemen-a strange species she’d had little exposure to hidden away in Wiltshire with her reclusive parents.

She’d asked him, playfully innocent, to waltz with her, there under the apple trees. He’d smiled and obliged, humming a tune with her, never dreaming…

The halcyon day had whirled about them, and something else had taken hold, and risen, softly, gently, through him.

He’d stopped humming, slowed; when he’d halted she’d been lost in his eyes, and he in hers.

He’d bent his head and kissed her. Even at twenty-two, he’d known how to steal a woman’s wits with a kiss, but that wasn’t how he’d kissed her. He’d kissed her gently, tentatively…worshipfully.