Caspian’s eyes searched my face.
“What?”
“They are going to hate this.”
For a moment, he only stared.
Then the sound that left him was almost a laugh and almost not.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
This time, when I said it, he kissed me like the word had undone the last buttoned thing in him.
Afterward, the room was dark enough that the covered basin had become only a shape in the corner.
Caspian lay beside me, one hand on the bed between us, palm up.
I left it there for a moment.
The sheet was at my ribs. His shirt was somewhere on thefloor with mine. My coat lay over the back of the chair, my mother’s brooch still pinned inside it, turned toward the wall.
My Mark had not settled.
Neither had his.
But the worst of the shaking had left me.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Don’t ruin this by mentioning tomorrow.”
“I need to.”
I turned my head toward him.
His face in the dark looked less stoic than I had ever seen it. Blond curls, sweaty and disheveled at his forehead. Mouth softer. Eyes still too serious for someone naked in his own bed.
“At the formal,” he said, “if you refuse me, I will not make it harder.”
“You said that before.”
“I mean it more now.”
“And if I accept you?”
His hand stayed open on the bed.
“Then I will spend the rest of my life making sure this was not the last choice that belonged to you.”
I looked at his hand for a long time.
Then I put mine in it.
The Pull answered softly this time.
Cold marble.
