Page 4 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

Something flickered across her face, brief and controlled. "That is unkind."

"It is accurate, which I understand is worse." He said it evenly, the way he had learned to say most things to her, without heat, because heat only ever gave her something to work with. "You are not here because you are troubled for my happiness. You are here because the succession requires an heir and my continued absence from ballrooms reflects poorly on a house you have spent thirty years protecting. I would rather you simply say so, and spare us both the performance of sentiment neither of us feels."

The silence that followed was longer and colder than any that had passed between them in recent years, though neither of them looked away from it.

She rose then, smoothing her skirts, and Sebastian understood with some dismay, that the argument was already over—had perhaps been over since the moment she sat down. "I will have Hopkins send word round to your tailor about the coat."

"I did not agree to attend."

"You did not disagree loudly enough, and quickly enough, and I have known you a great deal longer than you have known yourself, darling, so I will trust my instincts over your protests." She crossed to the door, then paused, looking back at him with an expression that was almost, though not quite, gentle. "You are allowed to want more than books, Sebastian. Wanting is not the same as being made a fool of. I promise you that."

"I want a great many things. An evening free of interruption chief among them."

"Then you ought to have locked the door," she said serenely, "instead of leaving it unlatched for anyone determined enough to walk through it," and swept out before he could decide whether that was meant as advice about the door or about something considerably larger. That, he reflected darkly, was exactly the sort of parting shot she liked best: the kind that lodged itself somewhere behind the ribs and refused to be dislodged by reason.

He sat alone for a long moment after the door clicked shut, listening to her footsteps recede down the corridor, to Hopkins's low murmur and her answering laugh, to the silence that settled back over the study once she was well and truly gone.

One evening, he told himself, picking the pen back up, willing his attention back to his letter and the stalled paragraph on the third page. One tedious, forgettable evening, and then I may return to my life exactly as I left it.

He did not, in that moment, believe there was any version of Thursday’s Ball that would be capable of changing that determination.

CHAPTER TWO

"Your Grace, how wonderful that you came after all."

"The Duchess of Fairmont is too gracious a hostess to disappoint," Sebastian said, which was not an answer, and bowed over Lady Wren's gloved hand with the exact, practiced degree of warmth that meant nothing at all. Beside her, her daughter dipped into a curtsy so deep it bordered on genuflection, fan fluttering, eyes bright with the hunger he had learned to recognize by the third season of his dukedom and had never once learned to enjoy.

Here we begin. He straightened, already calculating the shortest, polite route across the ballroom. He was already exhausted by an evening that had yet to even properly start.

"Miss Wren was just remarking how much she admires the music this evening," Lady Wren said, steering her daughter forward by the elbow with the subtlety of a woman docking a ship. "Weren't you, dear?"

"Oh, tremendously," said Miss Wren, who Sebastian suspected would have been hard-pressed to name the composer of the piece currently being played.

"How gratifying." He inclined his head, retreating a half step, and finding the retreat immediately blocked by the arrival of the Honorable Miss Aldridge, resplendent in yellow, who had apparently been lying in wait behind a potted fern for precisely this opportunity.

"Your Grace, I do not believe we have been introduced this season."

"A regrettable oversight," he drawled, in the flat, courteous tone he reserved for statements he did not mean. Hebowed again, and began once more the slow, smiling extraction that every ballroom in London had taught him to perform without appearing to flee openly. This was the entire architecture of the Season laid bare in miniature: mothers positioning daughters like pieces on a board, daughters performing an interest in whatever subject they believed might snag a duke's attention, and the duke in question standing very still while it happened to him, smiling, saying nothing but inanities.

He found Tristan Cavendish, Duke of Ashcombe, unsurprisingly, holding court near the card room with a glass in each hand and an audience of three young ladies who had clearly forgotten why they'd approached him in the first place.

"There he is." Tristan handed off both glasses to a passing footman without looking, extracting himself from his admirers with the ease of a man who had been doing this since before either of them could grow a proper beard. "Sebastian. You look precisely as delighted to be here as I predicted you would."

"You predicted correctly."

"I usually do, where you're concerned. Ten years of practice." Tristan fell into step beside him, sandy hair already coming loose from whatever order his valet had imposed on it, green eyes scanning the room with the lazy, cataloguing attention of a man who had long since stopped being impressed by anything in these gatherings. "How many mothers have cornered you so far?"

"Four."

"Only four? You are losing your touch, or the room is thinner than usual." He grinned, sidestepping a footman with a tray. "Nathaniel's already been trapped by Lady Featherstone for a full quarter hour discussing the corn prices, which I confess I find deeply satisfying, given how he mocked me for the whole of March over the Ellison business."

"You deserved the mocking."

"I deserved nothing of the sort. Come, before someone else remembers you exist."

They found Nathaniel Ashcroft, Duke of Kingsleigh, extricating himself from Lady Featherstone with visible relief, his cravat almosttoo perfectly knotted for a man who had spent the last quarter hour being lectured on agricultural yields, grey eyes flicking toward them with something close to gratitude. Julian Hawthorne, Duke of Dunhaven, was already waiting near the far window, half in shadow, watching the dancing with the faint, distant look of a man doing sums in his head that had nothing to do with the ballroom.

"You made it," Julian said, when they reached him, and there was real warmth under his dry tone. The warmth of a man greeting friends he had known since he was twelve years old and still occasionally could not quite believe he'd kept. "I told Nathaniel you'd claim a headache."