“It is too?—”
“It is too well-arranged for a walk in the orangery,” Cassian agreed, very quietly. “Let me.”
He turned her gently. He gathered the heavy fall of her hair in his hands, twisted it twice unhurriedly, as though he had at some point in a misspent youth learned to do up a woman’s hair more often than was strictly proper, and tucked the heaviest of the loose locks back into the coil at the nape of her neck.
He used three scattered hairpins that he had picked from her shoulder, the lapel of his coat and, with a small private smile he did not allow her to see, the leaves of the orange tree behind her.
He stepped back. “Pass.”
“Liar.”
“Acceptable, then. We have one minute. Move.”
She moved.
On legs that had not entirely come back to her yet, she walked out of the alcove, into the wider walk, and toward the door that opened onto the morning room corridor with Cassian at her elbow at a perfectly respectable distance.
His face was composed. Only Cassian Arnolds could compose a face this way on three minutes’ notice. It was a small impatient look that suggested he had been kept overlong in a glass room, making polite conversation about citrus.
Daphne met them halfway down the walk. She had a small tray with two cups of tea and three biscuits, and she had carried it down the corridor herself rather than send a maid with it which was a thing she had not done since she was nine.
She looked up at them and stopped. She did not, for an absurd few seconds, say anything at all.
“Daphne.”
“Alice.”
“Your tray.”
“Yes. Yes, the tray. Mama said I should bring it. She said that the morning room was—that the morning room would be ready. I did not know you had come this far.”
Her eyes darted from Alice’s face to Cassian’s. Then to Alice’s hair. Then to the small mark on the side of Alice’s neck where her hair had been doing a poor job of hiding it. Then back to Alice’s face.
Daphne went pink. She went pink in patches all the way down to the collar of her morning dress. In the next several seconds, she did not say anything at all.
“The tea is very kind of you, Lady Daphne,” Cassian said smoothly. “Shall we sit?”
“Yes. Yes, of course. In the morning room if Your Grace would care to.”
“Lead the way.”
Daphne led the way. She led it carefully and unevenly, her shoulders held with the particular stiffness of a person terrified that the man behind her might turn around.
Alice followed with Cassian a step behind. She could not look at her sister. She did not dare to. Until the orangery, she had not considered how she was going to manage Daphne. She had not considered anything at all.
They reached the morning room to find it occupied.
Her father was standing in front of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back in the small particular position he took up when he was waiting for someone. And he was, at the moment, waiting for them.
He had on his morning coat, and he was wearing the usual morning expression. He looked at Alice. He looked at Cassian.Then his eyes went, with the deliberate attention he reserved for things he meant to use later, to the nape of Alice’s neck where her hair was no longer entirely as her maid had left it.
“Lord Westbury,” Cassian greeted.
“Your Grace.”
“I had not expected the pleasure.”
“I had not expected to give it to you. I came down because the cook informed me that you had been in the orangery for the better part of three quarters of an hour, and my butler informed me that you came without sending word, and my younger daughter informed me, just now in the corridor as I came down, that you and my eldest daughter were so absorbed in your conversation among the trees that she could not draw your attention despite calling twice. I was concerned, Your Grace, that there might have been an emergency. I am relieved to find that there was not.”
