Chapter 30
Cassian kissed her like a man parched.
There was nothing careful about it, none of the deliberate control he had used with her on the terrace and in the orangery, none of the cool pauses with which he had ruined her composure through three weeks of a courtship that was supposed to be false.
He kissed her as though the chapel had taught him something about how little time a man was promised.
Alice gave it back to him, rising on her tiptoes, both hands fisted in the front of his shirt, kissing him with two days of grief and three weeks of wanting and a whole life’s worth of suppressed desire.
Somewhere below them, the puppy gave up on the bootlace and curled up with a small sigh on the warm floorboards.
“Wait,” Alice gasped against his mouth. “Wait, the door…”
Cassian reached out one long arm without breaking the kiss and pushed the door shut. The latch fell, and they were alone at last in the studio, save for the puppy, bathed in the golden light.
He drew back only far enough to look at her, and the look itself was like a touch, trailing over her face, her bare throat, and the wrinkled front of her gown.
“I have thought about this,” he admitted in a low voice, “in this room with you in that chair until I could not paint a straight line.”
“I know,” she whispered. “I was the one in the chair.”
The corner of his mouth quirked up, that one-sided smile she had been collecting like a miser throughout the Season.
Then he reached into his coat and drew out the pendant, warm from where he had carried it against him since the altar.
He brought it around her throat and fastened the small clasp at the back of her neck, the way he had in her father’s orangery, the way she had undone it in front of two hundred people.
The gray stone settled into the hollow at the base of her throat, where it belonged.
“I kept it for you,” he said, very low. “I was never going to give it to anyone else.”
And then his hands were on the small buttons down her back.
They were not, she noticed, entirely steady.
The famously steady hands of the Duke of Langton were not steady at all, and that, more than anything he had said, undid her.
She turned without being asked. She felt the gown loosen before his mouth came down on the bare top of her spine, soft and reverent. A shiver racked through her as the crumpled silk slid down her body and pooled on the painted floor.
Now, she stood in nothing but her thin shift and the pendant, and she did not feel cold, and she did not feel afraid. She felt looked at. She felt, for the first time in her entire life, wanted.
He stepped around in front of her. He took the hem of her shift in both hands and slowly drew it up over her hips, her waist, her breasts, her lifted arms, and he let it fall to the floor.
There was nothing left on her but the small gray diamond lying in the hollow at the base of her throat.
For a long moment, Cassian studied her. His gray eyes trailed down her figure and back up, unhurried and thorough, the way they trailed over a canvas he meant to get right. Under that look, she felt herself flush from her hairline all the way to her chest.
“You are blushing,” he said softly. “Everywhere. I want to know how far down it goes.”
“Cassian.”
“I have wondered that for two years,” he rasped.
He rested his hands on her waist, warm and not quite steady, and drew her against him. He bent his head and pressed his mouth to the side of her neck, and her breath left her in a rush.
His mouth moved lower, along the slope of her collarbone and the swell of her breast, before it closed around her erect nipple and drew. A sound she had never made before tore out of her.
She felt him smile against her skin.
He did it again, slower, his tongue working the stiff little peak while one large hand came up to cup her other breast and roll its aching tip with his thumb. She was holding onto his shoulders now, only to stay on her feet.
“That,” he murmured against her, “is one. I have a great many more in mind for you.”
He went down on his knees in front of her, this proud man who had been cold for so long, and looked up the whole length of her bare body with his warm hands spread over her hips. The sight of him there, of what he plainly meant to do, made her knees tremble.
He felt it.
He turned her and sat her down on the edge of the old velvet armchair, in a long golden shaft of sunlight, and pulled her knees apart with a slow, deliberate gentleness that almost made her melt.
“Cassian, you cannot mean to…”
“I mean to. I have wanted to do it again since the orangery. Lie back, Alice. Let me.”
She lay back against the velvet, and she let him.
He told her exactly what he was going to do before he did it. Then he lowered his dark head between her thighs and pressed his mouth to her aching center, and the room went white at the edges.
This time, she knew what was coming, and it undid her no less for the knowing.
He pressed his tongue against the most secret part of her and worked her with the same slow, attentive, deliberate patience he had taught her body to crave in the orangery.
He learned her by the sounds she made. He found the spot that made her gasp and lingered on it, circling, drawing the feeling up and out of her.
When her hips lifted helplessly off the velvet, he slid one long finger into her and then a second. The stretch and the clever curls in time with his kisses drove every thought clean out of her head.
Her fingers fisted in his black hair. Her heels pressed into his back. Sunlight lay hot across her bare throat. Pressure started gathering in her belly again, except there was no one here to be silent for.
So, she was not silent. She cried out his name, and then she cried it out again, louder.
The pleasure wound tighter and tighter under his mouth and his hands until it became unbearable, and then it broke, and she came apart on his tongue in long shuddering waves.
