“It is every reason.”
“My dress, Your Grace?—”
“Your dress is wet at the hem, Alice. It will dry. Mine is also wet at the hem. We will be dry by nuncheon. In the meantime, I have your wrist, and I have your arrow, and I have you in my lake which is the only place at this house party where the seven dozen people on the lawn cannot hear what we are saying. Now.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
He turned her in the shallow water by the wrist.
The willow hung over the lake by the landing. Its long pale green fronds came down to perhaps eight inches above the water, and the small landing stood between them and the lawn.
The lawn, at present, was fully occupied by Lord Greencliff, who loudly declared that since both the bride and the groom were now in the water, the contest was, in his impartial professional judgment, postponed pending the dryness of the main contestants. The lawn laughed. The lawn applauded. The lawn turned its attention back to the next pair of arrows.
Meanwhile, Alice and Cassian remained hidden.
He bent his head to her. “Alice.”
“Cassian.”
“This.”
“This?”
“We could have this.”
Alice did not answer at first.
She did not answer because what was on his face was not the dry, amused look he had been wearing on the meadow. It was the look he had worn in the orangery. It was the look he had worn while holding himself in check in Mrs. Hatcher’s back room.
On the small wooden landing at his own lake with his bride standing in twelve inches of water and her arrow in her hand and her hair coming down on one side, he was no longer holding himself in check.
He went down.
He went down on one knee in the water in his good Hessian boots, in front of his bride. The water almost reached the top of his calf. The willow’s pale fronds shifted slightly in the gentle midday wind.
He did not propose, for he already had. What was happening in the water was not in any sense that kind of proposal. With bothhands, he lifted the wet hem of her morning skirt and gently kissed the soft inside of her thigh, just on the spot above her knee where she had felt his hand four days ago in the orangery and had not since recovered.
She did not breathe.
In fact, she did not breathe for the entire duration of the kiss.
It was a warm, slow kiss. He held it for the length of three held breaths, and she felt his mouth on the bare skin above her stocking the way she had felt his finger on it in the orangery: like a shock that spread up her thigh through her chest to the tender spot at the side of her neck. He kissed her there once more with a deliberate small pressure and lifted his head.
Then he stood.
He set her skirts down, took her arrow from her hand, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his coat. He regarded her for one long second with the dark, possessive look that had been on his face under the willow and said very quietly, “We could have this, Alice. All of it. The lake. The orchard. The lawn full of people who are about to come back and ask us why we are still wet at nuncheon. The bride who cheats at archery in her husband’s meadow because she would rather win than be dignified. The husband who lets her. All of it. The whole of it. Every day.”
“Cassian…”
“Think on it.”
Alice drew in a breath. Then she tried, with the steady composure she usually mustered for difficult things, to let it out only for it to come out not the way she had meant it to.
It came out laughing. It came out laughing because she did not know what else to do with what she was being offered.
She put her free hand to her mouth. “You mean,” she said against her glove, “you and me in your meadow.”