Chapter 16
Cassian pressed two fingers to Alice’s mouth.
“Steady,” he murmured. “Breathe.”
She breathed.
It was not perhaps the steadiest breath she had ever drawn, but it was a breath, and her body, which had a moment ago been a great chaotic instrument she did not recognize, came back to her in slow, careful pieces.
Her knees were her own again. Her hands were her own again. She unhooked her fingers with some difficulty from the lapels of his coat and smoothed them flat. She straightened her skirts, which he had already smoothed for her, and lifted her hand to her hair.
Her hair was, regrettably, beyond rescue.
“It is too—”
“It is too well-arranged for a walk in the orangery,” Cassian agreed, very quietly. “Let me.”
He turned her gently. He gathered the heavy fall of her hair in his hands, twisted it twice unhurriedly, as though he had at some point in a misspent youth learned to do up a woman’s hair more often than was strictly proper, and tucked the heaviest of the loose locks back into the coil at the nape of her neck.
He used three scattered hairpins that he had picked from her shoulder, the lapel of his coat and, with a small private smile he did not allow her to see, the leaves of the orange tree behind her.
He stepped back. “Pass.”
“Liar.”
“Acceptable, then. We have one minute. Move.”
She moved.
On legs that had not entirely come back to her yet, she walked out of the alcove, into the wider walk, and toward the door that opened onto the morning room corridor with Cassian at her elbow at a perfectly respectable distance.
His face was composed. Only Cassian Arnolds could compose a face this way on three minutes’ notice. It was a small impatient look that suggested he had been kept overlong in a glass room, making polite conversation about citrus.
Daphne met them halfway down the walk. She had a small tray with two cups of tea and three biscuits, and she had carried it down the corridor herself rather than send a maid with it which was a thing she had not done since she was nine.
She looked up at them and stopped. She did not, for an absurd few seconds, say anything at all.
“Daphne.”
“Alice.”
“Your tray.”
“Yes. Yes, the tray. Mama said I should bring it. She said that the morning room was—that the morning room would be ready. I did not know you had come this far.”
Her eyes darted from Alice’s face to Cassian’s. Then to Alice’s hair. Then to the small mark on the side of Alice’s neck where her hair had been doing a poor job of hiding it. Then back to Alice’s face.
Daphne went pink. She went pink in patches all the way down to the collar of her morning dress. In the next several seconds, she did not say anything at all.
“The tea is very kind of you, Lady Daphne,” Cassian said smoothly. “Shall we sit?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. In the morning room if Your Grace would care to.”
“Lead the way.”
Daphne led the way. She led it carefully and unevenly, her shoulders held with the particular stiffness of a person terrified that the man behind her might turn around.
Alice followed with Cassian a step behind. She could not look at her sister. She did not dare to. Until the orangery, she had not considered how she was going to manage Daphne. She had not considered anything at all.
They reached the morning room to find it occupied.
Her father was standing in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back in the small particular position he took up when he was waiting for someone. And he was, at the moment, waiting for them.
He had on his morning coat, and he was wearing the usual morning expression.
He looked at Alice. He looked at Cassian.
Then his eyes went, with the deliberate attention he reserved for things he meant to use later, to the nape of Alice’s neck where her hair was no longer entirely as her maid had left it.
“Lord Westbury,” Cassian greeted.
“Your Grace.”
“I had not expected the pleasure.”
“I had not expected to give it to you. I came down because the cook informed me that you had been in the orangery for the better part of three quarters of an hour, and my butler informed me that you came without sending word, and my younger daughter informed me, just now in the corridor as I came down, that you and my eldest daughter were so absorbed in your conversation among the trees that she could not draw your attention despite calling twice. I was concerned, Your Grace, that there might have been an emergency. I am relieved to find that there was not.”
Lord Westbury did not look relieved.
He looked at Alice.
In her whole life, despite every small or large transgression, her father had never looked at her with the particular attention with which he was looking at her now.
It was not anger. It was something more careful.
It was the look he wore at the dinner table when he was cataloging a thing he intended to use later.
“Father—”
“Alice.”
“Father, the Duke was—”
“The Duke was,” Cassian cut in, stepping slightly between them, “in the process of inviting your daughter to a house party at Langton next week. My sister has been planning it for some time. At the end of the week, with your permission, our wedding will take place. I have secured a special license.”
The room went very still.
Alice turned her head slowly. She turned it because she had only heard what Cassian had said at that moment and because what he had said could not, on any reasonable hearing of it, be what he had meant to say.
“A special license?” her father asked mildly.
“Yes, My Lord.”
“And you are to be married at the end of the week.”
“Yes.”
“We agreed on three weeks, Your Grace.”
“That was before.”
