Chapter 10
The terrace was small.
It was, in fact, hardly a terrace at all.
It was a narrow stone balcony at the back of the building, hidden from the ballroom by a pair of long velvet curtains and from the garden below by a low iron railing.
It was usually used by ladies who needed a moment from the heat and by gentlemen who wished to smoke.
Alice had gone there once before, three Seasons ago, for the first reason. She had not gone there for the second.
Tonight, she was there for neither.
She did not know what she was doing there.
Well, that was not exactly true. She knew what she was there for.
She had merely declined to look directly at the thing she knew because looking directly at it required her to acknowledge that she had walked out of a crowded ballroom to a dark balcony because Cassian Arnolds had, half an hour ago, told her to wait for him there and that she had done it and that her heart was hitting her ribcage hard enough that she could hear it in her ears.
The garden below was very dark. There was a moon. It was small, white, and indifferent.
Alice rested her gloved hand on the iron railing and looked at the moon exactly as Cassian had instructed her to because she had decided at some point on the way here that if she was to be obedient, she was at least going to be obedient with a great deal of irony about it.
Two minutes had passed.
She counted the iron rosettes on the railing. There were nine of them. She counted them again. There were still nine.
She was about to count them a third time when the curtain at her back moved, and a hand wrapped around her waist and pulled.
She did not cry out.
She was rather proud of herself for not crying out because the hand was very firm and the pull was very fast. She was off her feet for half a heartbeat and landed against a chest she knew the smell of before she knew anything else because she had been thinking about his smell at the dinner two nights ago on the ride over which was a thing she had also declined to look at directly.
“Hush,” he said, his voice low. “Hush, Alice.”
“Your Grace—” “Quiet.”
She turned in his arms. He let her turn, but he did not let her step back.
His hands stayed where they were—one on her waist, one on the small of her back—and she pressed her gloved hands flat against his chest because she had to put them somewhere and she did not, after the dinner table, trust herself to leave them at her sides.
She could feel his heartbeat through the broadcloth. It was, she registered with a small wave of satisfaction, not steadier than her own.
“You asked me to wait for you here,” she said.
“I did.”
“It is a great deal more scandalous than a kiss in a ballroom.”
“It is.”
“Your Grace, the entire purpose of our betrothal is to be seen together.”
“We have been seen together, Alice. We have been seen together for forty-five minutes. The whole room is seeing us by remembering that we have left it.” His hand moved down her back.
He was looking down at her with the same steady attention he had shown her on the dance floor.
The small dark balcony had robbed the party of all the qualities the ballroom had given it, which were politeness and restraint, and left only the qualities that the ballroom had been concealing, which were not those things at all.
“But the room cannot see us here,” he continued. “The room is presently inventing what we are doing here. That, My Lady, is a great deal more useful to us than letting them watch.”
“You are very calculating, Your Grace.”
“I am.”
“It is not a quality I admire in a husband.”
“You will come to admire it.”
“I will not.”
He laughed again, and she felt it against her chest which was pressed against his. She made a small sound that she did not recognize as having come from herself because it was not the sound a gently bred young woman ought to make when laughed at.
“Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
Her face lifted. She did not have a choice. Her face had wanted to be lifted for the last forty seconds, and it lifted now with the particular helplessness of a part of one’s body that had quite stopped consulting one.
He was very close.
He was, she registered, breathing harder than she had thought, given how composed he had been a minute ago, given how composed he had been on the dance floor, given how composed he had been at the door of his dining room when he had kissed the back of her hand and let her go.
He was not composed now. His mouth was a hand’s breadth from her own. His hand was pressing on the small of her back very subtly, bringing her closer to him.
“Lady Alice,” he said quietly, “everything I said to you on the dance floor was true.”
“You said a great many things.”
“All of them.”
“You said I should not think about you at all on the terrace.”
“That one was not true.”
“You said—”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“I am going to kiss you now.”
“You—”
“I am going to kiss you. I am telling you now so that if you do not wish me to, you have enough time to step back. There is no audience here. There is no betrothal in this. There is no business at all in this, Alice. Step back if you want to.”
She did not step back.
She did not step back, and she did not breathe, and she did not move. The next thing she knew, he lightly cupped the side of her face in his hand, his palm under her jaw and his thumb on the edge of it, and he tilted her face up the last small distance it needed to be tilted, and he kissed her.
It was nothing like the kiss in the ballroom.
The kiss in the ballroom had been a public thing. It had been a thing done to be seen. It had been brief and intentional and slightly chaste, the way a man kissed when he knew exactly how much he could do in front of three hundred people without being challenged.
This was not that. This was the original kiss from which the public version had been copied, and Alice felt her whole body register the difference at once.
