Page 76 of The Duke’s Caught Bride

He was very still for a moment, and then he released a long, steady breath. He took his waistcoat, cleaned up the mess on her hand, and tossed the garment away. Then he pulled her close and looked at her with an expression she had no word for and was not going to attempt to name.

The candle went out.

They lay in the dark with the stars at the window and the city’s low orange haze above the rooftops.

She was aware of the warmth of him at her side, the wool beneath them and his breathing slowly evening out.

This is what I wanted.

Not the garden, though she had not known it then. Not the ballroom, or the dinner table, or any of the hundreds of moments she had spent telling herself she was fine with whatever this was. But this. Him, undone, in the dark, with her the reason for it.

She did not say so. She closed her eyes instead.

The next thing she knew, she was moving. She felt her body press against something warm, and she understood, without fully waking, that she was being carried. She turned her face into the warmth, which smelled of cedar and linen and something uniquely him, and his arms tightened fractionally around her.

She did not open her eyes. She did not need to.

Through the warm confusion of near-sleep, she thought that she ought to say something. Thank you, or I am capable of walking, or some other reasonable thing.

She could not find the words. She found, at the bottom of the thought, that she did not particularly want to.

She let herself be carried.

Alice woke to birdsong and grey light and the familiar ceiling of her room.

For a moment, she lay still. Then, she blinked once, twice, and sat up.

The birds on the Grosvenor Square sycamores.

The quality of early light, pre-breakfast, pre-household, the quiet hour she had come to recognize as the gap between the night and the day before either had fully committed.

The warmth of her own bed.

The weight of the previous evening settled over her in a long wave. She let it settle and did not reach for any part of it to contain or correct. She lay still and let it be what it was.

On the bedside table, where her book usually sat and a candle stub and nothing else, there was a small brass instrument she had not put there.

She reached for it. It was heavier than it looked. A pocket orrery, perhaps three inches across, the planets arranged on concentric rings around a small, enameled sun at its center, the workmanship fine enough to have belonged to someone who cared about accuracy rather than ornament.

She turned it in her hands. The rings moved, the planets rotating on their tracks with a faint, precise click at each interval, Mercury to Venus to Earth to the red nick of Mars, each in its correct relation to the others.

She held it for a long time.

Through the wall, she could already hear the sounds of the household beginning its day. The distant clatter of the kitchen. The soft footfall of the first housemaid on the back stairs. The ordinary morning noise of a household that had no idea what had happened in the attic at one o’ clock, in the dark, between two people who had arrived there by a chain of events beginning with a seven-year-old and a travel bag in a service yard.

She looked at the orrery. At Mercury, smallest and fastest, closest to the sun.

She carefully set it on the table, where she could see it from the bed. Then she lay back and looked at the ceiling and allowed herself, for the length of exactly one breath, to be entirely happy.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The days after were unremarkable in every way that could be observed from the outside, and entirely changed in every way that could not.

Alice took breakfast with the twins at eight, as she always did. She reviewed household accounts with the housekeeper at nine. She answered correspondence at the writing desk Kenneth had moved into the morning room for her, because she had mentioned once, in passing, that the light was better there, and the desk had appeared without comment the following afternoon.

She did not mention the desk. Kenneth did not explain it.

The twins, who possessed no such restraint, noticed everything.