He held her through every one of them and did not stop, drawing each last pulse out of her until she was trembling and boneless and begging, “Please, please, come here.”
He came up over her.
He lifted her from the chair, dragged the dust sheet one-handed off the easel, and spread it on the floorboards. Then he laid her down on it and came down with her. At some point, his clothes had come off, so there was nothing left between them.
Alice felt his hard length against the inside of her thigh, and she understood dimly, through the warm haze he had left her in, exactly what came next.
She was not afraid of that either.
She reached down between their bodies and took him in her hand, learning the heat and the weight of him. He made a sound against her shoulder that no ballroom in England would ever have expected of the Duke of Langton.
“Alice.” His voice was wrecked. He lowered his forehead to hers. “Look at me. Are you certain? Are you with me?”
“I am with you.” She guided him to where she was aching and empty, and she lifted her hips. “I have been with you since the rose garden. Eyes on me, Your Grace.”
He pushed into her slowly.
There was a bright flash of pain as he filled her, a stretch past anything she had known, and then it gave way all at once to a fullness so complete that she gasped and clutched at his back.
He held still, buried inside her, shaking with the effort of holding back.
“All right?” he managed.
“More,” she begged.
He gave her more.
He drew back and pushed home again, slow and deep, and then again, finding a rhythm she rose to meet, the two of them moving together in the golden light.
His breath came in ragged bursts against her ear. Broken sounds spilled out of her with every stroke.
His old command came back to her, now turned into a plea, murmured against her mouth between one breath and the next. Stay with me. Eyes on me, Alice.
She stayed. She kept her eyes on his gray ones, and she watched the famous control leave him stroke by stroke.
The Ice Duke came entirely undone above her and inside her, and she rose to meet each deep thrust and gave back every bit of what he gave.
The pleasure built a second time, faster and harder, wound tight at the place where their bodies were joined.
She told him so, in words she would have died before speaking anywhere on earth but here, and he answered by moving his clever fingers between them and stroking her swollen bud until she shattered around him.
When she clamped down on him, he could hold himself no longer. He drove deep into her and stayed there, and she felt him spill into her with a long helpless shudder.
His jaw fell slack in the sunlight, and her name tore out of him like the one word he had been forbidden all his life and had only just been given leave to speak.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the armchair beneath the dust sheet Cassian had dragged down to cover them, and the sun moved across the floor, and the puppy snored.
Alice rested her cheek on his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.
“I will have to marry you now,” she murmured. “You have thoroughly compromised me. In an attic. Twice over.”
She felt him laugh. Not the small one-sided laugh but an actual laugh, low and surprised, rumbling in his chest under her ear. The unguarded laugh she had never heard from him before.
She pressed her smile against his skin and thought she might keep that sound, too, like the smile. Like everything.
“You compromised me,” he said. “I would like that established for the record. You came to my study at midnight in a wrapper and a pendant, you led me up four flights of stairs, and you have ruined me entirely. I was a respectable man. I had a reputation for being made of ice. You have left it in pieces all over the floor of my own studio, and now, there is paint on it as well.”
“You are blaming me.”
“I am crediting you. There is a difference. And you taught it to me in this very room with a paint box. Credit is what you give the person who did the wonderful thing.” He turned his head and pressed a kiss to her hair.
“You did the wonderful thing, Alice. You have been doing it for three weeks. You walked into my ordered life and knocked everything off every shelf. You have no idea, none, what it is like for a man who has spent his whole life keeping the shelves straight to be allowed at last to let it all fall.”
She was quiet for a moment, her finger tracing idle patterns over his heart.
“I am hanging the painting in our bedroom,” he said.
“You are not. I am completely improper in it.”
“You are completely magnificent in it. It is the best thing I have ever made, and it is going on the wall where I shall see it every morning for the rest of my life. You cannot stop me; it is my house.”
“It is our house.”
He fell quiet at that, and his arm tightened round her.
“It is our house, indeed,” he agreed quietly.
Alice tilted her head back to look up at him, at the paint still on his jaw, at his disheveled black hair, at the gray eyes that had not been able to leave her face for longer than a breath since she had come through the door.
“This is the happiest day of my life,” she said, and she was astonished to find that she meant it with her whole heart.
On this disgraceful morning in this dusty room, jilting-bride and ruined and improper and not yet anyone’s wife, she was the happiest she had ever been.
Cassian took her lips in a slow kiss and then gathered her closer. Against her hair, he said the words she would hold to herself in the hard and easy days for the rest of their long and crowded life together.
“There are a great many more to come.”
Below them, somewhere in the disgraced and flower-painted house, a door opened, and Joanna’s voice floated up four flights of stairs, bright and entirely unrepentant.
“I am back, and I have brought your mother, Alice, and the vicar says he can do Thursday. And is anyone going to explain why the puppy has dragged one of my brother’s boots all the way down here?”