Chapter 15
Alice turned around.
She faced the wall of orange leaves at the back of the alcove, held the open box in front of her at her waist, and waited. Her breath had gone shallow and quick, and she could not, to her chagrin, entirely steady it.
Cassian had stepped up behind her. She could feel him. She did not need to look to know how close he was because his nearness moved against the back of her gown like the air before a storm, and her shoulders gave up the small last pretense she had been making of composure.
“Lift your hair, Lady Alice.”
She lifted her hair. She lifted the heavy dark coil of it from the back of her neck, held it over her shoulder, and waited. The cool air kissed her heated skin, and she suppressed a shiver.
His hands lifted the chain over her head.
He brought it down to rest against her collarbone, the small gray stone settling at the hollow of her throat with a coolness that spread all through her chest. His fingertips found the nape of her neck, taking the two ends of the clasp.
He fastened it. It was a small clasp; it took him perhaps three seconds.
He could have let her go after the third second. He did not.
His hands lingered on the back of her neck.
They were warm whereas the chain was cool.
He had not until now touched the bare skin of any part of her body for any length of time, and the feel of his skin against her own was unlike anything she had experienced before.
His thumb lightly stroked down the line of her nape.
“Cassian.”
She had said his name again. She had said it again in the orangery in full view of half the household, and she did not know whether she had spoken it aloud or only thought it until she felt him exhale slowly against the back of her neck. “Alice.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like the pendant?”
“Yes.”
“Turn around.”
She turned.
She did it slowly. She did it because her body had been instructed to, and this morning, it was not in any condition to disobey. She turned and looked up to find his face very close. His hand had stayed on the back of her neck through the whole turn.
He had simply let her turn within his hand, and now, she stood with her back to the orange trees and his palm on the nape of her neck, and the dark blue velvet box in her hand between them, and his face six inches above her own.
She lifted her hand to the stone at her throat and held it for a moment between her fingertips. “Did you mean to claim me, Your Grace?”
He laughed.
It was the smallest laugh. It was the laugh she had heard when they had danced together that night. It was almost nothing, a small breath through his nose.
“A jewel,” he murmured, “would not be enough for me to claim you, Alice.”
She had known he would say something like that. She had not known what it would do to her. She felt the words at her throat where the stone was, on the side of her neck where his thumb was, on the base of her spine where his hand had pressed many times. She felt the words in her knees.
“And what,” she heard herself ask, “would be?”
He did not immediately answer.
He looked at her, letting the moment stretch, and she understood with a flutter in her stomach that their walk could have ended. He could have stepped back. She could have stepped back.
He could have given her a small, polite answer involving a proper wedding and a proper ring and a proper ceremony, and they could have parted ways in the orangery, and the rest of the morning could have proceeded as a morning ordinarily did.
He did not step back. He took the velvet box from her hand, closed it, and carefully set it down on a small wrought-iron table at the side of the alcove without taking his eyes off her face.
Then he kissed her.
It was not like the kiss in the ballroom.
It was not even like the kiss on the terrace.
The kiss in the ballroom had been a thing done in public to settle a question.
The kiss on the terrace had been a thing done in private to ask one.
This was a thing done with the question already answered, and Alice felt it through her body before she had registered it.
His mouth was open on hers. His hand slid up into her hair and scattered the pins her maid had so carefully placed, and the strands came down between his fingers and over her shoulder. He made a soft sound at the back of his throat that she felt in her own chest.
“Cassian.”
“Yes, Alice.”
“They will see—”
“They cannot see. The trees provide enough cover.”
She distantly realized what she had done.
She had checked the position of the trees and the position of the cook’s larder and the position of the upstairs windows before she had brought him here.
She had walked the orangery not because she wanted to see the trees but because she had been counting sightlines.
She had led him, slowly and deliberately, into the only alcove in the orangery that could not be seen from any of the doors, and she had done it with the careful deliberation with which she did everything she had decided to do.
She did not know whether to be furious with him or grateful.
She decided, in the next breath, to be grateful.
His other hand was on her waist. He moved it slowly so that she could, at any moment, catch his hand in her own and make him stop. He kept his eyes on her face while he did it so that she could at any moment say anything to him and he would stop.
She did not.
His hand went down from her waist to the curve of her hip to the soft, thick fall of her morning skirts, and he slowly gathered them between his fingers and lifted them.
She felt the cool air kiss her skin.
His free hand moved down her stockinged leg.
His warm palm slid up the back of her calf, up the soft inside of her knee, and brushed the bare skin above her garter where no man had ever touched her before.
She felt every inch of it. She felt the small, absurd hot ache of it in places she had not previously known a person could ache at all.
“Cassian—”
“Tell me to stop, Alice.”
“I cannot.”
“Tell me to stop, Alice, and I will stop, and we will go back to the morning room and have tea like respectable people. Say it.”
“I do not want you to stop.”
He made a sound that was not, this time, almost nothing. It was a soft, low sound. It was the sound of a man giving something up, and Alice felt the giving-up all through her chest.
