Alice rested her cheek on his chest and listened to his heartbeat slow.
“I will have to marry you now,” she murmured. “You have thoroughly compromised me. In an attic. Twice over.”
She felt him laugh. Not the small one-sided laugh but an actual laugh, low and surprised, rumbling in his chest under her ear. The unguarded laugh she had never heard from him before.
She pressed her smile against his skin and thought she might keep that sound, too, like the smile. Like everything.
“You compromised me,” he said. “I would like that established for the record. You came to my study at midnight in a wrapper and a pendant, you led me up four flights of stairs, and you have ruined me entirely. I was a respectable man. I had a reputation for being made of ice. You have left it in pieces all over the floor of my own studio, and now, there is paint on it as well.”
“You are blaming me.”
“I amcreditingyou. There is a difference. And you taught it to me in this very room with a paint box. Credit is what you give the person who did the wonderful thing.” He turned his head and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You did the wonderful thing, Alice.You have been doing it for three weeks. You walked into my ordered life and knocked everything off every shelf. You have no idea, none, what it is like for a man who has spent his whole life keeping the shelves straight to be allowed at last to let it all fall.”
She was quiet for a moment, her finger tracing idle patterns over his heart.
“I am hanging the painting in our bedroom,” he said.
“You are not. I am completely improper in it.”
“You are completely magnificent in it. It is the best thing I have ever made, and it is going on the wall where I shall see it every morning for the rest of my life. You cannot stop me; it is my house.”
“It isourhouse.”
He fell quiet at that, and his arm tightened round her.
“It is our house, indeed,” he agreed quietly.
Alice tilted her head back to look up at him, at the paint still on his jaw, at his disheveled black hair, at the gray eyes that had not been able to leave her face for longer than a breath since she had come through the door.
“This is the happiest day of my life,” she said, and she was astonished to find that she meant it with her whole heart.
On this disgraceful morning in this dusty room, jilting-bride and ruined and improper and not yet anyone’s wife, she was the happiest she had ever been.
Cassian took her lips in a slow kiss and then gathered her closer. Against her hair, he said the words she would hold to herself in the hard and easy days for the rest of their long and crowded life together.
“There are a great many more to come.”
Below them, somewhere in the disgraced and flower-painted house, a door opened, and Joanna’s voice floated up four flights of stairs, bright and entirely unrepentant.
“I am back, and I have brought your mother, Alice, and the vicar says he can do Thursday. And is anyone going to explain why the puppy has dragged one of my brother’s boots all the way down here?”
CHAPTER 31
Cassian spent the week after learning how to ask for things.
He had never, in his adult life, asked for anything. He had taken, or he had been given, or he had done without in cold silence. But he had never asked because an ask could be refused, and a man who had been refused his father’s love at fourteen had decided, somewhere in the wreck of that year, never to put himself in the way of a refusal again.
It had been a tidy way to live. It had kept his pride in very good order. It had also, he was coming to understand, kept him alone in a swept-clean house for sixteen years. And now, he found, with paint under his fingernails and a badly behaved dog asleep on his bed, that he no longer had the smallest interest in his pride.
So on the second day, he had himself driven to Westbury Hall and asked.
It was not a comfortable interview. Lord Westbury received him in his study as he had three weeks earlier in London when Cassian had stood before him and informed him flatly that he intended to marry his daughter.
It was the room where the Earl had threatened Alice with banishment to the country, and where Cassian had told him in front of her that he would let no man disrespect her again, not even her father.
Neither of them sat down this time. They stood on opposite sides of the cold hearth, two tall hard men who had taken a profound and immediate dislike to one another.
The Earl looked at the Duke who had let his daughter run from a chapel in front of the whole ton, and the Duke looked at the Earl who had burned the scandal sheets before his daughter could read them. A long, uncivil silence stretched out between them.