“You are wearing blue.”
“It was laid out. It does not mean anything.”
“Of course.”
She could hear the smile in his voice.
She did not turn her head.
The dining table was set for eight.
Cassian made the introductions like a man who had hosted many dinners.
Richard Sutton, the Duke of Ronvale, who bowed over Alice’s hand and kissed it without taking his eyes off her face, which was a manner Alice had heard about and not previously experienced and which she found she liked less than she had expected.
Matthew Turner, the Viscount Greencliff, who bowed without flourish, looked at her with a single steady eye, and said, “Lady Alice. A pleasure.”
Victor Hamilton, the Earl of Everlong, an old friend of Cassian’s from boyhood, who bowed with great gallantry and declared himself enchanted.
For some reason, she did not like Lord Everlong. It was an instinctive reaction, and she did not trust it. She resolved not to act on it. She smiled at him pleasantly, before she was led to her chair.
The chair was at Cassian’s right hand. The footman pushed her in. She arranged her skirts, folded her hands in her lap, and did her best to remember every rule her mother had ever taught her about dinner conversation which she had not, on the evidence of the past twenty-four hours, been applying properly.
She caught Cassian staring at her. She caught him a second time, just as the footman served the soup, and a third time when the conversation moved to the weather. By the time she had begun to entertain the possibility that he had been looking at her for the past five minutes, she was no longer thinking about her mother’s rules at all.
“I had no idea,” the Duke of Ronvale said, midway through it, “that Cassian had any interest in any lady at all. I had begun to worry for him, to be quite honest, Lady Alice.”
Alice cleared her throat. “That is because we did not wish to make Joanna uncomfortable,” she said smoothly. “I would not have wanted her to think I was her friend merely to spend time with her brother.”
She lifted her spoon. Her hand was shaking. She could feel it shake. She willed it not to shake. It continued to shake. She closed both hands around it, and her glove caught in the silver. She steadied it. She had barely lifted the spoon again when she felt something warm press against her thigh.
She froze.
It was a thigh. More specifically, it was Cassian’s thigh, pressing against hers under the table with the steadiness of a thing that intended to remain there.
He was not looking at her. He was looking at the Duke of Ronvale with the polite attention of a man following his guest’s conversation, and his thigh was pressing against hers as though the touch had not occurred to either of them.
Her hand stopped shaking. She lifted the spoon, got the soup to her mouth, and then set the spoon down. The pressure of his thigh did not lessen. It remained steady and warm throughout the soup course. She did not look at him even once. Her whole body flushed.
“My dear Lady Alice,” the Viscount said from across the table. “If I might be so bold…”
“Of course, My Lord.”
“When did you and His Grace first realize you had feelings for one another?”
The whole table looked at her.
“Last week,” she answered.
“Two years ago,” Cassian said at the same time.
She watched in horror as the entire table paused.
“Last week,” she repeated carefully.
“I was speaking of when I first realized I had feelings for her,” Cassian said, smooth as cream. “Lady Alice, naturally, was much slower.”
“I was not slower, I was?—”
