He looked at Cecilia. “Where there is smoke, there is fire. Remove the fire.”
Tapping her pencil against her opposite hand, Cecilia paced her study while thinking, “How do I extinguish the fire? As a matter of fact,whatis this fire?”
Passing by her wide set of windows, she paused at the sight of Cassian surrounded by five dogs, juggling five sticks he threw at paced times and lengths, that kept all the dogs in motion.
“He looks like such a giddy child out there,” she murmured to herself.
She watched him jog backward, almost tripping over one of the dogs; snatching a stick from the ground, he flung it, and the dogs went off like a bullet from a gun.
He clapped as the hounds barreled back to him, taking him down in a mount of wagging tails and lolling tongues.
She watched Cassian roll on the grass with his dogs, without a care in the world as to how stained his clothes would get. He was constantly laughing, constantly hopping around and playing,and the unmeasured delight she saw on his face made Cecilia wonder if she had ever known the man at all.
Turning back to the matter at hand, she tried to find the fire in this situation. Clearly, the fire here was the night when she had kissed Cassian by accident, and the smoke was the rumors Gabriel was spreading to distract everyone from the scandal of leaping to marry Ophelia.
But how did she douse the fire?
The answer did not come to her that night, nor the night after.
When the morning of the Harvest festival came around, Cecilia was about to get dressed… if only she could choose from the heap of clothing on her bed.
She slipped on the edge of the bed and pulled the white silk stockings, securing them to the garters.
“The village Harvest celebration…” she reached for her chemise and slipped that on. “I’ve never been to one before.”
Next was the white silk corset that she could only put on with Abigail’s help. At the moment, her maid had dashed out to give a helping hand to Andrews. Even with her maid gone, Cecilia considered herself resourceful, efficient, and competent enough to put on a corset herself.
She managed to loosen the strings wide enough that she could step into it and wiggled it up over her bottom and to her sternum. While pressing the front to her chest, she tried to grab the strings and pull them.
She failed. “Drat.”
After repeated attempts, the strain on her arm made her wish to be one of the contortionists at Vauxhall. On her ninth attempt to grasp the strings, she heard the door open and sighed in relief.
“Abigail, thank goodness,” she breathed. “My arm feels as if it is about to fall off. Please tighten this corset for me.”
“…I am not Abigail,” Cassian’s low timbre reached her ears.
“Cassian!” she gasped, spinning around, grabbing at her breasts as if they were bare. “You cannot be in here!”
“I can be anywhere I want,” he arched a brow, his firm hand spinning her back to him.
She wanted to shrink away. Holding the corset to her chest as if it were a shield, Cecilia sputtered, “I-I’m practicallynaked.”
“’Tis a pity you aren’t,” he shrugged while his hand fitted on the waist of the garment.
Clad in only a chemise, single petticoat, and short stays, and she could feel every part of Cassian’s body pressed up against her, andgadz, he was like a wall of muscle.
His arms were long enough to wrap around her and—if hedidhug her—envelop her entirely. She looked down as his hands rested on her waist, broad hands, with long fingers and crudely blunt nails.
Even through the three sets of cloth, she felt the heat of his hand burning on her skin. “If you were naked, I’d be threatened to miss this festival. We are late to the village celebration, Cecilia, so take a deep breath...”
Cecilia did the opposite. Her breath caught in her chest as he grasped the strings and pulled. She slapped a hand on her chest, not from the lack of air but at the sight of herself in her reflection.
Throughout her life, she had had many maids, but none of them had drawn her corset so tightly that she had looked like an hourglass. “You certainly know your way around a corset,” she rasped.
“Of course,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I have unlaced scores of them. But doing them up was a novel experience. Now, do you need help getting into that walking dress or—”
“Shoo,” she gestured to the door. “I will dress myself before your fingers manage to undo the laces. Go.”
