He smiled.
The smile was not an entirely respectable smile. It was the small, one-sided private smile he had worn on the dance floor. It was the smile of a man whose patience had run out.
“That argument again, Alice.”
“That argument again, Your Grace.”
He took half a step closer. She did not step back.
“The things,” he rasped, “I would do to you in this dress.”
She felt the words land on her skin. They landed on the side of her neck where his mouth had been four days ago and on the small of her back where his hand had been four days ago and on the inside of her thigh where his fingers had been four days ago, and in each of those places, she felt them like a particular heat that was not, strictly speaking, a result of anything that had happened in this room.
“Your Grace.”
“The things you would beg me for until you surrendered.”
“Cassian.”
She had said it without meaning to. She had said his Christian name in a small, paneled room on Bond Street with the door latched and her hand at her throat, and she watched his face briefly go still. It was the stillness she was beginning to recognize. She had touched a wound he had not expected her to.
He drew a long breath and let it out slowly. He did not, she noticed, draw it altogether steadily.
“Even looking at you hurts,” he said, his voice low.
She did not know what to say to that.
She did not say anything. Instead, she let her hands hang at her sides and stood very still in the silk dress, letting him look at her the way he was looking at her.
For two years, he had been pretending he had not been looking. Now, he stopped pretending.
After a long moment, she said, “Your Grace.”
“Yes, Alice.”
“I do not think we should marry.”
He went still.
He went still in a different way this time. He went still in the way of someone who had been hit where he had not been expecting to be hit and needed a moment to register the location.
“No?”
“No.”
“And yet you are trying on wedding clothes.”
“I am trying on underclothes.”
“You are trying on the underclothes for the night on which I shall make you mine.”
“Cassian—”
“You said yes to me four days ago, Alice, in your father’s orangery. You said yes to me again that same morning, in your father’s morning room. You said yes to me last night in the letter you sent Joanna in which you accepted the invitation to her house party. You have said yes to me a great many times in the last week, and now, you are saying what?”
“I want children, Your Grace.”
He did not answer.