He kissed her again. It was a deeper kiss. It was a kiss she felt in her teeth, in her tongue, in the back of her throat.
His hand had moved higher in the slow, steady way he did everything with no haste, as though he had decided a long time ago that he would not, when given this, rush through it.
His palm slid from the bare skin above her garter to the inside of her thigh.
His thumb traced the soft crease between her thigh and her core.
He paused there for a beat she felt in her whole body and looked at her face, waiting.
She did not have any way of asking him for it.
She did not have words. She did not know the words.
She had not, in any of the conversations she had ever had with any person in her life, been given the words for asking a man, in a small alcove of orange trees, for the thing she was asking for at present.
So, she tilted her hip instead. She tilted her hip up against his hand by perhaps a quarter of an inch, and she watched his face go briefly very still at the small permission.
Then he moved his hand.
His fingers found a place she had not known any person could find. It was a place she had, on perhaps three occasions in her life and in her bed, found by accident in the dark with the door bolted, and she had been so deeply alarmed by finding that she had not afterward gone looking for it again.
His finger settled on it. He did not move at first. He let her feel him there.
He let her feel that he knew precisely where he was and what he was doing.
And then, with the patient slowness she was beginning to understand was the most unbearable thing about him, he murmured against her mouth, “Hush. Hush, Alice, you must be quiet.”
“Cassian—”
“Hush.”
She was, she found, capable of being quiet. She was capable of pressing her forehead into the side of his neck and lightly biting down on the lapel of his coat to stop a sound from escaping her, and she did this because his fingers had reached the apex of her sex which she had never touched before.
It was nothing she had been told to expect.
It was nothing the books had told her to expect.
The books had been wrong. The books had been wrong about all of it.
They had spoken of pleasure as a thing a woman submitted to in marriage, the way she submitted to a particular weather.
But what was being done to her in the small alcove in her parents’ orangery on the morning after she had not slept was not weather, and she was not submitting.
She was, with a particularly focused desperation, asking for more of it.
She bucked her hip against his hand without intending to, and he laughed low against the side of her hair. “Greedy thing.”
“Cassian.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
At first, she did not register that he had called her sweetheart. She registered it later, in the part of herself that registered everything later, when the rest of her mind had quieted and was again capable of paying attention to small things.
At the moment he said it, she was not capable of paying attention to small things. She was capable of paying attention to one very specific small thin, in the very specific place where his finger was. He had moved his finger. He had… She could not… He had…
“Look at me, Alice.”
“I cannot.”
“Look at me.”
She looked at him.
His face was perhaps two inches above her own.
His eyes were on hers. His gray eyes, the very precise gray of the stone at her throat.
He had a particular look on his face, a look she had never seen before, and she understood with a small flutter in her chest that he was, for all his composure, for all his discipline, for all the careful patience he had brought to the alcove and the trees and the sightlines, undone.
He was undone. He was undone as much as she was. He was holding it together because one of them had to.
“Stay with me, Alice.”
“I am.”
“Don’t turn away. Stay with me. Stay—”
“I am with you, Cassian. I—”
Something happened.
It was not precisely a thing. It was a series of things, all at once in a place at the center of her body she had not until this moment known to exist.
She heard herself make a sound. She felt him swallow the sound out of her mouth.
She felt her knees give and his arm at her back catch her.
She felt him press her gently into the trunk of the orange tree behind her so that she would not fall, and she did not fall.
She held onto the lapels of his coat with both her hands, and she did not for a great while know anything else.
When she could again, she found that his forehead was pressed against hers.
He was breathing harder than she had ever heard him breathe. He had not, through any of it, removed his hand. He was holding her with both his arms with a particular careful gentleness, as if he had cracked her and meant to keep her from breaking further.
“Alice.”
“Yes.”
“Good?”
She kissed him.
She kissed him on the mouth. She kissed him with her hair coming down around her shoulders and her skirts crumpled at her thighs and her whole body thrumming, having been for the first time in her life somewhere she had not been.
And she kissed him because she did not know what else to do with the feeling that had surged within her, sudden and complete.
She did not have a name for it.
She understood, against the leaves of an orange tree in her parents’ orangery with her parents’ cook in the larder and her parents’ maids at the linen room window and her parents’ gardener in his potting shed, that whatever it was, she was in very serious trouble.
She did not say anything for a long while.
She did not need to. He was kissing her back.
His mouth was on hers, his hand was on the small of her back, and his other hand had begun to gently smooth her skirts down.
She let him smooth her skirts down, and she let him kiss her, and she let her breath come back to her, and she let her pulse settle.
“Cassian.”
“Mm?”
“I think—”
“Daphne is coming,” he said softly. “I can hear her.”
She froze with her hand on his lapel and her hair down her back and her cheek hot against his shoulder. She heard the familiar light tread and her sister’s voice calling out her name from the far side of the orangery.
“Alice? Alice, the tea is ready.”