Page 55 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"The maid is waiting upstairs, she will show you to the blue room." He inclined his head, formal again, though the movement came a beat too quickly, as though he wanted the gesture finished before either of them could linger on it further. "Sleep well, Amelia."

"And you."

He turned toward his study rather than his own bedchamber, and she noted it, and climbed the stairs to the blue room alone, glancing back once to see him still standing at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with an expression he smoothed into nothing the instant he realized she'd turned.

She lay awake a long while that night in an unfamiliar bed, turning over everything she had and had not seen. She thought about the lingering hand at the carriage door, the too-quick answers, the restless fingers, the way he had watched her climb those stairs as though he could not quite decide whether to call her back.

Whatever this marriage was, she thought, it was clearly costing him rather more than his composure let on. She fell asleep without any clearer sense of what to make of that than she'd had when the evening began.

He was gone before she woke the first morning, and the second, and by the third Amelia had stopped expecting otherwise. Hopkins informed her each time, with careful neutrality, that His Grace had left early on estate business and did not expect to return before evening.

She wandered the house instead, discovering rooms she had not known existed and corridors that seemed to lead nowhere. She read in the blue room's small sitting room, in the library, and in the garden when the weather allowed it, and found each empty hour compounding the last until the silence of Ravensmere House felt less like solitude and more like a verdict on how little her presence in it mattered.

On the third evening, she heard his study door close and did not let herself think twice before crossing the hall and opening it without knocking.

"Sebastian."

He looked up from his desk, surprise crossing his face before he schooled it back into something more careful. "Amelia. I did not expect⁠—"

"No. You never do, because you have made a considerable effort these three days to ensure you are never in a position to expect me at all." She stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind her. "You left before I woke this morning. And yesterday. And the day before that. I have eaten every meal in this house alone, Sebastian, and I have run out of patience pretending I do not notice."

"I have had estate business."

"For three consecutive days, all of it apparently requiring you to leave before dawn and return only after I have retired." She crossed her arms, though her hands were not nearly as steady as the gesture suggested. "Do you take me for a fool?"

"I do not."

"Then do not offer me estate business as though I cannot see plainly what is actually happening." Her voice rose, despite every effort to hold it level. "Does my presence upset you so thoroughly, Your Grace, that you intend to spend the whole of our marriage arranging your days so that you need never actually be in a room with me?"

"That is not what is happening."

"It is precisely what is happening. Tell me plainly if I have done something to offend you, I would rather know the truth than spend another day guessing at it in an empty house."

"You have done nothing."

"Then why." Her voice cracked on the single word, and she hated how thoroughly it betrayed her. "Why, Sebastian. I stood in that church and married you, and I have given you every courtesy since, and you have repaid it by making certain we are never once alone together long enough to speak. Tell me why?"

She could hear her own breathing now. His eyes closed briefly and his hand went to the back of his neck.

"My God."

"What?"

He rose from his desk, whatever careful composure he had been maintaining finally giving way.

She stopped breathing as he came toward her.

One step. Then another.

"You think your presence upsets me." His voice had gone low, rough, raw in a way she had never heard from him before. "It devastates me, Amelia. Because of how much I want you."

The words landed through her chest like a physical thing, and she stood there, momentarily incapable of any response at all.

"I have spent three mornings leaving this house before dawn," he went on, crossing the small distance between them, "because I did not trust myself to sit across from you at breakfast and behave as though I did not want to cross the room and finish what we started in that library. I told myself I was giving you space. The truth is I was protecting myself from wanting something I no longer knew whether you wanted from me."

Her stomach clenched.

"I cannot walk into a room with you without knowing where you are."