Chapter 24 #3
Then his tongue came. At first, Alice only felt warmth. Then she felt a slow pressure in a place she had not known could make her feel such pleasure. He lingered there long enough for her to learn that he had found it.
Then he worked it.
He worked it with the same disciplined slowness with which he had lifted her skirts in the orangery. He did not hurry. He did not, on any account, hurry. The slowness was, she eventually understood, the cruelty of it.
He could have moved faster, but he did not. He was making her, in the candlelit studio at the top of his house, learn the precise rhythm at which he meant to undo her.
Over the next quarter of an hour, she made several sounds.
Her head tipped back against the chair, and her hands gripped the carved wooden armrests with a strength she had never applied to a piece of furniture. The candlelight danced on the underside of her chin and the inside of her bare arms, yet she was not paying attention to any of it.
She was paying attention to one thing: the small, warm, steady pressure of his mouth, and the change in it when she made a particular sound. The pressure grew a degree firmer, a fraction faster, the moment she moaned.
He was reading her body.
He was reading her body, and her body was telling him everything.
The pressure changed again by some degree she could not have afterward measured until it was exactly right.
She drew a breath and could not let it out. Her hips tilted toward him without her permission. He made a low sound in the back of his throat that traveled to a place she had not known sound could travel, and she felt the slow gathering of pressure in her core.
She climbed.
She climbed for a great while. She climbed in fast small steps that she could feel in her thighs and in the soft place above her hips and at the back of her neck. The chair under her was, she understood very distantly, the only solid thing she had hold of.
She climbed until she could not climb any further. She climbed until the candlelit studio briefly went white at the edges, and she fell apart in his hands.
He held her through it.
She felt the steady pressure of his palms against the inside of her knees and the warmth of his mouth gentling very slowly as she came down from her peak.
Cassian did not stop immediately. He waited until she had stopped trembling. Then he pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her thigh and the soft spot above her hip and rose.
She felt him hold her before he lifted her into his arms and sat down on the chair with her naked in his lap and his face in her hair.
“Cassian.”
“Yes, my girl.”
She closed her eyes, pressed her face against the side of his neck, and she stayed there for a long while.
“Cassian.”
“Yes.”
She could not say it. She pressed her face harder against the side of his neck.
“You are leaving tomorrow,” he murmured. “Aren’t you?”
She felt him go still beneath her. He went still in the way he had in the library when she had said, “Cassian, you told them. You told people you want no heirs. You embarrassed me. You… hurt me.”
He rested his chin on the crown of her head. “Alice.”
“I cannot do this anymore, Cassian. I have tried. I have tried for a week. I have tried in your house and in your orchard and in your lake and in your gallery and here in your studio, and I cannot. I do not hate you. I think that you would make a great father in another life with another woman. I cannot force you to be one for me. I have dreamt of a family all my life, Cassian—” She stopped and breathed.
“And you have a great many qualities you have been denying for sixteen years. If we do this, we will only hurt each other. We will hurt each other for forty years over this thing we cannot agree on. I won’t allow us to become those people. I simply won’t.”
He did not answer.
“I think you should find a wife who does not want children, Cassian. I think you should find one who does not look at a kitchen maid’s son the way I do.”
“Alice—”
“I just hope—” She laughed against his neck. “I just hope you will never paint her. Or, if you do, I hope you will give her a mustache.”
“Alice.” He drew a slow breath. She could feel him holding himself together for her sake. “I wish I were the best choice for you.”
“You could become that.”
“Could I?”
“In another life, Cassian. Yes.”
“Alice.”
“Maybe,” she murmured against his throat, “I am not the perfect choice for you. Maybe I never was.”
She lifted her head and kissed him.
She kissed him on the mouth with her wedding gown draped over a chair downstairs and the promised carriage waiting behind the chapel and her hand on his face, and said, “Good night, Your Grace.”
She slid off his lap, picked up the silk nightgown and wrapper from the floor, and slowly put them on with her back to him. She could not look at him while she did it. She tied the small ribbon at her neck with hands she could no longer feel.
She went to the door and stopped. “Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“The painting… Please finish it.”
She stepped out of the room without waiting for his answer.