“Do you like the pendant?”
“Yes.”
“Turn around.”
She turned.
She did it slowly. She did it because her body had been instructed to, and this morning, it was not in any condition to disobey. She turned and looked up to find his face very close. His hand had stayed on the back of her neck through the whole turn.
He had simply let her turn within his hand, and now, she stood with her back to the orange trees and his palm on the nape of her neck, and the dark blue velvet box in her hand between them, and his face six inches above her own.
She lifted her hand to the stone at her throat and held it for a moment between her fingertips. “Did you mean to claim me, Your Grace?”
He laughed.
It was the smallest laugh. It was the laugh she had heard when they had danced together that night. It was almost nothing, a small breath through his nose.
“A jewel,” he murmured, “would not be enough for me to claim you, Alice.”
She had known he would say something like that. She had not known what it would do to her. She felt the words at her throat where the stone was, on the side of her neck where his thumb was, on the base of her spine where his hand had pressed many times. She felt the words in her knees.
“And what,” she heard herself ask, “would be?”
He did not immediately answer.
He looked at her, letting the moment stretch, and she understood with a flutter in her stomach that their walk could have ended. He could have stepped back. She could have stepped back.
He could have given her a small, polite answer involving a proper wedding and a proper ring and a proper ceremony, and they could have parted ways in the orangery, and the rest of the morning could have proceeded as a morning ordinarily did.
He did not step back. He took the velvet box from her hand, closed it, and carefully set it down on a small wrought-iron table at the side of the alcove without taking his eyes off her face.
Then he kissed her.
It was not like the kiss in the ballroom. It was not even like the kiss on the terrace. The kiss in the ballroom had been a thing done in public to settle a question. The kiss on the terrace had been a thing done in private to ask one. This was a thing done with the question already answered, and Alice felt it through her body before she had registered it.
His mouth was open on hers. His hand slid up into her hair and scattered the pins her maid had so carefully placed, and the strands came down between his fingers and over her shoulder.He made a soft sound at the back of his throat that she felt in her own chest.
“Cassian.”
“Yes, Alice.”
“They will see?—”
“They cannot see. The trees provide enough cover.”
She distantly realized what she had done. She had checked the position of the trees and the position of the cook’s larder and the position of the upstairs windows before she had brought him here. She had walked the orangery not because she wanted to see the trees but because she had been counting sightlines. She had led him, slowly and deliberately, into the only alcove in the orangery that could not be seen from any of the doors, and she had done it with the careful deliberation with which she did everything she had decided to do. She did not know whether to be furious with him or grateful.
She decided, in the next breath, to be grateful.
His other hand was on her waist. He moved it slowly so that she could, at any moment, catch his hand in her own and make him stop. He kept his eyes on her face while he did it so that she could at any moment say anything to him and he would stop.
She did not.
His hand went down from her waist to the curve of her hip to the soft, thick fall of her morning skirts, and he slowly gathered them between his fingers and lifted them.
She felt the cool air kiss her skin.
His free hand moved down her stockinged leg. His warm palm slid up the back of her calf, up the soft inside of her knee, and brushed the bare skin above her garter where no man had ever touched her before. She felt every inch of it. She felt the small, absurd hot ache of it in places she had not previously known a person could ache at all.
