“I know, my love.”
“I just wanted to climb.”
“I know. Hush. We have you.”
“It hurts very much.”
“Of course, it does. You have fallen on it. Brave boy. Very brave boy. What is your name?”
“Lucas.”
“Lucas, I am Alice. This is the Duke.”
The boy, who had not until this moment registered that there was a duke in the room, looked up with very large eyes. “Your Grace.”
“Lucas.”
“I am sorry, Your Grace.”
“Why are you sorry, Lucas?”
“I was climbing. Mama said I was not to climb. The library steps are not for climbing. The library steps are for the Duke’s books that are too high, Mama said.”
“Your mother was correct, Lucas.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You shall not climb again.”
“No, Your Grace.”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“Is his ankle broken?”
Alice, who had her hand on the boy’s ankle and was pressing very gently on the bone, shook her head once. “It is not broken. It is bruised. He shall not walk on it for the rest of the evening. Lucas, can you put your arms around my neck?”
The boy nodded and put his arms around her neck.
With his bare feet against the front of her pristine bodice and the library steps still lying where they had fallen, she picked him up.
She picked him up with a thoughtless competence, the unthinking ease of someone who had clearly done it a great many times before. She settled him on her hip. She braced his weight on her forearm, cradled the back of his fair head with her free hand, and kissed his temple with a grave, practiced tenderness that looked like long habit. She did not, at any point, register that Cassian was looking at her.
Hewaslooking at her. He had been standing at the door to the small library for perhaps thirty seconds and had not, in any of those thirty seconds, breathed.
Alice was holding a child.
Alice was holding a child in his house, bouncing him on her hip without seeming to realize it, and cradling the back of his head.
Just like that, he was transported to a place he had not previously been.
He saw very clearly a dark-haired, gray-eyed boy on her hip, her hand on the back of his head, and her lips just above his temple, and she was sayingHush, my lovein the soothing way she had just said it to Lucas.
He could not breathe.
“Cassian.”
