“Your Grace, the entire purpose of our betrothal is to be seen together.”
“We have been seen together, Alice. We have been seen together for forty-five minutes. The whole room is seeing us by remembering that we have left it.” His hand moved down her back.
He was looking down at her with the same steady attention he had shown her on the dance floor. The small dark balcony had robbed the party of all the qualities the ballroom had given it,which were politeness and restraint, and left only the qualities that the ballroom had been concealing, which were not those things at all.
“But the room cannot see us here,” he continued. “The room is presently inventing what we are doing here. That, My Lady, is a great deal more useful to us than letting them watch.”
“You are very calculating, Your Grace.”
“I am.”
“It is not a quality I admire in a husband.”
“You will come to admire it.”
“I will not.”
He laughed again, and she felt it against her chest which was pressed against his. She made a small sound that she did not recognize as having come from herself because it was not the sound a gently bred young woman ought to make when laughed at.
“Alice.”
“Your Grace.”
Her face lifted. She did not have a choice. Her face had wanted to be lifted for the last forty seconds, and it lifted now with the particular helplessness of a part of one’s body that had quite stopped consulting one.
He was very close.
He was, she registered, breathing harder than she had thought, given how composed he had been a minute ago, given how composed he had been on the dance floor, given how composed he had been at the door of his dining room when he had kissed the back of her hand and let her go.
He was not composed now. His mouth was a hand’s breadth from her own. His hand was pressing on the small of her back very subtly, bringing her closer to him.
“Lady Alice,” he said quietly, “everything I said to you on the dance floor was true.”
“You said a great many things.”
“All of them.”
“You said I should not think about you at all on the terrace.”
“That one was not true.”
“You said?—”
“Alice.”
“Yes?”
“I am going to kiss you now.”
“You—”
“I am going to kiss you. I am telling you now so that if you do not wish me to, you have enough time to step back. There is no audience here. There is no betrothal in this. There is no business at all in this, Alice. Step back if you want to.”
She did not step back.
She did not step back, and she did not breathe, and she did not move. The next thing she knew, he lightly cupped the side of her face in his hand, his palm under her jaw and his thumb on the edge of it, and he tilted her face up the last small distance it needed to be tilted, and he kissed her.
It was nothing like the kiss in the ballroom.
