“Charlotte?” he asked again, with a bemused smile. “It is Cousin Charlotte, isn’t it?”

“Cousin” wasn’t quite the endearment she had been hoping for.

“Cousin?” Charlotte echoed. Although her grandmother claimed kinship with any number of peers and minor princes, the Dovedale family tree had run thin for successive generations. There were very few with any real right to call her by that name. “Cousin Robert?”

His eyes, brilliantly blue in his sun-browned face, crinkled at the corners as he smiled down at her. “None other,” said the long-absent Duke of Dovedale.

“Oh,” said Charlotte stupidly. What on earth did one say to someone who had disappeared well over a decade ago? “Hello?”

Somehow, that didn’t seem quite adequate, either.

“Hello,” her cousin said back, as though it seemed perfectly adequate to him.

“Cousin?” echoed Penelope, who didn’t like to be left out. “I wasn’t aware you had any.”

The connection was so tenuous as to make the term more a courtesy than an actuality. The Dovedale family tree had been a sparse one over the past few generations, sending the title scrambling back over branches and shimmying down collateral lines until it reached Robert, at the outermost fringe of the ducal canopy. Robert was, if Charlotte recalled the intricacies of her family tree correctly, the great-grandson of her great-grandfather’s half brother, having been the progeny of her great-great-grandfather’s much younger second wife. Her grandmother had been furious at the quirk of fate that had sent the title spiraling towards an all but unrelated branch, with a claim more tenuous than that of the Tudors to the Plantagenet throne, but formalities were formalities and courtesies were courtesies, so cousins they were, as long as they bore the Lansdowne name.

Charlotte looked from her cousin to Penelope and quickly back again, just to make sure he was still really there. He was. It seemed utterly impossible, but there he was, after — how many years had it been? Closer to twelve than ten.