It was perhaps the strangest accomplishment of her life that she did not stop dancing. Her feet kept moving. Her hand moved with his. Her expression, she was almost certain, did not change.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes, My Lady.”
“Four minutes?”
“Four minutes.”
“And what is to happen in those four minutes?”
“You shall stand on the terrace, look out at the garden, admire the moon if there is one, and not think about me at all.”
“And in the fifth?”
He did not smile. He did not, she realized, smile through any of it.
“In the fifth,” he said, “we shall find out.”
CHAPTER 10
The terrace was small.
It was, in fact, hardly a terrace at all. It was a narrow stone balcony at the back of the building, hidden from the ballroom by a pair of long velvet curtains and from the garden below by a low iron railing. It was usually used by ladies who needed a moment from the heat and by gentlemen who wished to smoke. Alice had gone there once before, three Seasons ago, for the first reason. She had not gone there for the second.
Tonight, she was there for neither.
She did not know what she was doing there. Well, that was not exactly true. She knew what she was there for. She had merely declined to look directly at the thing she knew because looking directly at it required her to acknowledge that she had walked out of a crowded ballroom to a dark balcony because Cassian Arnolds had, half an hour ago, told her to wait for him there and that she had done it and that her heart was hitting her ribcage hard enough that she could hear it in her ears.
The garden below was very dark. There was a moon. It was small, white, and indifferent.
Alice rested her gloved hand on the iron railing and looked at the moon exactly as Cassian had instructed her to because she had decided at some point on the way here that if she was to be obedient, she was at least going to be obedient with a great deal of irony about it.
Two minutes had passed.
She counted the iron rosettes on the railing. There were nine of them. She counted them again. There were still nine.
She was about to count them a third time when the curtain at her back moved, and a hand wrapped around her waist and pulled.
She did not cry out.
She was rather proud of herself for not crying out because the hand was very firm and the pull was very fast. She was off her feet for half a heartbeat and landed against a chest she knew the smell of before she knew anything else because she had been thinking about his smell at the dinner two nights ago on the ride over which was a thing she had also declined to look at directly.
“Hush,” he said, his voice low. “Hush, Alice.”
“Your Grace—” “Quiet.”
She turned in his arms. He let her turn, but he did not let her step back. His hands stayed where they were—one on her waist, one on the small of her back—and she pressed her gloved hands flat against his chest because she had to put them somewhere and she did not, after the dinner table, trust herself to leave them at her sides.
She could feel his heartbeat through the broadcloth. It was, she registered with a small wave of satisfaction, not steadier than her own.
“You asked me to wait for you here,” she said.
“I did.”
“It is a great deal more scandalous than a kiss in a ballroom.”
“It is.”
