Squinting in a comical way that tugged another reluctant grin from him, Cassia leaned up and peered at his face. With a slow nod, she sat back down. “Very well. I believe you, Nathan . . . ?” She added an up-tilt to her lilting voice that transformed it into the question it was.
“Nathaniel. The Marquess of Winfield.”
Her perfectly formed eyebrows shot up. “You are a marquess.”
He gave a curt nod. A marquess, destined to be a duke. He was well accustomed to the fawning and obsequiousness met with that revelation.
“And you are a captain of a ship . . .”
Only this woman would gloss over that lofty title and go dreamy-eyed over the fact that he sailed, and not the rank he was born to. And that realization left him with an odd sensation in his chest.
“See?” Cassia plucked the brush from his fingers and ran it through those tresses as she spoke. “That is the problem with the world,” she said, pausing to jab her brush at him, punctuating her statement.
He cocked his head. “That I’m a marquess?”
“No,” she said, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “That you’re a nobleman and you are permitted to have your own ship and sail the seas and live a life outside of Polite Society.”
“Is that what you want?” he asked quietly, compelled once more by this unexplainable need to know more about Cassia Doris McQuoid. “To live a life outside of Polite Society?”
“I don’t want to live a life, either in it or out of it. I just want to have the freedom to choose to move between whatever it is I want to do.”
“And what is that?” he murmured. Moving closer, he settled his fingers on hers, which had resumed those strokes. “What is it you want to do?”
What is it you want to do?
No one had ever asked that question of her.
No one had because it had always been expected what her future would be: she would be the wife of some perfectly acceptable, affable nobleman . . . which meant she would be an arm ornament . . . and . . . not much more.
Whereas her sister had been sent away to Mrs. Belden’s Finishing School and lived outside of the same walls they’d always known and learned what it was to survive on one’s own.
But Cassia had learned, in this moment with this man beside her, that she didn’t want to just survive. “I want to live,” she whispered, staring at the table covered with Nathan’s colorful maps. “But . . . I don’t even know what that means,” she said, and then as the realization hit her, all those truths came rapidly tumbling out, spilling from her lips. “I want to know what it is to do something more than curtsy or work at needlepoint. I hate needlepoint.” But she’d learned it and perfected it. “I want to know how people outside of London and Scotland live. What foods they eat and how they dress, and feel the sun on my face, because the sun . . . it is a rarity in London, you know,” she said needlessly. Of course, everyone knew rain and clouds and fog competed for the greatest time spent in the English sky.
The energy drained from her. “But . . . the problem is . . . I can’t. Because the extent of the skills and lessons imparted me over the years were those reserved for a lady. Because it was always accepted that I’d never leave and never be anything more than . . . than . . . some good-enough gentleman’s wife.”
“Don’t you dare settle,” Nathan said sharply, and she blinked slowly and looked up. “Don’t you dare settle for some good-enough gentleman. Find a damned fellow who treats you like you are the sun the English sky needs, and treasures you for that light.”
Cassia’s breath caught, as in that moment she fell, hard and fast and forever, in love with Nathan Ellsby, the Marquess of Winfield. This gruff, rough, and altogether tough ship’s captain who cursed and grunted, and who was very real for those emotions.
As if on cue, he grunted, then plucked the brush from her fingers and resumed brushing the back of her head, those almost dry locks that she’d been unable to reach.
“Do you think we’ll meet across a London ballroom?” she asked softly, and he paused a moment.
“I . . .”
“We’ll, of course, pretend we do not know one another.” A sad smile pulled at the corners of her mouth. “It’ll be a secret only known by you and me.” And she’d mourn that until she drew her last breath. “One that my husband, of course, cannot know.”
He growled. “Don’t marry a man who’d find fault with you for how you lived your life before him.”
“You’re charging me with an impossible task, Nathan. Gentlemen are very specific in what they expect of their wives and future wives.”
“Then marry a man with less specific expectations,” he snapped.
“Will you discuss me with your wife?” she asked, angling a glance over her shoulder, and then promptly wished she hadn’t.
He froze.
She wished she hadn’t, because she’d unwittingly conjured images of the fortunate woman who’d one day be the Marchioness of Winfield.
“I thought so,” she said, the smile she plastered on her lips straining her cheek muscles.
Nathan resumed, a second time, brushing her hair, and this time, she didn’t speak. This time, when the silence fell, it was comfortable and companionable, and she took that gift.
Over the course of Cassia’s lifetime, all manner of people, from her lady’s maid on to her mother and younger sisters and cousins, had brushed her hair.
Not a single one of those times had felt like this one.
How could such a simple, routine task also prove so . . . intimate.
And there was no doubting, this was intimate.
From the way he filled his hands with a portion of her curls and then brought that brush gently through her hair.
Cassia closed her eyes and surrendered fully to the moment. Then, after a long while of running those bristles through her drying tresses, he set it aside, and she bit her lip, filled with an aching regret at the end of that intimate moment.
Only, he set the brush down on the mattress and filled his hands with her hair, ever so gently separating the mass of her loose tresses in one hand, and then with the other, he layered them over the partition he’d made.
And then it hit her, and so much warmth flooded her heart and spread through her entire person. She angled a slight look back over her shoulder.
He grunted. “Keep your head straight. Please.” He tacked that last word on grudgingly, as if it pained him to do so, and she smiled, directing her gaze forward as he braided her hair.
As he expertly braided her hair.
In all the times she’d imagined the man she would one day wed, she’d thought about what her relationship might be with that man. Ofttimes in her imaginings, she and that unknown someone would settle into a familiar, comfortable union known by Cassia’s own parents. They’d read together and be part of their children’s lives together. But never could she have imagined the intimate end of what that marriage would be. Not in the bedchambers, but rather a greater intimacy that came from those before-now-imagined exchanges.
Now that Nathan cared for her in this way, she could not think of settling into a future with a man who did not carry out this same role.
Nathan’s fingers worked rapidly, like a man who’d overseen the task thousands of times before this one.