Page 29 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"At the timing."

Tristan smiled.

"Naturally. Come. Let us find you a drink, and you may spend the carriage ride home composing whatever dignified explanation you intend to offer yourself for tonight's rather remarkable exception."

Sebastian said nothing to that, because there was, he found, nothing dignified left to offer, only the raw, unfamiliar frustration of arriving too late for something he had not permitted himself to admit he wanted until it had already slipped past him.

CHAPTER NINE

"Absolutely not."

"Papa, you have not even heard my full argument yet."

"I have heard enough of it to recognize where it is going, and I would rather refuse you at the start than watch you build an elaborate case toward a conclusion I have already decided." Her father did not look up from his newspaper, though the faint twitch at the corner of his mouth suggested he was rather more amused than his tone let on. "You wish to attend Dr. Charles Wetherby's lecture on the Athenian constitution."

"I wish to attend a public lecture on a subject I have studied for the better part of a year, in a hall that admits any interested party who purchases a ticket, which I have already done, incidentally, with my own pin money."

"A public lecture attended almost exclusively by gentlemen, Amelia, which is precisely the difficulty."

"Then I shall be the sole exception, and Dr. Wetherby will simply have to manage the shock of a woman in his audience actually understanding the material." She set down her teacup with rather more force than strictly necessary. "Papa, I have read three of his published papers already. I have asked Mr. Bell to order the fourth. I have earned the right to hear the man speak in person, and I do not see why my presence in a lecture hall ought to trouble anyone half so much as it apparently troubles Mama."

"It troubles your mother," her mother said, from the doorway, arriving in time to catch the last of it with an expression of long-suffering patience, "because you have already made yourself the subject of considerable talk this Season, and I do not relish the prospect of adding a lecture hall full of gentlemen to the list of places society expects to find you arguing rather than dancing."

"I am capable of doing both, Mama, should the occasion require it."

"That is precisely the difficulty." Her mother settled into the chair opposite, folding her hands. "You are already the young lady who dismantled a duke at the Fairmont ball. You are already the young lady who argued philosophy at Richmond where any of society's gossips might have seen you. I had hoped, foolishly it seems, that you might spend at least one evening this Season behaving as though you wished to be married rather than examined by a room full of Cambridge men."

"Perhaps I do not wish to be examined by a room full of Cambridge men, Mama. Perhaps I simply wish to hear a lecture."

"Perhaps," Mary said, drifting in from the hall with an apple in hand and an expression of gleeful interest, "she wishes to see whether a certain duke will be in attendance, which I understand is rather more likely than not, given how frequently his name has come up in recent conversation."

"Mary."

"I am simply observing." Mary took an unrepentant bite of her apple, dropping onto the settee beside their mother with the easy sprawl she'd never quite grown out of. "Though I confess, if I were permitted to attend a lecture purely to watch you argue with a duke in front of an audience, I would abandon every other engagement without hesitation."

"There is no duke to argue with. This is a lecture on the Athenian constitution, not a private assembly."

"Of course," Mary said, entirely unconvinced, with an expression that suggested she intended to say nothing further and believe absolutely none of it.

Her father sighed, folding his newspaper at last, and studied Amelia with the look he wore when he had already decided to relent and simply wished to make her wait a moment longer for the privilege. "I will escort you myself. That is my final offer, and I will not be argued out of the condition. If society wishes to whisper about my daughter attending a lecture, they may whisper about her father sitting beside her while she does, and see what they make of that instead."

"Papa." Amelia was across the room and embracing him before he'd finished the sentence, delight rising fast enough to chase away every careful argument she'd prepared and no longer needed. "Thank you."

"Do not thank me yet. You have not sat through two hours of Dr. Wetherby discoursing on Athenian governance beside your own father, who I promise you will fall asleep well before the second hour concludes." He patted her shoulder, resigned and fond in equal measure, and returned to his newspaper as though the matter were entirely settled, which, judging by her mother's long, unhappy sigh from the settee, it apparently was.

"You are hopeless," her mother said, though there was no real heat left in it, only the exhaustion of a woman who had learned, over one and twenty years, precisely which battles were worth the effort of fighting to their conclusion.

"I am simply interested in the topic, Mama."

"You are simply interested, I repeat," Mary said, around another bite of apple, grinning outright now, "in whether a certain duke will be sitting somewhere in that lecture hall, and I do hope, for both our sakes, that he is, because I have not had this much entertainment from your Season since the Fairmont ball."

Amelia did not dignify that with a response, though she spent rather longer than necessary that evening selecting a gown that was neither too formal for a lecture hall nor too plain to be noticed, and told herself, quite firmly, that the choice had nothing whatsoever to do with the possibility Mary had so unhelpfully raised.

The lecture hall was already half full when they arrived, rows of hard wooden benches filling steadily with gentlemen in dark coats, the low hum of academic conversation carrying through the room in a way that reminded her, not unpleasantly, of the bookshop, and Amelia had just settled beside her father in a row near the back when a familiar voice spoke from just behind her shoulder.

"I confess I did not expect to see you here, Miss Hartwell."

She turned to find Sebastian standing in the aisle, dressed with his usual precision, an expression of genuine surprise breaking through his careful composure in a way she had rarely seen. "Nor I you, Your Grace, though I suppose I ought to have guessed. A lecture on the Athenian constitution seems precisely suited to a man who once argued the merits of primary sources at a ball."