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 turnedher 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.
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.