Cassian did not glance at Alice as he said it.
He did not need to. His thumb moved briefly, almost imperceptibly, against the edge of his coat sleeve in the small repetitive motion Alice had begun to recognize as the thing he did with his hand when he was very deliberately not doing something with it.
Lord Westbury gave a slow nod. “Very well, Your Grace. I shall not pretend to be sorry. Three weeks is a great deal of time to fill with banns when the matter is already settled, and a special license is, I daresay, the more discreet course. We shall await your sister’s invitation.”
“My Lord.”
“I shall leave you with my daughters. Daphne, set down the tray.”
Daphne set down the tray.
Lord Westbury bowed very correctly to Cassian. He turned very correctly on his heel. He walked very correctly out of the morning room, the door closing behind him with a small, precise click. He had said exactly what he wished to be heard saying, and he meant to be heard not saying the rest.
Daphne did not move.
For what felt like several seconds, Alice did not move either. She did not look at Cassian. She did not dare to look at him. In fact, she did not trust herself to speak in front of her sister, who was looking between them with an expression Alice had not paid enough attention to in the corridor.
“Daphne,” Alice said quietly, “please, will you give me a quarter of an hour with His Grace?”
“Alice—”
“Please, Daphne.”
Daphne looked at her. She looked at her for the small, careful length of time that meant Daphne, who had been Alice’s sister for twenty years, had decided to allow a thing she did not entirely understand.
She nodded and left.
She closed the door behind her. She did not close it entirely, which Alice noted with a small gratitude because two inches of space was in the orangery and in the morning room and in every room in her parents’ house, the precise margin between Daphne being a sister and Daphne being a chaperone.
And Daphne, in being kind, was being neither.
Alice turned to Cassian. “Your Grace.”
“Alice.”
“You have lost your mind.”
“I have.”
“You—We had agreed on three weeks. Three weeks. You have not been betrothed to me a fortnight.”
“I am aware.”
“And you have, in a morning room with my father standing two paces away from you, announced our wedding for next week. On a special license. Why?”
He did not immediately answer.
He had the same look he had been wearing in the alcove before her father had come down. It was the look she had not seen on him before this morning and which she did not have a name for even now.
He drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
“Because three weeks is too long, Alice,” he said quietly.
“Too long for what?”
“For me.”
“Cassian—”
“Three weeks is too long for me to be permitted to call on you in your parents’ house every other afternoon and to pretend, in front of your father and your butler and your cook and your sister, that I am here for tea.”
He took half a step back from her which she noticed was not a step away. It was a step into the position he had taken up before that dance with eighteen inches between them and his hands clasped behind his back.
He was making himself stop.
“Three weeks is, on present evidence, too long for both of us. We shall be married at the end of next week by special license. We will host a house party first because Joanna will have my head if we don’t and because it will give you, your sister, your mother, and your father the small dignified ceremony you are entitled to.
And then we will be married. I will not be pressed on this, not even by you. ”
“Cassian—”
“I will not be pressed.”
“But—”
“I will not be pressed, Alice.”
She looked at him.
She looked at him with the place between her shoulder blades where his hand had been not twenty minutes ago and the place at her throat where the stone was and the place at the apex of her thighs where she could still faintly feel the warmth of him, and she understood that she was not going to press him.
She was not going to press him because she did not want to press him.
She was going to argue with him. She was going to argue with him for the form of it.
And then she was going to allow him, in eight days’ time, to put a ring on her finger at the altar because she had decided against an orange tree in her parents’ orangery that she loved him and that she was not going to be the one who walked away from it.
She had not, however, decided what she was going to do about children.
She had not decided what she was going to do about children, and she understood, while looking at him across the morning room, that the next eight days were going to be the days in which she decided.
“Very well, Your Grace.”
“Very well?”
“Very well. Next week. The special license. The house party. The wedding.” She lifted her chin. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“At the house party, you shall give me one true conversation. About children.”
He went still in the particular way he had gone still on the terrace when she had said his Christian name, as if she had touched a wound.
“Alice—”
“One conversation, Cassian. About why.”
He drew a breath and let it out. He fixed her for a long moment with the dark, steady look she was beginning to recognize as the look he gave her when he was about to agree to a thing that he was not ready to agree to.
“One conversation.”
“You promise me.”
“I promise you, Alice.”
“Then we shall be married next week.”
She offered him her hand. He took it and kissed it.
He kissed it for the precise count required by manners and not a count longer.
Alice stood in the middle of the morning room with her hair coming down at the back and the stone at her throat and her sister listening at the door, and she resolved not to tell him until she had to that the count he had just kissed her hand for would, regardless of any other thing she chose in the next eight days, be the last one she ever counted at all.