Page 20 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

The evidence would appear to demonstrate that⁠—

He stared at the sentence. That was worse. He struck out would appear and restored the original wording, then sat back.

Ridiculous.

Had he mistaken the absence of women from certain institutions for evidence that they were incapable of succeeding within them? Sebastian frowned. He picked up his pen. The next hour passed in a series of increasingly irritating revisions.

One paragraph was removed entirely, though he could not have said whether he had removed it because it was weak or because he had suddenly become incapable of reading it without hearing that infuriating woman’s voice.

At last, he pushed the papers away. "This is absurd."

The room offered no answer. Sebastian leaned back in his chair and rubbed a hand across his jaw.

He had argued with men considerably more accomplished than himself. Professors had dismantled his conclusions in public lecture halls. He had defended papers before scholars who had spent forty years studying the same texts he had only begun to examine.

None of them had managed to leave him questioning the structure of his argument before he had even reached luncheon. And none of them had looked at him quite the way she had. He glanced toward the pages.

His eyes caught on the sentence he had changed for the fourth time. He picked up the pen again. For several seconds he simply stared at it.

Then, with a quiet curse, he threw it onto the desk. The sound seemed unnecessarily loud in the stillness. He gathered the papers into a neat stack, squared the edges with overt precision, and pushed them to the far side of the desk.

He would return to them later. When his mind was his own again. Sebastian stood and crossed to the window. London moved below him, indifferent and noisy, leaving him entirely incapable of understanding why a woman he had known for one evening had managed to disturb the settled order of thoughts he had spent years constructing.

He told himself that was precisely what irritated him.

Not her. Not her mouth. Not the memory of her eyes when she challenged him. Only the argument.

CHAPTER SIX

"You are going to have to start charging me for the time I spend standing in your shop," Amelia said.

Mr. Bell looked up from his ledger.

"I have considered it, Miss Hartwell."

"And?" Amelia set the borrowed volume on the counter, its spine considerably more worn than when she'd taken it out a fortnight past, and watched the bookseller's mouth twitch.

"I fear I should become a very rich man."

She smiled and ran her gaze over the bookshelves.

"Did you receive the new Greek histories?"

"Yesterday."

"Where?"

Mr. Bell pointed toward the back shelves.

"Third case. Upper level. I have not yet had time to arrange them."

"I shall do it for you."

"I knew you would."

She moved toward the shelves, already forgetting that she had promised herself she would not spend another hour in the shop. She had made it precisely three cases into the history section, trailing one finger along a row of spines trying to decide which was worth borrowing, when a voice she recognized instantly, and with considerable dismay, spoke from directly behind her.

"Gibbon. I would not have taken you for a Gibbon reader. Miss Hartwell."