His mouth was very warm. That was the first thing.
The second thing was that he did not move quickly. He did not move at all at first. He held his mouth to hers and let her get used to it, let her recognize it, let her decide whether she wanted to go on.
She decided. She felt herself decide.
She did not know which of her hands slid up his shoulders, and she did not know which of her feet moved forward and brought her hip closer to his, but they did.
Cassian made a sound at the back of his throat. It was a small sound, almost nothing. He had been holding himself in check, and the check had just slipped. Then he opened her mouth with his.
Alice made a sound of her own. It was not a sound she had known she could make. It was not a sound she had any business making on a terrace at Almack’s. Still, she made it.
His hand on her face slid down to her throat, which was scandalous, and then to the side of her neck, which was more scandalous, and then to her collarbone. His fingers closed around the juncture between her shoulder and her throat, as though he had not yet noticed he was holding her.
She was on fire. She had not known a person could be on fire.
She had read about it in the books her cousin had passed her at the age of nineteen, the books that had been written by Frenchwomen and bound in plain paper. She had not believed any of it. She had thought it was an exaggeration, the way people exaggerated being struck by lightning.
She had been wrong.
She had been terribly wrong.
She rose on her tiptoes to be closer to him because her body did not know any other thing to do, and he made that sound at the back of his throat again. His mouth moved to the corner of her jaw and then to the spot just below her ear.
He lifted his head, and she pressed her face into the side of his neck and breathed him in, trying with all the discipline her mother had taught her to remember her own name.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“I cannot—”
“I know.”
“I cannot do this for very long, Alice. You must—”
“I know.”
“I cannot—”
She turned her face up to his again. She had decided, at some point in the last minute, that if he was going to stop, she would have one more first.
She kissed him this time. It was a clumsy small kiss compared to the kiss he had given her, and she felt the clumsiness of it like a flush across her cheeks, but he made a soft pleased sound, and his arm tightened around her back.
She had been right that he would not mind the clumsiness.
She had been very, very right.
“Cassian.” His Christian name slipped out.
She did not mean for it to slip out. She had not been thinking about names; she had been thinking about his mouth. The second she heard herself say it, she felt his whole body go still, the way a body went still when a wound had been touched.
She lifted her eyes to his, only to find that he was already looking down at her with an expression she did not recognize. He had never, in two years of knowing her, looked at her like that.
“Lady Alice—”
A footstep. It was the first thing both of them heard.
It was unmistakable. It was on the stone of the terrace just beyond the curtain. It was light and hesitant. Whoever it belonged to was walking as quietly as she knew how.
“Hush,” Cassian breathed. “Stay still.”
He did not let her go. He did not, in fact, move at all.
He merely moved his head. He turned it slightly, just enough to angle his face toward the curtain, and shifted his shoulders so that his body was between hers and the curtain.
He had stepped between her and her father in her father’s study several days ago, and he had not stopped doing it since.
“Alice?” came a small voice from the other side of the curtain.
It was Daphne.
Alice felt her stomach lurch with cold horror because Daphne was the one person in the entire ballroom she had not prepared a story for. Daphne was the one person in the entire ballroom whom Alice could not, after this, look in the eye and lie to.
Daphne had come looking for her. She had been gone from her sister’s side for an hour, and her sister had decided to come and find her because, in the careful, sweet, conscientious way of a younger sister, she had wanted to be sure that her older sister was well.
The curtain moved. It moved perhaps an inch, and then it stopped. Through that inch came a thin sliver of ballroom light and Daphne’s voice, light and not in the least suspicious.
“Alice? Are you out here? Lady Sefton was asking for you.”
Cassian lowered his mouth to Alice’s ear. “Answer her,” he murmured. “Calmly.”
“Yes, Daphne. I am here. I was admiring the moon. I shall come in shortly.”
There was a pause that was perhaps two seconds long.
Then Daphne, who was twenty-years-old and dreamy and absent-minded and had not the smallest inclination to look more closely at why her perfectly sensible older sister might be admiring the moon by herself on a terrace, said, “Oh, good,” let the curtain fall, and went away.
Her footsteps receded into the ballroom.
Alice did not move for the count of four breaths. Then she stepped back from Cassian. Her hands were shaking. Her hair was beginning to come loose. She lifted her hands to it and pressed it into place then lowered her hands again.
“Your Grace.”
“Alice.”
“That was a very dangerous game, Your Grace.”
Cassian did not answer at once.
He looked at her in the faint light from the lamps in the ballroom with her hair half-down at the back and her gown wrinkled at the waist where his hand had been and the small pink mark at the side of her neck where his mouth had been.
She watched his face for the steady composure he ordinarily wore in public and did not find it.
“It was worth it, Alice.”