A footstep. It was the first thing both of them heard.
It was unmistakable. It was on the stone of the terrace just beyond the curtain. It was light and hesitant. Whoever it belonged to was walking as quietly as she knew how.
“Hush,” Cassian breathed. “Stay still.”
He did not let her go. He did not, in fact, move at all. He merely moved his head. He turned it slightly, just enough to angle his face toward the curtain, and shifted his shoulders so that his body was between hers and the curtain. He had stepped between her and her father in her father’s study several days ago, and he had not stopped doing it since.
“Alice?” came a small voice from the other side of the curtain.
It was Daphne.
Alice felt her stomach lurch with cold horror because Daphne was the one person in the entire ballroom she had not prepared a story for. Daphne was the one person in the entire ballroom whom Alice could not, after this, look in the eye and lie to.
Daphne had come looking for her. She had been gone from her sister’s side for an hour, and her sister had decided to come and find her because, in the careful, sweet, conscientious way of a younger sister, she had wanted to be sure that her older sister was well.
The curtain moved. It moved perhaps an inch, and then it stopped. Through that inch came a thin sliver of ballroom light and Daphne’s voice, light and not in the least suspicious.
“Alice? Are you out here? Lady Sefton was asking for you.”
Cassian lowered his mouth to Alice’s ear. “Answer her,” he murmured. “Calmly.”
“Yes, Daphne. I am here. I was admiring the moon. I shall come in shortly.”
There was a pause that was perhaps two seconds long. Then Daphne, who was twenty-years-old and dreamy and absent-minded and had not the smallest inclination to look more closely at why her perfectly sensible older sister might be admiring the moon by herself on a terrace, said, “Oh, good,” let the curtain fall, and went away.
Her footsteps receded into the ballroom.
Alice did not move for the count of four breaths. Then she stepped back from Cassian. Her hands were shaking. Her hairwas beginning to come loose. She lifted her hands to it and pressed it into place then lowered her hands again.
“Your Grace.”
“Alice.”
“That was a very dangerous game, Your Grace.”
Cassian did not answer at once.
He looked at her in the faint light from the lamps in the ballroom with her hair half-down at the back and her gown wrinkled at the waist where his hand had been and the small pink mark at the side of her neck where his mouth had been. She watched his face for the steady composure he ordinarily wore in public and did not find it.
“It was worth it, Alice.”
CHAPTER 11
Cassian had been at Almack’s a good many times in his life, and he had never before found a glass of champagne so difficult to drink.
He was leaning against the wall near the fourth window with his shoulder against the paneling. He had been watching Alice dance for forty minutes. He had not put his name on her card tonight, a restraint that was looking worse with every dance. She had danced the first dance with Lord Sefton. She had danced the second with a man Cassian did not know and had decided, at the third bar of the cotillion, to dislike.
She had danced the third with Lord Dowton, which had been a quiet, civil affair in which both of them had appeared to be relieved to be dancing with someone they were now permitted to find unremarkable. She was presently dancing the fourth with a young viscount who had a great laugh and not many ideas, and who was now laughing at something she had said while looking at her mouth.
Cassian was not, as a rule, a man who broke glasses. He had not broken a glass since he was nineteen. He slid his fingers down the bowl of his glass to the stem where the glass was less susceptible to breaking.
“You will break it,” Joanna murmured at his elbow.
“I will not.”
“You are squeezing it like you are wringing the neck of a chicken.”
“Joanna.”
