“You have not, in three days, given the smallest indication that you remember I exist.”
“Lady Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
“I remember that you exist.” He said it with his eyes on hers and his face entirely composed.
Alice felt the warmth at the back of her throat slide down and settle somewhere unhelpful. She lifted her fan, snapped it open, and used it, with great determination, to fan her own face.
“Your dance card, Lady Alice.”
“My dance card?”
“You have one, I assume.”
She had one. It hung from a thin silk ribbon at her wrist. She unhooked it and held it out because there was a procedure forthis, and the procedure required her to surrender the card and him to inscribe his name in one of the slots.
She had always considered the procedure very civilized, but now, she considered it barbaric because Cassian’s gloved fingers brushed hers when he took the card, and she had to remember, immediately and forcibly, how to breathe.
He did not write his name in one of the slots. He wrote his name in all of them. Or at least he planned to, he had already gotten to the tenth one. She gently touched his hand.
“Your Grace.”
“Yes, Lady Alice.”
“You have written your name in all of them.”
“Almost. Are you stopping me from claiming the last one?”
“That is not?—”
“It is not, no.”
“There are eleven slots.”
“There are.”
“It is not done, Your Grace.”
“It is not done as a rule,” he agreed. “It is done occasionally by men whose betrotheds have written them very pointed letters.”
“My letter was not pointed.”
“Your letter was sharpened on both sides, Lady Alice.” He re-fastened the card at her wrist himself which was a thing he had no business doing since she had hands and was perfectly capable of using them. But he did it anyway with two fingers under the silk ribbon and his thumb against the inside of her wrist for half a heartbeat too long. “There. Shall we dance the first dance?”
The musicians were tuning their instruments.
Alice’s wrist was on fire where his thumb had been. “Yes, Your Grace.”
He offered her his arm, she took it, and they went to the dance floor.
They were not, she discovered as they took their places, the only couple who had drawn attention this evening. They were, however, the couple who had attracted the most attention.
She could feel the attention of the room moving with them. She could feel her mother somewhere, watching with a particular trembling pride. She could feel the eyes of Lady Sefton, who had nodded so neutrally at the door and who was now committing to memory the precise length of time Cassian’s hand rested against her back.
The musicians struck up a waltz.
The waltz was still new enough at Almack’s to be daring. It required the gentleman to place his right hand on the lady’s waist and the lady to place her left hand on the gentleman’s shoulder. More than anything else, it required that the lady and gentleman look at one another for the duration of the dance because to look anywhere else was to be terribly clumsy about it.