“Alice.”
“You have lost your mind.”
“I have.”
“You—We had agreed on three weeks. Three weeks. You have not been betrothed to me a fortnight.”
“I am aware.”
“And you have, in a morning room with my father standing two paces away from you, announced our wedding for next week. On a special license.Why?”
He did not immediately answer.
He had the same look he had been wearing in the alcove before her father had come down. It was the look she had not seen on him before this morning and which she did not have a name for even now.
He drew in a breath and let it out slowly.
“Because three weeks is too long, Alice,” he said quietly.
“Too long for what?”
“For me.”
“Cassian—”
“Three weeks is too long for me to be permitted to call on you in your parents’ house every other afternoon and to pretend, in front of your father and your butler and your cook and your sister, that I am here for tea.”
He took half a step back from her which she noticed was not a step away. It was a step into the position he had taken up before that dance with eighteen inches between them and his hands clasped behind his back.
He was making himself stop.
“Three weeks is, on present evidence, too long for both of us. We shall be married at the end of next week by special license. We will host a house party first because Joanna will have my head if we don’t and because it will give you, your sister, your mother, and your father the small dignified ceremony you are entitled to. And then we will be married. I will not be pressed on this, not even by you.”
“Cassian—”
“I will not be pressed.”
“But—”
“I will not be pressed, Alice.”
She looked at him.
She looked at him with the place between her shoulder blades where his hand had been not twenty minutes ago and the place at her throat where the stone was and the place at the apex of her thighs where she could still faintly feel the warmth of him, and she understood that she was not going to press him.
She was not going to press him because she did not want to press him. She was going to argue with him. She was going to argue with him for the form of it. And then she was going to allow him, in eight days’ time, to put a ring on her finger at the altar because she had decided against an orange tree in her parents’ orangery that she loved him and that she was not going to be the one who walked away from it.
She had not, however, decided what she was going to do about children.
She had not decided what she was going to do about children, and she understood, while looking at him across the morning room, that the next eight days were going to be the days in which she decided.
“Very well, Your Grace.”
“Very well?”
“Very well. Next week. The special license. The house party. The wedding.” She lifted her chin. “On one condition.”
“Name it.”