“I should not have done what I did the other night.”
The warmth in her chest turned cold. “Oh.”
“It was a mistake, Alice. I apologize.”
“A mistake.”
“I should not have gotten carried away. It will not happen again.”
“I do not understand. You want a wife.”
“Yes.”
“You will be married to me within the month.”
“Yes.”
“You will, on the night of our wedding, want an heir.”
Cassian went very still.
At the wordheir, he had taken half a step closer to her. She did not, in the moment, realize he had done it. His hand had come up to the trunk just at the side of her head, and his other hand braced against the trunk on the other side, and all of a sudden, she found herself caged between the tree and his body.
“And what,” he rumbled, “would a lady like you know about heirs, Alice?”
In five and twenty years of being a sister, a daughter, and a young woman, Alice had been mocked in many ways by manymen. None of them had ever mocked her in the low tone Cassian had just used. None of them had ever stood within an inch of her while they did it. None of them had ever made her feel the things she was feeling now.
She lifted her chin. “Enough to ask, Your Grace.”
He was looking at her mouth.
She thought, for the briefest second, that he was going to kiss her again, against the trunk of a plane tree in Hyde Park in the late morning of an ordinary Thursday with her chaperone fifty yards behind them on the gravel. She thought he was going to kiss her, and she thought that if he did, she was not going to step back.
She thought a great many other things, all of them quite useless, in the half-second before he closed his eyes and stepped back.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
“It does not matter. It was a mistake the other night, it would be a mistake here, and it will not happen again. I apologize.”
“But if we get married?—”
“Not if I can avoid it.”
“Because you dislike me?”
“Because I do not want an heir.”
“What?”
He had gone very still. “I do not want an heir.”
“You—”
“I do not want an heir from you. I will not want an heir from anyone. I have decided some time ago that there will not be any more Dukes of Langton after me, and the decision is not a thing I shall be revising, and there is no use in pretending it might be otherwis, because pretending will do neither of us any kindness in the long run.”
The path was very quiet. For several seconds, Alice heard nothing but the small wind in the plane trees and her own pulse in her ears.