“Stay with me, Alice.”
“I am.”
“Don’t turn away. Stay with me. Stay?—”
“I am with you, Cassian. I?—”
Something happened.
It was not precisely a thing. It was a series of things, all at once in a place at the center of her body she had not until this moment known to exist.
She heard herself make a sound. She felt him swallow the sound out of her mouth. She felt her knees give and his arm at her back catch her. She felt him press her gently into the trunk of the orange tree behind her so that she would not fall, and she did not fall. She held onto the lapels of his coat with both her hands, and she did not for a great while know anything else.
When she could again, she found that his forehead was pressed against hers.
He was breathing harder than she had ever heard him breathe. He had not, through any of it, removed his hand. He was holdingher with both his arms with a particular careful gentleness, as if he had cracked her and meant to keep her from breaking further.
“Alice.”
“Yes.”
“Good?”
She kissed him.
She kissed him on the mouth. She kissed him with her hair coming down around her shoulders and her skirts crumpled at her thighs and her whole body thrumming, having been for the first time in her life somewhere she had not been. And she kissed him because she did not know what else to do with the feeling that had surged within her, sudden and complete.
She did not have a name for it.
She understood, against the leaves of an orange tree in her parents’ orangery with her parents’ cook in the larder and her parents’ maids at the linen room window and her parents’ gardener in his potting shed, that whatever it was, she was in very serious trouble.
She did not say anything for a long while. She did not need to. He was kissing her back. His mouth was on hers, his hand was on the small of her back, and his other hand had begun to gently smooth her skirts down. She let him smooth her skirts down,and she let him kiss her, and she let her breath come back to her, and she let her pulse settle.
“Cassian.”
“Mm?”
“I think?—”
“Daphne is coming,” he said softly. “I can hear her.”
She froze with her hand on his lapel and her hair down her back and her cheek hot against his shoulder. She heard the familiar light tread and her sister’s voice calling out her name from the far side of the orangery.
“Alice? Alice, the tea is ready.”
CHAPTER 16
Cassian pressed two fingers to Alice’s mouth.
“Steady,” he murmured. “Breathe.”
She breathed.
It was not perhaps the steadiest breath she had ever drawn, but it was a breath, and her body, which had a moment ago been a great chaotic instrument she did not recognize, came back to her in slow, careful pieces.
Her knees were her own again. Her hands were her own again. She unhooked her fingers with some difficulty from the lapels of his coat and smoothed them flat. She straightened her skirts, which he had already smoothed for her, and lifted her hand to her hair.
Her hair was, regrettably, beyond rescue.
