She undid the small silk tie at her neck with hands that did not shake and let the wrapper fall from her shoulders and to the floor, leaving her in the silk nightgown she had bought at Mrs. Hatcher’s. The candlelight danced across the hem at her knees as she sat down in the chair.
Cassian took a small flat brush out of the paint box. He did not look at her at first. He set up his palette on the small table where she had laid the paint box. He squeezed three small worms of color onto the wooden palette in the careful, familiar order of a hand that had not forgotten what to do. He uncapped the linseed oil. He thinned the colors, mixed two of them with the small brush into a third color she could not name, and then stepped behind the easel.
He looked at her. He looked at her in the silk nightgown for a long while. He did not lift the brush.
“Cassian?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to paint?”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“The nightgown, please.”
She sucked in a breath. Holding his gaze, she put her hands on the small ribbon at her neck, untied it, eased the silk down her shoulders, her ribs, and then her hips, and let the nightgown fall onto her wrapper.
She sat back down in the chair.
She had not, in twenty-five years of being a respectable young lady of the ton, been seen naked by anyone other than her mother, her sister, or her maid. In fact, they had not seen her naked either. Her maid had seen her in the bath, her mother had seen her in her infancy, and her sister had seen her in her shift.
She had not been seen naked by anyone, certainly not by a man, in a candlelit studio with the pendant at her throat and herhands at her sides and her bare feet on the wooden floor. Until now.
She felt the candlelight on her skin. She felt it like a warmth on her throat and her shoulders and the inside of her thigh where his hand had touched her a week ago in the orangery.
He did not say anything. He just lifted the brush and began to paint.
Before this evening, she had thought that she would be very awkward about it. She had thought she would not, in the bright nakedness of a studio with a man she was to marry tomorrow, know what to do with her hands.
She had been right, she did not know what to do with her hands, but the not-knowing was not awkward. It was something else. It was the held attention of a body looked at for the first time by a person who meant to take it seriously, and the seriousness was very steadying.
Cassian painted for perhaps a quarter of an hour without speaking.
He painted with the sharp focus she had seen on the dance floor and in the orangery and on the small wooden landing at the lake.
He did one thing at a time, and he did it entirely. While he worked, his face went through several expressions she had not seen on it before this evening. At the corner of his mouth, therewas a small private satisfaction she had never seen on him in any room of any house she had been in with him.
He was, she realized, happy.
He was happy. In the two years she had known him, she had never seen him happy.
She felt her breath catch at the back of her throat.
“Cassian?”
“Yes.”
“Is it any good?”
He looked up at her over the top of the easel, with that private satisfaction still on his face, and answered very quietly, “Better than I could have ever imagined.”
She did not answer. She did not answer because the unguarded gladness in his voice was much larger than any answer she could have given. Instead, she sat very still on the chair in the candlelight, feeling the warm air caress her skin.
He eyed her for a moment. The private satisfaction vanished from his face and was replaced with the look he had worn in the orangery.
“Alice.”
