“Oh,” she said again. “I see your eyebrows are none the worse for wear.”
The aforementioned brows shot toward his hairline, and beside her, Georgiana made a stifled sound of despair.
Oh hell, oh damn, she was mucking this up. She tried again. “That is, I—I—I should like to make your acquaintance. Um. In the flesh.”
She instantly regretted the wordflesh, which seemed distressingly… fleshly.
This is Strathrannoch, she told herself.He knows you. You know him. He just doesn’t know it yet.
“I am H,” she managed to say.
That wasn’t quite how she’d imagined it coming out. Truly, when she’d imagined this part of the scenario, they had simplyrecognizedeach other and then fallen into the habit of conversation built by three years’ correspondence.
Her imagination, Lydia was coming to realize, was thoroughly fuddled.
“H,” Strathrannoch repeated.
Did his eyes sharpen upon her—in recognition, perhaps? She could not tell.
“H,” she said again. “From the letters.”
His gaze flickered down to the papers strewn about her feet, and then up, up her body and back to her face. “And what are you doing here?”
She sucked in a lungful of air and tried with all her not inconsiderable brainpower to recollect what she had written in her notes for this precise moment.
Mutually… persons… union…
The words swam. In fact, the whole world seemed to be swimming slightly before her eyes, with Strathrannoch framed in the doorway and her head tilted up to look at his face.
“I am here,” she said, “to marry you.”
No, that wasn’t how she’d written it out. Strathrannoch made a faint choking sound, and, at her side, Georgiana did as well.
“I have money,” Lydia said desperately.
Your only chance, shouted her brain.Your only chance!
She tried again, attempting to tamp down her panic. “I knowthat you—that you need money—from what you said in your letters. And I have plenty—and I know that we—that we get on—”
“Lass,” Strathrannoch said. Lydia’s words died in her throat. “Should I have some idea who you are?”
“I am H,” she said again. Surely the man could not have multiple correspondents by that pseudonym. “From the letters. From all the letters we exchanged these last three years.”
He met her eyes straight on. His were brown and green and blue, all the colors of the landscape they’d passed through on the ride from Dunkeld. She had loved the sight. She had been so hopeful.
“Lass,” he said, “I’ve not written you any letters.”
There was a buzzing sound in her ears. “Not to—to me asme. But you wrote to me as H, in reply to my political tracts. Dozens of letters about Scotland and revolution and Napoleon and—”
He gave his head a short, sharp shake. “No,” he said. “I didn’t. I don’t care a fig for politics and I’ve no time for correspondence.”
Lydia couldn’t feel her fingers. Her heart bolted forward like a rabbit, crashing against her ribs, and it hurt, and she couldn’t catch her breath.
He did not know her? Her head seemed to whirl, and she blinked dizzily at the letters at her feet. “You did not write those?”
Strathrannoch’s gaze was steady on her face. “No. Not a one.”
“Oh,” she said.
