“Cassian—”
“Tell me to stop, Alice.”
“I cannot.”
“Tell me to stop, Alice, and I will stop, and we will go back to the morning room and have tea like respectable people. Say it.”
“I do not want you to stop.”
He made a sound that was not, this time, almost nothing. It was a soft, low sound. It was the sound of a man giving something up, and Alice felt the giving-up all through her chest.
He kissed her again. It was a deeper kiss. It was a kiss she felt in her teeth, in her tongue, in the back of her throat.
His hand had moved higher in the slow, steady way he did everything with no haste, as though he had decided a long time ago that he would not, when given this, rush through it. His palm slid from the bare skin above her garter to the inside of her thigh. His thumb traced the soft crease between her thigh and her core. He paused there for a beat she felt in her whole body and looked at her face, waiting.
She did not have any way of asking him for it. She did not have words. She did not know the words. She had not, in any of the conversations she had ever had with any person in her life, been given the words for asking a man, in a small alcove of orange trees, for the thing she was asking for at present.
So, she tilted her hip instead. She tilted her hip up against his hand by perhaps a quarter of an inch, and she watched his face go briefly very still at the small permission.
Then he moved his hand.
His fingers found a place she had not known any person could find. It was a place she had, on perhaps three occasions in her life and in her bed, found by accident in the dark with the door bolted, and she had been so deeply alarmed by finding that she had not afterward gone looking for it again.
His finger settled on it. He did not move at first. He let her feel him there. He let her feel that he knew precisely where he wasand what he was doing. And then, with the patient slowness she was beginning to understand was the most unbearable thing about him, he murmured against her mouth, “Hush. Hush, Alice, you must be quiet.”
“Cassian—”
“Hush.”
She was, she found, capable of being quiet. She was capable of pressing her forehead into the side of his neck and lightly biting down on the lapel of his coat to stop a sound from escaping her, and she did this because his fingers had reached the apex of her sex which she had never touched before.
It was nothing she had been told to expect.
It was nothing the books had told her to expect.
The books had been wrong. The books had been wrong about all of it. They had spoken of pleasure as a thing a woman submitted to in marriage, the way she submitted to a particular weather. But what was being done to her in the small alcove in her parents’ orangery on the morning after she had not slept was not weather, and she was not submitting. She was, with a particularly focused desperation, asking for more of it.
She bucked her hip against his hand without intending to, and he laughed low against the side of her hair. “Greedy thing.”
“Cassian.”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
At first, she did not register that he had called hersweetheart. She registered it later, in the part of herself that registered everything later, when the rest of her mind had quieted and was again capable of paying attention to small things.
At the moment he said it, she was not capable of paying attention to small things. She was capable of paying attention to one very specific small thin, in the very specific place where his finger was. He had moved his finger. He had… She could not… He had…
“Look at me, Alice.”
“I cannot.”
“Look at me.”
She looked at him.
His face was perhaps two inches above her own. His eyes were on hers. His gray eyes, the very precise gray of the stone at her throat. He had a particular look on his face, a look she had never seen before, and she understood with a small flutter in her chest that he was, for all his composure, for all his discipline, for all the careful patience he had brought to the alcove and the trees and the sightlines, undone.
He was undone. He was undone as much as she was. He was holding it together because one of them had to.
