Page 72 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"I agreed to survive an evening. I did not agree to watch my home turned into the exact, same, spectacle my mother nearly ruined us pursuing."

He heard the old bitterness rising, faster than he could master it, and across the room caught the Dowager Duchess's eyes on him, her mouth curved in something that was not quite a smile, satisfied and knowing, the exact expression she had worn the day she informed him a ball was already arranged whether he consented to it or not.

She wanted this. She built this evening precisely to force my hand, and now stands there watching to see whether I will simply let it happen to me the way I let everything happen to me at nine years old, hiding under a schoolroom table while she managed the wreckage of my father alone. The thought lodged somewhere behind his ribs, ugly and unwelcome, and he turned it, before he could stop himself, on the one person in the room who least deserved it.

"You spent a considerable sum on this. Without consulting me on the particulars."

"Your mother handled a great deal of the arrangements, but I approved every expense myself, and I did not think⁠—"

"That is precisely the difficulty. You did not think." The words left him before he could stop them, old fear speaking faster than sense. "You cannot understand what happens when women make decisions without considering consequences, Amelia. I have watched it happen once already, in this very house, and I have spent a decade repairing what it cost. You cannot understand."

The words left him before he had finished deciding whether to say them, and he heard, immediately, exactly how they would land, and found he could not call them back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The sentence struck her like a physical blow she had not braced for, arriving from the one man she had believed would never aim for that particular wound.

She stood very still for a moment, the noise of the ballroom rushing back in around her, the orchestra's festive music, the murmur of the guests who had not, thank God, heard the words themselves, only witnessed whatever had crossed her face when she did.

"I beg your pardon."

"Amelia —"

"No." She heard her own voice come out low and steady, though her hands had gone cold, though something in her chest had cracked clean through at the cruelty of the comparison. "You will not soften it now, having already said it plainly enough. You believe I have made decisions without considering their consequences. You believe I am precisely the kind of woman you blame for what happened to your family, is that it? Is that truly what you think of me, after everything?"

"That is not what I meant."

"It is precisely what you meant, or you would not have reached for it." Her voice shook, despite every effort to hold it steady, three days of exhaustion and one evening of standing alone finally finding somewhere to go.

"You are comparing me to your mother."

"I am telling you what I have seen extravagance cost this family."

"I am not your mother, Sebastian. I did not bankrupt an estate. I organized one evening, with your aproval, to give your name back some of the welcome it had lost." She kept her voice low, fighting to remain aware of how many eyes might already be drifting toward them.

"I have spent three days learning an entire language I did not ask to learn, addressing hundreds of cards until my hand cramped, settling disputes between a florist and a confectioner because your mother required someone in this house capable of making a decision while you disappeared to your ledgers every morning before I had even woken. I did all of it believing it mattered to you. Believing it mattered to us. And you stand here, in the middle of the ball I organized for you, for your family name and for our future, and compare me to whatever it is you cannot forgive your mother for."

"I did not compare you to my mother."

"You compared me to every woman you have ever decided was reckless with consequence, Sebastian, and I am neither foolish nor blind enough to pretend that is a smaller insult than the specific one." Something in her chest had gone terribly cold, all the warmth they had found together receding somewhere she could not currently reach. "I believed we had moved past this. I believed the man who let me into a room above a tobacconist and asked me to see all of him, trusted me rather more than this."

"Amelia, that is not fair —"

"No." She cut him off, sharply, aware that her eyes had begun to sting and refusing, absolutely, to let them fall in front of a ballroom full of guests who had already begun, subtly, to notice the tableau. "What is not fair is standing in a ballroom I exhausted myself preparing and being told I cannot understand consequence, by a man who left me to manage the whole of it alone rather than face whatever this evening was actually costing him." She stepped back, putting between them a distance she had not imagined wanting again. "If this is truly how you see me, Sebastian, then you need not trouble yourself with standing beside me tonight. I have managed perfectly well without you thus far."

She turned before he could answer, before the tears threatening at the corners of her eyes could betray her further, and crossed the ballroom toward her own family with a composure that cost her every remaining ounce of the evening's strength, leaving him standing precisely where she had found him, the ruin between them entirely his making.

Her father's face creased with concern as she approached, and she did not look back to see whether Sebastian moved to follow. Her mother reached for her hand the moment she arrived, some old maternal instinct sensing wreckage before a word was spoken, and Amelia allowed herself to be drawn into the safety of family long enough to steady her breathing, to blink the worst of the sting from her eyes, to rebuild, piece by piece, the composure a duchess was required to wear through the remainder of her own ball.

I will not weep in my own ballroom. I will not give this room, or his mother, or him, the satisfaction of watching me come apart in public over words he cannot even properly defend.

She held that resolve through two dances she did not remember agreeing to, through a long conversation with Lady Ashworth that passed entirely without her retaining a single word of it, through the agony of watching Sebastian, across the room, standing alone near the window exactly where she had left him, neither approaching nor retreating, simply enduring his own ball the way a man endures the weather.

She could not leave it there. Whatever fury still burned beneath her composure, some stubborn, unwilling part of her refused to simply let the evening end in ruin between them, refused to let hundreds of witnesses be the last thing either of them remembered of tonight.

She crossed the ballroom a second time, aware of eyes following her progress, aware that whatever had passed between them earlier had not gone entirely unnoticed and stopped before him with her chin lifted and her hand extended, steady despite everything.

"Dance with me."