And around the arrows, painted with no care at all for the perfect gray stone of a house that had never in its life been permitted asingle object out of place, was a riot of flowers. Painted flowers everywhere. Splashed up the steps and across the threshold and trailing through the hall in a bright impossible mess, made by a hand that did not seem to care in the least who saw it, leading her in and on and up.
Alice stood very still on the steps of the chapel she had run from with her heart skittering like a hare and followed the painted flowers with her eyes all the way to the open doors.
For the longest moment of her life, she could not make her feet move at all.
Then she lifted her wrinkled skirts and stepped inside.
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 wasfuriousbecause 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 itsfoundations 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…”
