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“There’s something exceedingly intimate about the exchange of hundreds of letters. I would imagine. I haven’t much experience with letter writing. But the exchange of, as you call it, minutia, implies a degree of familiarity, of acceptance, that is really rather fortunate. I suspect that even if the minutia aren’t missed, the act of recording them, and reading about them, is.”

The tears from before were back, and they were winning the battle. She told herself it was all right. It was too dark for him to see.

“Diantha,” he said urgently, “are you quite all right?”

How did he do that?

The sound of her Christian name on his lips made the volume of tears increase. A small sob escaped. She was mortified.

“Are you crying?” He sat up.

She did, too. “I don’t mean to.” She wasn’t a crier. Or at least she’d never thought she was. She hadn’t cried at her sister’s funeral, for Heaven’s sake. She hadn’t cried when Mr. Hill blackmailed her.

She wasn’t a crier. She wasn’t a swooner.

Except when she was.

He took her in his arms, and if she’d thought that kiss on her hand was shocking, it had nothing on this. He was warm and solid. Her head rested against his chest. If she listened, could she hear his heartbeat? Likely not, for her own was thundering in her ears, and—

He dropped his arms and pulled back.

She was sharply disappointed. But she wasn’t crying anymore, so his intervention had worked—assuming the cessation of her tears had been his aim.

She scrambled to her feet. “I must go.”

He was silent a moment. She waited, though she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t require his permission to leave.

Eventually, he got to his feet. “We can try again tomorrow.”

We.

She did not correct him, just said, “Good night, my lord.”

She had taken a few steps away, when, suddenly, he was by her side.

“Don’t call me my lord.”

She was about to apologize, but he kept talking.

“You may always write to me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said it was an odd feeling, having no one to write to. I surmised from the context that ‘odd’ meant ‘not good.’ If that is the case, I offer myself as a correspondent. I don’t know that I would be any good at it, given my aforementioned inexperience, but if you should care to send me letters, I should be happy to receive them, and to answer them.”

“But what would I say?”

“We seem to have managed to fill the hours just fine in the flesh. Can letters really be that different?”

Something inside Diantha lunged toward the idea of continuing her dialogue with Lord Marsden. Perhaps it would be some consolation after her “ruination.”

Or perhaps he would be angry enough at her for lying to him that he wouldn’t want to write to her.

She told herself that she hadn’t lied. She hadn’t said anything that was untrue. She’d told him she had another plan. And she did.

She was so tired, suddenly. “I must bid you good night … Simon.” She hesitated. “I know you don’t want me to call you ‘my lord,’ but I can hardly call you by your Christian name in company.”

“I would be quite happy to have you call me Simon in any circumstance, but I suppose you are correct. Perhaps we ought to leave the Christian names to when we are alone. Will you join me tomorrow in my comet vigil?”