Chapter 29
The flowers led her up.
They trailed through the hall and up the great staircase and across the gallery where the former Duke’s portraits hung.
A small blue flower was painted directly on the gilt frame of the largest and grimmest of them—a cold-faced man in a dark coat forty years ago. It sat on the former Duke’s frame like a thumbed nose.
Alice gave a helpless, wet laugh and walked on.
The flowers led her up the second staircase then the third, reminding her of the way she had crept up two nights ago with a paint box wrapped in brown paper. Her heart climbed into her throat and stayed there.
At the top landing, the painted flowers gathered into a great bright crowd around a door she knew.
The door stood open.
Alice stopped on the threshold. Inside, in the golden morning light filtering through the high window with its dust sheet pulled all the way back, in the middle of the floor she had cleared two nights ago for an easel, sat Cassian.
He was in his shirtsleeves on the bare floorboards with his long legs folded under him in a manner she had never seen him permit himself—entirely without dignity, entirely without order. In his lap, gnawing with great seriousness on the cuff of his shirt, was a puppy.
It was small and brown and absurd. It had ears too large, paws too large, and a tail flicking like a metronome. As soon as Alice stepped into the doorway, it caught sight of her, fell over its front paws in excitement, righted itself, and bolted off Cassian’s lap toward her.
“I do not understand,” Alice murmured.
Cassian rose to his feet. He did it the way he did everything—in one controlled motion. Except he had paint on his hands and his jaw, and his black hair was not perfectly neat, and he was looking at her as though she were the only soul in England.
“This is Jewel,” he began. “She is eight weeks old, and she is, by every account, extremely badly behaved. She has already disgraced herself twice on the morning room carpet. She is my wedding gift to you.”
Alice bent and gathered the puppy in her arms because she could not help it. It squirmed against her and licked her chin.
For one moment, she pressed her face into its soft, warm fur because it was easier than looking at him, and then she lifted her head.
She was furious because being furious was much safer than the alternative.
“If this is some sick, twisted joke, Cassian, I do not—”
“It is not a joke.”
“You let me go. You stood in the chapel, you opened the door, and you let me run. You stood in my father’s path so that I could run, and now, you bring me here with arrows and flowers a-and a puppy, and I cannot—I do not understand what you want from me.”
“This is me showing you that I would change everything,” he said.
“That I would become everything you need me to be for one moment with you. For the smallest, meanest, most undeserved moment with you, I would tear this entire house down to its foundations and paint flowers on the rubble.” He took one step toward her, no more, as if he did not trust himself with two.
“I am showing you because I have never spoken a tender word out loud. I do not know how to do it, so I did it in paint, like a coward all over the house, because it was the only language I had.”
Alice held the puppy against her chest like a shield and pressed her lips to its soft head because it was easier than looking at him.
“The fact that you even believe—” Her voice cracked. “The fact that you even think for one moment that I would need anything else but—”
“But…?”
“Nothing.” She set her jaw. “It does not matter. I want to leave. I want to go home. None of this makes any sense, and I cannot stand here in your terrible, beautiful studio and…”
She turned to leave and got as far as the door.
His hand closed around her wrist. Not hard but the way it had on the terrace at Almack’s, by the lake, behind the orange tree. And as always, it stopped her dead, the whole length of her going still at the touch, traitor that her body was.
He gently took the puppy out of her arms and set it down on the floor where it immediately attacked his bootlace. Then he turned her by the wrist and shoulder until she was facing him, and he did not let go.
“I will not let you go again,” he said. “I let you go once. I stood in my own chapel and gave you the door because I thought it was decent, but I was wrong. It was a cowardly act dressed up as a decent one, and I have spent two days learning the difference. I am not doing it again.”
His voice was not cold. There was nothing cold in it.
“Do you want to make a mess, Alice? In my perfect house in my ordered life in every corner of me that I have kept tidy for thirty years so that no one would ever see what was underneath? Yes. The answer is yes.
“Do you want a puppy in the house when I said I would never have one? Yes. Do you want me to laugh out loud at dinner and lose at archery and paint where the whole world can see? Yes. Anything. Anything you want, Alice, from this morning to the end of my life, the answer is yes.”
Alice’s eyes welled with tears. The puppy had undone his bootlace.
“What about children?” she whispered.
He went still.
“Is the answer still yes, Cassian? Because that is the only one that matters, and you cannot—you must not say it just to keep me, do you hear me? I will not let you give up your dream just because I am standing here, crying in your studio. You told me in the lake. You told me why. I understood you. I have not once stopped understanding you. You will not change the truest part of yourself just because—”
“Dreams change,” Cassian cut in.
She blinked at him.
“Mine has,” he continued. “It changed two days ago in this room in this chair with an old man asking me one cruel question. It has not changed back, and it won’t.”
He gently took her face in both his paint-stained hands, the way she had seen him take nothing else in all the time she had known him.
“I spent my whole life believing that to want a child was to want to make it into something because that is the only fatherhood I was ever shown.
And then I watched you. I watched you with your sister, whom you taught to laugh on purpose.
I watched you on the floor of a borrowed room with a frightened boy in your arms, whom you rocked and asked where it hurt as if you had been doing it since the beginning of the world.
“And I understood too late that there is another way to do it, that you would do it the other way, that you would never make a small loud person into anything but more of itself, and that I, standing beside you, with your hand to keep me honest, would not be my father.”
His thumbs stroked across her cheekbones.
“I do not want no heirs, Alice. I never wanted no heirs. I wanted no cruelty. I have had the two confused for thirty years, and you have spent three weeks beating them apart in me. I am so tired of being afraid of a dead man. I want a house full of children. I want it so bad that I can barely breathe. I want it with you and only with you.”
Alice was crying in earnest now, helpless, hiccupping, loud sobs.
“I left my heart here two nights ago,” she sniffed.
“I gave you a paint box and told myself it was the gift, but it was not the gift. The gift was my whole heart. I left it in this room with you, and I have been walking around Westbury without it for two days. I did not want to ask you to change, Cassian. I swear to you I did not, not ever, because I fell in love with you exactly as you are—the scowl and the rules and the dreadful cold voice. All of it.”
“I know.”
“And you are not supposed to change for me. That is not how it is supposed to—”
“Alice.” He bent his head until his brow rested against hers.
“Love changes you without asking. It does not request your permission. It seeped through every crack I had spent my life sealing up and changed me where I stood. I have never in my life felt more like a man and less like my father’s son than in the moment I pictured you carrying my child. ”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “I am yours. I have been yours since you told a table full of strangers that your favorite thing about me was my scowl. And I am asking you, with no dignity left and paint on my hands and a badly behaved dog ruining my boot, to let me make you mine.”
And for the first time, Alice Lockwood, who had spent her whole life giving everything she had away, stopped giving the only thing she had never let herself keep.
She reached up, took his face in her hands as he had taken hers, and said, “Yes.”
Then she kissed him.