He did not answer.
“I think you should find a wife who does not want children, Cassian. I think you should find one who does not look at a kitchen maid’s son the way I do.”
“Alice—”
“I just hope—” She laughed against his neck. “I just hope you will never paint her. Or, if you do, I hope you will give her a mustache.”
“Alice.” He drew a slow breath. She could feel him holding himself together for her sake. “I wish I were the best choice for you.”
“You could become that.”
“Could I?”
“In another life, Cassian. Yes.”
“Alice.”
“Maybe,” she murmured against his throat, “I am not the perfect choice for you. Maybe I never was.”
She lifted her head and kissed him.
She kissed him on the mouth with her wedding gown draped over a chair downstairs and the promised carriage waitingbehind the chapel and her hand on his face, and said, “Good night, Your Grace.”
She slid off his lap, picked up the silk nightgown and wrapper from the floor, and slowly put them on with her back to him. She could not look at him while she did it. She tied the small ribbon at her neck with hands she could no longer feel.
She went to the door and stopped. “Cassian.”
“Yes.”
“The painting… Please finish it.”
She stepped out of the room without waiting for his answer.
CHAPTER 25
On the morning of his wedding, Cassian dressed with great care and no expectation.
He stood in front of the long mirror in his room while his valet did the small, precise work at his cuffs and his throat. He watched the man do it and thought of nothing he was willing to keep.
His coat was the dark blue he had chosen because Joanna had said the gray one made him look like a headstone. His cravat was tied in the arrangement his father had favored which Cassian had not bothered to change in twelve years because changing it would have required thinking about it and thinking about it would have required remembering the hand that had first tied it.
His boots had been polished twice. His room was very neat. Everything was exactly where it should be which was how he had always wanted it. But this morning, it gave him no satisfaction whatsoever.
There was a carriage standing ready behind the chapel. He had ordered it himself. He had decided on it nine days ago in the back room of a modiste’s shop on Bond Street with Alice standing in front of him in a length of pale silk that he had not since then managed to forget for even one hour.
He had told her in the cold, reasonable voice he kept for what cost him most that she was not trapped. That on the morning of their wedding, a carriage would be waiting. That she could run away. That he would, if she asked it of him, drive her away himself.
He had meant it. He still meant it.
That was the trouble with telling the truth in a cold voice: a man could not afterward pretend he had not meant it.
“Your Grace.” His valet stepped back. “If I may.”
“You may.”
“It is a very nice knot.”
“It is the only knot you know.”