The kiss in the ballroom had been a public thing. It had been a thing done to be seen. It had been brief and intentional and slightly chaste, the way a man kissed when he knew exactly how much he could do in front of three hundred people without being challenged.
This was not that. This was the original kiss from which the public version had been copied, and Alice felt her whole body register the difference at once.
His mouth was very warm. That was the first thing.
The second thing was that he did not move quickly. He did not move at all at first. He held his mouth to hers and let her get used to it, let her recognize it, let her decide whether she wanted to go on.
She decided. She felt herself decide.
She did not know which of her hands slid up his shoulders, and she did not know which of her feet moved forward and brought her hip closer to his, but they did.
Cassian made a sound at the back of his throat. It was a small sound, almost nothing. He had been holding himself in check, and the check had just slipped. Then he opened her mouth with his.
Alice made a sound of her own. It was not a sound she had known she could make. It was not a sound she had any business making on a terrace at Almack’s. Still, she made it.
His hand on her face slid down to her throat, which was scandalous, and then to the side of her neck, which was more scandalous, and then to her collarbone. His fingers closedaround the juncture between her shoulder and her throat, as though he had not yet noticed he was holding her.
She was on fire. She had not known a person could be on fire.
She had read about it in the books her cousin had passed her at the age of nineteen, the books that had been written by Frenchwomen and bound in plain paper. She had not believed any of it. She had thought it was an exaggeration, the way people exaggerated being struck by lightning.
She had been wrong.
She had been terribly wrong.
She rose on her tiptoes to be closer to him because her body did not know any other thing to do, and he made that sound at the back of his throat again. His mouth moved to the corner of her jaw and then to the spot just below her ear.
He lifted his head, and she pressed her face into the side of his neck and breathed him in, trying with all the discipline her mother had taught her to remember her own name.
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“I cannot?—”
“I know.”
“I cannot do this for very long, Alice. You must?—”
“I know.”
“I cannot?—”
She turned her face up to his again. She had decided, at some point in the last minute, that if he was going to stop, she would have one more first.
She kissed him this time. It was a clumsy small kiss compared to the kiss he had given her, and she felt the clumsiness of it like a flush across her cheeks, but he made a soft pleased sound, and his arm tightened around her back.
She had been right that he would not mind the clumsiness.
She had been very, very right.
“Cassian.” His Christian name slipped out.
She did not mean for it to slip out. She had not been thinking about names; she had been thinking about his mouth. The second she heard herself say it, she felt his whole body go still, the way a body went still when a wound had been touched.
She lifted her eyes to his, only to find that he was already looking down at her with an expression she did not recognize. He had never, in two years of knowing her, looked at her like that.
“Lady Alice?—”
