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 kneesapart 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.”
