Chapter 3
He was closer than she had expected.
That was the first thing Alice noticed when she turned her head.
He had not moved, or she had not seen him move, and yet his shoulder was nearly at her chest now, and his face was close enough that she could see the faint shadow along his jaw, the small pale scar at the edge of his eyebrow she had never noticed before, and the steady gray of his eyes.
He has lashes.
Of course, he had lashes. What a ridiculous thought.
Everybody had lashes. But she had never noticed his because she had spent two years looking at him from a safe distance and finding him objectionable, and she had not, until tonight, been close enough to notice anything about his face except the disapproval on it.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Hold still.”
“Your Grace.”
“Lady Alice.”
“You cannot.”
“I can.”
“You cannot. Look around you.”
“I have.”
“Your Grace, you despise me.”
“I am aware.”
“Then you cannot.”
“I am sorry, Lady Alice.”
“For what?”
“I will tell you in a moment.”
He lifted his hand. He did it with the same quiet, unhurried slowness with which he did everything. She watched it come up between them. And with all the calm in the world, she watched his thumb and forefinger take her chin and gently tilt her face up to his.
She did not breathe.
For one absurd second, she thought he would not do it. He was so calm, holding her face the way one held a book one was about to read.
The room was very loud, and her plan for the evening had involved a stranger and a count of four. But Cassian Arnolds was not a stranger, and there was no count, and she could not, for the life of her, make her mouth move.
She had never been kissed before.
It was the worst thing to be thinking about, but she could not stop thinking about it. She had been twenty-five years old for six months. She had had three Seasons. She had been engaged to a perfectly proper young man for one entire week.
She had never, despite all the little mistakes she had made in her life, been kissed by a man. She had thought, in her foolish careful planning of this evening, that her first kiss would be a brisk impersonal scandal she could close her eyes against and endure for a count of four.
She had picked the count herself. She had picked the lighting. In her mind, she had picked a stranger near the orchestra who would do nicely.
She had not pictured the Duke of Langton’s thumb on the corner of her jaw.
She had not pictured his eyes on her face from a hand’s breadth away.
She had not pictured the fact that he would smell like clean linen and bay rum and a faint sharp note of something darker underneath that her body had decided was extremely good.
She had not pictured any of this.
There are two hundred people in this ballroom.
The thought came from a great distance.
There were two hundred people in this ballroom, a string quartet, and a dozen wallflowers near enough to see.
Behind the Duke’s left shoulder, Lady Worthington was holding court near a flower arrangement, and somewhere in the room were her mother, Daphne, Isaac, and every gossip in London.
There was her father. There was also Joanna, who was about to be very surprised.
There was the entire architecture of Alice Lockwood’s life, all of it visible at once, all of it about to break.
She had wanted this. That was the thing.
She had wanted to be kissed. Not by him but by somebody else.
By somebody who would matter less. But she had walked into this ballroom tonight with the express intention of being seen kissed by a man, and now, she was about to be seen kissed by a man.
The part of her that had organized the whole evening should have been pleased.
She was not pleased. She did not step back.
“Your Grace,” she whispered. “Please.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Please.”
“I will not let you do it with anyone else.”
She looked at him. She did not understand the words. Or she did. Or she did not know whether she did. Something beneath his voice did not match the cool, deliberate expression on his face. She heard it, but she did not know what to do with it.
“Why?” she whispered.
He did not answer. He only kissed her.
It was not a long kiss. It was not, by any measure she could afterward have applied to the act in the abstract, an indecent one.
His mouth was warm. His thumb did not leave her chin.
He was very still, very deliberate, and his lips moved against hers with a patience that was somehow worse than impatience because patience left her with nowhere to go.
He was not rushing. He was not taking. He was kissing her in a way that suggested he had decided to do it and had decided exactly how long he was going to do it for and that he intended to do it correctly.
There was a long second of pure shock.
She did not move. Her chest had gone tight and would not let go.
The thought came with a clarity that did not seem to belong to her: she had been wrong to plan her ruin around a stranger because a stranger’s mouth would have been at most an inconvenience, and the Duke of Langton’s mouth was very much not.
She heard a fan snap shut at the edge of the room.
She heard, somewhere farther off, a woman suck in a breath.
She heard the nearby clink of a glass being set down, the way a person set down a glass when they had forgotten they were holding it.
She heard, somewhere behind her left shoulder, a stifled sound that she recognized with a perfect, awful certainty as Joanna’s gasp.
The whole room was going to know. The whole room was knowing it now.
In any case, she could not move because the Duke of Langton’s mouth was on hers. Because his mouth was very warm and, against all reason, the only point of certainty in the entire evening.
And then she heard nothing because her hands had come up of their own accord and gone first to the lapels of his coat and then, when his mouth had not moved away, had slid up the wool to settle, light and trembling, on the back of his neck, and she kissed him back.
Just once. Just for a beat.
Long enough that she felt his breath catch.
Long enough that she felt his hand tightening on her jaw, and the heat that bloomed up the back of her neck and spread through her scalp and the slow, terrible rolling of her stomach.
Long enough that he made a sound low in his throat, a sound that was not in his vocabulary, a sound she would not have believed him capable of making before she heard it.
Long enough that she understood, with an awful and absolute clarity, that she had been wrong about what kind of trouble she was in.
He pulled away but did not step back. He kept his hand on her face for a beat longer than he had to.
Alice opened her eyes and looked at him, feeling like she was seeing him for the first time.
He was beautiful.
It was an absurd thought. It was the wrong thought.
But she had known the man for two years, had sat across from him at a dozen drawing-room teas and disliked him at every single one, and somehow, she had failed to notice that he was beautiful.
He had a hard face. Black hair that fell across his brow.
Gray eyes that were not, at this moment, cold.
They were fixed on her. They were fixed on her face, a look in them she did not recognize. It was not triumph. It was not satisfaction. It was something closer to surprise. He was looking at her as though she had answered a question he had not meant to ask.
How did I not see that? How did I not see any of that? How could I have missed it?
She had been wrong.
She had been profoundly wrong.
He bent his head, still not letting her go. His hand had slid from her jaw, and his other hand had come up at some point to rest very lightly on the curve of her waist. She could not, at this moment, feel any of her bones.
His mouth came very close to her ear. She could feel his breath against her temple, she could faintly feel his fingers resting on her jaw, and she could feel, with sudden ridiculous clarity, every single point of her body that was within an inch of his.
The room had gone wrong around them. It had gone away. Now, it was coming back. It was almost back.
She could hear, through the returning noise, the orchestra trying to remember itself. A single violin had not stopped. A second was scrambling to find the note. Somebody somewhere barked a laugh that died at once.
Behind her, she heard her mother’s voice, pitched a quarter higher than it should have been, ask somebody where her daughter was. She closed her eyes for the length of one breath and opened them again, only to find the Duke of Langton still there, six inches away, with his thumb on her chin.
“You owe me now, My Lady,” he whispered.