They bought him dinner.
All four of them got extravagantly drunk, the way nothings did. But they were not nothings, not any of them, not any longer.
Cassian walked home through the late summer dark, across the Langton park to a house painted over with flowers and a dog that had eaten his boots and a studio with the windows open. He stood for a long while in the empty hall, looking up the great staircase, and thought,Two more days.
For the first time in his life, he found that he felt only joy at the thought. The simple, uncomplicated joy of a man counting down the days to the best day of his life.
Two more days.
He could hardly wait.
EPILOGUE
Two days later, Alice was married, properly this time.
She walked down the aisle of the same chapel on the same warm stone past the same flowers, though there were a great many more of them now, and Joanna had insisted on cornflowers among the lilies.
Blue and yellow, the colors of the painted arrows, which no one but the bride and groom understood and which made Alice laugh out loud halfway down the aisle, a thing the ton would discuss for a fortnight.
She wore the same gown. At her throat, she wore the small gray pendant which had been restored to its place by her groom’s hand on the chapel steps not ten minutes ago.
And this time, she was attended not only by her sister but also by Joanna, who was walking solemnly behind them in apricot silk, carrying a white wicker basket trimmed with ribbon in which laya small brown puppy who had been bathed against her will and who regarded the entire proceedings with deep suspicion and one chewed ear.
At the end of the aisle stood Cassian.
This time, he did not look like a man at a funeral. Richard, who was standing next to him, had remarked on it in the vestry. He had stressed that he had never in eleven years seen Cassian look like that, and Cassian had told him to be quiet and had not been able to stop the corner of his mouth from twitching. Richard had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder and said nothing more.
On his other side stood Victor, sober as promised, holding the ring in a hand that was not entirely steady. And behind him, in the front pew where the bridegroom’s family sat, Matthew leaned on his cane, his one good eye fixed on the doors. His weathered face held a look of such open, unguarded pride that Cassian had to look away from him or risk losing his composure before the bride had even arrived.
The whole ton had come.
Cassian understood perfectly that they had for the spectacle, to see whether the Lockwood girl who had jilted the Duke of Langton in this very chapel a week ago would do it again.
They had come to witness either a triumph or a disaster, not greatly minding which so long as it could be discussed at dinner.
He found he did not care in the least what they had come for. Let them watch. Let them see exactly what the Ice Duke looked like when the doors opened and the woman he loved walked down the aisle toward him a second time, choosing him with his pendant at her throat and her bright face turned up to his.
Let them write that in their scandal sheets. He hoped they would.
Daphne lowered her sister’s hand into his.
Alice felt his fingers close around hers, warm and certain, and she looked up into his face.
He looked down into hers, and there was a moment, before the vicar began, when neither of them heard a single word.
There were only the two of them, who had begun in a ballroom with an insult and a stolen kiss and who had hated each other thoroughly and on principle. And who had, somewhere between an orangery and a studio, stopped lying to themselves and started being more true to one another than either had ever been to anyone.
“You came,” he murmured under the vicar’s opening words, so only she could hear. “You walked the whole way down. I confess I watched the doors.”
“There was no carriage this time,” she murmured back. “I looked. I was rather hoping to be difficult.”
“I gave the carriage to Joanna. She has plans.”
“God help us all.”
“Lady Alice.” His thumb stroked over her knuckles. “Eyes on me.”
She kept her eyes on him, on the gray eyes that were not cold and never had been, through the whole service, through the vows that they both spoke sincerely and wholeheartedly.
