She had read a great many descriptions of kisses. She had always thought them somewhat exaggerated for effect.
She revised this assessment comprehensively.
This is what real feels like.
She had thought it and meant it, and the morning after, she still meant it, which was either wonderful or catastrophic or possibly both. She did not currently have the capacity to determine which.
She sat up. The question was—and this was where the ceiling became considerably less reassuring—where did it leave them? The arrangement, the terms, the careful distance that had been shrinking by inches since approximately the second morning and had now definitively closed.
What was on the other side of a kiss in a garden? What did it mean for the paper marriage that had stopped feeling like a paper marriage sometime around the first week in the nursery?
What did he think it meant?
That was the question she could not answer, and it was the only question that mattered.
She had absolutely no reliable information, because William Whitmore communicated his thoughts with the frequency and clarity of a locked safe, and she had been learning the combination for weeks and was not yet certain she had all the numbers.
“Your Grace?”
Cecily blinked.
Her maid, Ellen, was standing by her wardrobe with two dresses draped over her arm, looking at her with a patient smile. She looked like she had been waiting for a while.
“I’m sorry,” Cecily said. “What did you say?”
“The blue or the green dress, Your Grace. For this morning.”
Cecily looked at the dresses. She registered them as objects. Blue. Green. Colors that existed on a spectrum.
“The lilac,” she said absentmindedly.
Ellen turned back to the wardrobe.
William had kissed her like he meant it. Not the version of a man doing the correct thing at the correct moment for the benefit of an audience. There had been no audience. There had been a garden and a lantern and a music faint through the glass and his breath shuddering against her mouth and?—
“Your Grace, the lilac dress is at the modiste’s. I sent it for alteration on Tuesday.”
She suddenly remembered the reason for choosing the lilac dress, even though it wasn’t among the options Ellen provided. It had to do with a certain green-eyed man with lilac thread on his coat.
“Then the blue one,” Cecily said.
“Which one? You have three blue dresses.”
Cecily looked at the ceiling briefly. “The one that fits.”
Ellen seemed to find that an adequate answer and began laying things out with quiet efficiency.
Cecily sat at the dressing table and looked at her reflection, thinking about the way William had said her name afterward.
“Your hair, Your Grace.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to sit still.”
“I am sitting still.”
“You are leaning toward the mirror,” Ellen said, pins in hand, “and swaying, Your Grace.”
