Long enough that he made a sound low in his throat, a sound that was not in his vocabulary, a sound she would not have believed him capable of making before she heard it.
Long enough that she understood, with an awful and absolute clarity, that she had been wrong about what kind of trouble she was in.
He pulled away but did not step back. He kept his hand on her face for a beat longer than he had to.
Alice opened her eyes and looked at him, feeling like she was seeing him for the first time.
He was beautiful.
It was an absurd thought. It was the wrong thought. But she had known the man for two years, had sat across from him at a dozen drawing-room teas and disliked him at every single one, and somehow, she had failed to notice that he was beautiful. He had a hard face. Black hair that fell across his brow. Gray eyes that were not, at this moment, cold.
They were fixed on her. They were fixed on her face, a look in them she did not recognize. It was not triumph. It was not satisfaction. It was something closer to surprise. He was looking at her as though she had answered a question he had not meant to ask.
How did I not see that? How did I not see any of that? How could I have missed it?
She had been wrong.
She had been profoundly wrong.
He bent his head, still not letting her go. His hand had slid from her jaw, and his other hand had come up at some point to rest very lightly on the curve of her waist. She could not, at this moment, feel any of her bones.
His mouth came very close to her ear. She could feel his breath against her temple, she could faintly feel his fingers resting onher jaw, and she could feel, with sudden ridiculous clarity, every single point of her body that was within an inch of his.
The room had gone wrong around them. It had gone away. Now, it was coming back. It was almost back.
She could hear, through the returning noise, the orchestra trying to remember itself. A single violin had not stopped. A second was scrambling to find the note. Somebody somewhere barked a laugh that died at once.
Behind her, she heard her mother’s voice, pitched a quarter higher than it should have been, ask somebody where her daughter was. She closed her eyes for the length of one breath and opened them again, only to find the Duke of Langton still there, six inches away, with his thumb on her chin.
“You owe me now, My Lady,” he whispered.
CHAPTER 4
Alice could not, for the first second after he stepped back, remember how to be in a room.
The Duke had stepped back. His hand had fallen from her jaw. The string quartet had stopped. The room had not stopped, exactly, but it had narrowed around her into a series of disconnected impressions she could not yet make into a coherent picture, and she stood at the center of it with her gloved hands balled into fists and a heat behind her ribs she could not name.
She was about to be in a great deal of trouble.
That, at least, was the next thought, and it pulled her back into her body.
She straightened her spine. She unballed her hands. She looked at the Duke very briefly and saw that he had already refitted himself into the shape of a man who had not just kissed a womanin front of half the ton. The reassembly had been so swift that for a moment Alice found herself almost angry at how easily he could do it.
“Your Grace,” she forced out.
“Lady Alice.”
“My family will be here in a moment.”
“I imagine so.”
“I do not know what to say to them.”
“Allow me.”
Behind her, somebody was running. Heels on parquet, fast and uneven. Alice did not turn. She knew the sound. Her mother had been wearing those slippers all evening.
“Alice.” Her mother’s voice, pitched low, frantic, beautifully composed. “Alice, my darling, what?—”
