“Aye,” Alistair croaked.
Reflexively, his right arm tightened around her.
“Cling tight, lass,” he breathed.
Chrissi nodded, not quite trusting herself to speak.
Gracious.
Surely the last time she had experienced so many emotions in such quick succession had been that final disastrous day of their disintegration.
She breathed in the scent of him...this former beloved, this long-ago traitor.
This Scot who had always completely overset her world.
ALISTAIR SCRAMBLED UP the embankment, every muscle in his body vibrating with tension.
Chris.
He was holding Chris.
His Christiana.
Though . . . hardlyhisanymore.
Mrs. Stephen Newton.
He had learned, years ago, that she had married some unnamed gentleman. The news had sent him careening, downing far too much whisky and shouting angrily at the silver moon, casting aspersions on womankind in general and her head specifically.
It had not been one of his finer moments.
Time had (mostly) healed the gaping wound of her loss.
Alistair had never known or even wanted to know theidentity of her husband—not wishing to torture himself by imagining her life with another.
Now...he knew. Chris had married Dr. Stephen Newton—an elderly colleague of her father’s at Oxford and easily thirty years her senior. Why had she marriedhim, of all people?
Scratch that.
Alistair knew why.
She had gotten her wish, in the end. To work and publish alongside her husband, feats she had definitively accomplished. And as she had always been listed as Mrs. Stephen Newton in publications with her husband, Alistair hadn’t sussed her true identity—that Mrs. Stephen Newton was, in fact, the former Miss Christiana Rutherford.
And now she was here, in his arms.
His body more than remembered the womanly curve of her, the slope of her waist and arch of her neck. Her touch seared, a scalding brand of familiarity that hurt more than it healed.
He didn’t want this. Not now. Not at this juncture.
She was his painful past, not his hoped-for future.
Reaching the top of the slope, he released her perhaps a bit too abruptly, causing her to stumble. But, as ever, Chris righted herself instantly. That had always been her way—chin up, shoulders strong.
“Thank you, my lord.” She gave him a wan smile. “I most certainly did not intend to make such a dramatic entrance today.”
The crisp vowels of her English accent washed over him, bringing with it memories of Tuscany that clung like sun-drenched honey—delicious and cloyingly sweet.
Chris racing ahead of him through a wisteria-draped loggia along Largo Leonardo da Vinci in Fiesole, skirts snapping as wind whipped her laughter.
