Chapter 24 #2
Alice watched him. She watched his face.
She watched a shadow pass behind his eyes.
With a sinking feeling in her gut, she watched his face arrange itself in the way it had in the gallery in front of his brother’s portrait, and she understood that she had done a thing she had not until this moment been certain she had any right to do.
“Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“It was silly of me. I should—”
Cassian crossed the room in three long strides, took her face in both his hands, and kissed her.
He kissed her in the small candlelit studio with his hands cradling her cheeks. He kissed her in the disciplined way he had not allowed himself for ten days.
When he drew back, his face was inches from hers.
“Thank you, Alice.”
“Cassian—”
“Thank you.”
“You are welcome.”
He drew a slow breath. “But it is not enough.”
“Cassian—”
“It is not enough, Alice.”
“What—”
“I need a model.”
She did not answer at once.
“A model?”
“A model, Alice.”
“For…”
“For the first thing I’ll be painting in sixteen years.”
She drew a shallow breath. “Yes.”
He turned around and went to the paint box on the small table by the window. He opened the lid and looked at the careful arrangement of pans and brushes inside, the small stoppered jars, and the tightly capped tube of linseed oil at the corner.
He stood for a long moment with his hand on the lid. Then he turned around.
“Alice.”
“Yes.”
“Take it off, please.”
“Cassian—”
“The wrapper. Only the wrapper.”
She undid the small silk tie at her neck with hands that did not shake and let the wrapper fall from her shoulders and to the floor, leaving her in the silk nightgown she had bought at Mrs. Hatcher’s. The candlelight danced across the hem at her knees as she sat down in the chair.
Cassian took a small flat brush out of the paint box.
He did not look at her at first. He set up his palette on the small table where she had laid the paint box.
He squeezed three small worms of color onto the wooden palette in the careful, familiar order of a hand that had not forgotten what to do.
He uncapped the linseed oil. He thinned the colors, mixed two of them with the small brush into a third color she could not name, and then stepped behind the easel.
He looked at her. He looked at her in the silk nightgown for a long while. He did not lift the brush.
“Cassian?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to paint?”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“The nightgown, please.”
She sucked in a breath. Holding his gaze, she put her hands on the small ribbon at her neck, untied it, eased the silk down her shoulders, her ribs, and then her hips, and let the nightgown fall onto her wrapper.
She sat back down in the chair.
She had not, in twenty-five years of being a respectable young lady of the ton, been seen naked by anyone other than her mother, her sister, or her maid.
In fact, they had not seen her naked either.
Her maid had seen her in the bath, her mother had seen her in her infancy, and her sister had seen her in her shift.
She had not been seen naked by anyone, certainly not by a man, in a candlelit studio with the pendant at her throat and her hands at her sides and her bare feet on the wooden floor. Until now.
She felt the candlelight on her skin. She felt it like a warmth on her throat and her shoulders and the inside of her thigh where his hand had touched her a week ago in the orangery.
He did not say anything. He just lifted the brush and began to paint.
Before this evening, she had thought that she would be very awkward about it. She had thought she would not, in the bright nakedness of a studio with a man she was to marry tomorrow, know what to do with her hands.
She had been right, she did not know what to do with her hands, but the not-knowing was not awkward. It was something else. It was the held attention of a body looked at for the first time by a person who meant to take it seriously, and the seriousness was very steadying.
Cassian painted for perhaps a quarter of an hour without speaking.
He painted with the sharp focus she had seen on the dance floor and in the orangery and on the small wooden landing at the lake.
He did one thing at a time, and he did it entirely. While he worked, his face went through several expressions she had not seen on it before this evening. At the corner of his mouth, there was a small private satisfaction she had never seen on him in any room of any house she had been in with him.
He was, she realized, happy.
He was happy. In the two years she had known him, she had never seen him happy.
She felt her breath catch at the back of her throat.
“Cassian?”
“Yes.”
“Is it any good?”
He looked up at her over the top of the easel, with that private satisfaction still on his face, and answered very quietly, “Better than I could have ever imagined.”
She did not answer. She did not answer because the unguarded gladness in his voice was much larger than any answer she could have given. Instead, she sat very still on the chair in the candlelight, feeling the warm air caress her skin.
He eyed her for a moment. The private satisfaction vanished from his face and was replaced with the look he had worn in the orangery.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“Are you cold?”
“No.”
“Are you well?”
“Yes.”
“Are you—”
“I am not cold, Cassian.”
He set the brush down and stepped around the easel to her chair. He came to her slowly, each step measured and unhurried.
Clearly, at some point in the last quarter of an hour, he had decided what he was going to do.
He stopped in front of her, leaned down, gently lifted her hand from her lap, and put it against the soft swell of her breast. “There.”
“Cassian…”
“And here.” He took her other hand and put it just as gently between her thighs.
“Cassian.”
“Like that, Alice. For a moment. While I paint.”
He went back behind the easel.
Alice did not breathe. She sat with one hand on her breast and the other between her thighs.
She could feel a flush crawl up her throat and cheeks.
She could feel the warmth of her palm against the swell of her breast and the light pressure of her fingers against her core which she had never touched while another person was looking at her.
Her nipple had pebbled under her palm. Her folds were very warm against her fingers, and damp in a way she had not expected. She could feel the heat of Cassian’s attention from across the room. She could see the tremors in the brush which had not been there earlier.
He painted for perhaps another two minutes. Then he set down the brush and came back to her chair.
He went down on one knee in front of her. This time, he did not keep a careful distance. He put his hands very lightly on her knees and looked up at her face.
“Alice.”
“Yes.”
“May I?”
“Yes.”
He gently spread her knees and lowered himself between them. He took the hand between her thighs and lifted it onto the armrest. He held her gaze for a long second then he bent his head.
At first, Alice did not know what he was doing. She did not know because what he was doing was something she had not been told to expect by any book or any governess or any mother in the careful library of her education.
She had not been told this was something a man did.
She had not been told this was something a woman could receive.
She had been told a great many things about what would happen between her and her husband on her wedding night, but none of them had prepared her for the first soft, warm press of his mouth against the very place his fingers had touched in the orangery a week ago.
She made a sound that was not becoming of an earl’s daughter. It was the moan of a wanton. She bit her lower lip hard to suppress the next one.
Cassian looked up at her. “Alice, no one can hear us. Joanna sleeps in the south wing. The kitchens are three floors below us.”
“Cassian—”
“Make any sound you like.”
He bent his head again, and she let out another moan.
This time, he touched her with the careful patience he brought to everything. The first touch was only his lips, soft, almost dry, at the place only he had ever touched. He held it there until she grew used to it.