“You will be alone.”
“I will not be alone for very long, I do not think.” Alice did not look at the window. She did not allow herself to. “Go.”
Daphne went.
Alice was left alone for perhaps two minutes. Her mother had been waylaid by Lady Sefton on the subject of a niece. Her father was nowhere in sight which meant he was in the dining room.
She had stationed herself near the door to the small room where the matrons did their gossiping because it was a position from which one could be seen by everyone in the room without appearing to be looking at any of them.
It was an excellent position. It was also exactly the position that would force the Duke of Langton to cross the entire length of the ballroom to reach her.
“Lady Alice.” The voice came near her ear, low and raspy.
Her body recognized it before her mind did. Her body recognized it in the small soft hairs at the back of her neck which stood up. Her body recognized it before she had thought to turn, and she did not turn. She did not turn for two further breaths because she had been waiting for him to find her.
“Your Grace.”
“You look very well this evening.”
“Thank you.”
“I have been watching you for nine minutes.”
“That is a great compliment, Your Grace, considering the circumstances.”
“I have been counting.”
“Of course, you have.”
“Have I caused offense, Lady Alice?”
“I cannot imagine why you should think that.”
“There was a letter.”
She nodded. “Indeed.”
“It was not a friendly letter.”
“It was not an unfriendly one.”
“You make the distinction.”
“I do.”
She turned then. She turned because she could not, in fairness, conduct an entire conversation with her shoulder, and she turned because she had given herself ten minutes, and ten minutes had passed, and she turned because she was, in the parts of herself she would not for any inducement have admitted to, wildly curious to see what Cassian Arnolds looked like in a coat that was not black.
He was in dark blue. He looked, she registered with a quiet and treacherous warmth at the back of her throat, very well in dark blue. In fact, he looked like a man who had been deliberately dressed by a sister who did not wish him to be at all comfortable in his own clothes and who had achieved her goal.
The color did something to his eyes which were already gray and which had, in the candlelight, turned a particular shade of slate that Alice did not have any business noticing. The black of his hair against the blue was also a thing she had no business noticing, and she noticed it anyway.
She tore her gaze from his face and turned it, with great care, to his cravat. “Your Grace,” she said, “you have not called on me.”
“I am aware.”
“You have not sent flowers.”
“I am aware of that as well.”
