Page 3 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"And yet."

"Mother." He rose, because manners survived even where affection had not, and inclined his head with the exact, correct degree of courtesy owed a duchess, nothing more. "This is unexpected. I do not recall inviting you to Grosvenor Square."

"You never do. I have found it saves considerable time to simply arrive."

She settled herself into the chair across from his desk without being asked, folding her hands with a composure that signalled she had come with a purpose and did not intend to be moved from it. She never arrived without purpose. He had stopped expecting otherwise years ago and found this expectation easier to live with than the disappointment of hoping for anything else.

"I assume you did not call simply to admire the shelves."

She surveyed the study with the quick, assessing look of a woman accustomed to finding fault and rarely disappointed in the search, though this time she found rather less to fault than usual, the shelves ordered, the desk clear but for the ledger and three letters, the room just as precise as he preferred every part of his life to be.

Then she looked back at him. "You are hiding, darling."

"I am working."

"You are hiding inside your work. You know there is a difference, because you have been doing this since you were a boy, whenever it upset you to be seen wanting anything." She said it without heat, the way she might have observed the weather. "You did not attend the Harcourt dinner. You did not attend Lady Fenwick's musicale, though I am told you were specifically and repeatedly invited."

He made himself meet her eyes squarely, because she had a way of finding the soft ground in an argument if he let his attention wander, and he had learned that the only defense was full engagement. "I have work that matters to me, Mother. Actual work. Not the performance of usefulness that passes for occupation among most of the men I am obliged to call my peers, but genuine scholarship that will outlast every one of us. I fail to see why an evening spent pursuing that is inferior to an evening spent watching young ladies angle for a duke's attention over lukewarm claret."

"Ah." She said it softly, almost pleased. "There it is."

"There is what?"

"The real objection. It is not the claret." She tilted her head. "You believe every woman in that ballroom wants the title and not the man attached to it."

"I believe," Sebastian said with a sigh, "that a duke's company is rarely sought for his conversation."

"You believe that because you have decided it in advance and stopped looking for evidence to the contrary." She said it lightly, but there was steel beneath her words+. "You are a brilliant man, Sebastian. You would never accept so lazy a conclusion in your own field. Yet here you sit, having met perhaps a dozen young women in as many years with any real attention, and you have already written the verdict for every woman you have not yet met."

"That is not lazy, Mother."

"That is bitterness wearing pattern as a disguise, and I would know, because I taught you rhetoric myself and I recognize my own tricks when you use them against me." She reached over and moved the unopened letter an inch to the side, as though it personally offended her, and folded her hands again. "You were not always like this."

"I was younger."

"You were hopeful." Something moved behind her eyes, quick and old, there and gone. "I know precisely where the disappointment started, darling. I was there for it. But you have let one season of watching your father's judgment fail convince you that every person's affection is a transaction waiting to be revealed, and that is not caution. That is a wound you have never let close, dressed up as wisdom."

"This is not about Father."

"It is always a little about your father," she said, not unkindly, "in this house. But that is a conversation for a different evening, and I did not come here to relitigate it." She straightened in her chair, and Sebastian recognized the shift in her posture the way a sailor recognizes a change in wind. Here it came. "I came to tell you that the Duchess of Fairmont is hosting her annual ball on Thursday, and you are going to attend it."

"I am not."

"You are, because I have already accepted on your behalf, and it would embarrass us both if the Duke of Ravensmere failed to appear at an event his mother confirmed in writing a fortnight ago. One evening, Sebastian. That is all I ask."

Sebastian set down his pen with particular care while trying not to raise his voice. "You had no right to accept for me."

"I had every right. I am your mother, and someone in this family must occasionally act in its own interest, since you show so little inclination to do it yourself." Her gaze moved briefly to the ledger, the letters, the whole ordered architecture of his desk. "You manage this estate better than your father ever did, I will grant you that freely. But an estate is not a succession, and a title without an heir is simply a debt waiting to be called."

"How fortunate that I am aware of my own obligations without needing them recited to me."

"Are you." She tilted her head, something sharp moving behind her eyes. "Then perhaps you might explain why, at nine and twenty, you have not troubled yourself to court a single young lady with any seriousness, while half the mothers of London stand ready to hand you their daughters on request. Is one evening in a ballroom truly so unreasonable?"

"It is unreasonable to ask a man to spend an evening being appraised like breeding stock by every mother in London with an unmarried daughter."

"It may well be unreasonable," she agreed, "and you will endure it, because dukes have been surviving ballrooms since ballrooms were invented, and you are not so delicate as you are currently pretending to be."

"I have no interest in being handed anything. You of all people ought to understand the transaction plainly enough. You conducted a version of it yourself."