Page 25 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"I am rarely entirely persuaded of anything on first challenge. I find it wants testing before I trust it." He settled back against the oak's broad trunk, and the easy, unguarded posture of it, so different from the careful composure he wore in every ballroom, struck her more than she wished to admit. "Test it with me, Miss Hartwell. Properly, this time, without an audience of scandalized onlookers to interrupt us."

And so she did.

It began, as it always seemed to between them, as an argument, her objection to his treatment of the Athenian sources unfolding into a broader dispute over whether formal education could ever be separated from the biases of the institutions that delivered it, and from there into a genuine, sprawling conversation that ranged from Plato's Republic to the education of Roman daughters to a heated, entirely tangential disagreement over whether Herodotus could reasonably be trusted on any point where he had not witnessed the events himself.

At one point she reached across the blanket to take the paper at precisely the same moment he reached for them. Their fingers touched. Neither moved. It was nothing, a simple accident.

Yet Amelia became acutely aware of the warmth of his hand beneath hers. Sebastian's gaze dropped briefly to their hands. Then lifted to her face. Neither spoke.

Her mother cleared her throat softly and Amelia withdrew her hand.

They moved from education to philosophy, from philosophy to history, and somehow from history into a discussion about whether a historian could ever truly be impartial.

Amelia argued that every historian brought his own assumptions to the page.

Sebastian disagreed. "Then you believe objectivity is impossible?"

"I believe perfect objectivity is impossible."

"That is a very different claim."

"Yes."

"Which means you concede that objectivity is still worth pursuing."

"Certainly."

He nodded. "Then we agree."

"We do not."

"We do on that point."

"One point."

"I shall treasure it."

She laughed.

Over the course of the picnic, Amelia found herself leaning forward without meaning to, gesturing with her bread in a manner her governess would have found appalling, and did not notice the hour passing until the sun had shifted considerably lower through the branches above them.

"You are laughing at me," she said, catching the corner of his mouth twitching for perhaps the fourth time in as many minutes.

"I am not laughing at you. I am observing you argue with your entire body, which I find more entertaining than I anticipated when I invited you here." His eyes held real warmth now, none of the careful restraint from the bookshop. "You gesture, Miss Hartwell, when you are certain you are correct. Your hands move before your argument has fully finished forming itself."

"That is a very ungracious observation to make of a woman you invited to spend the afternoon with you."

"I thought you preferred honesty."

"I prefer flattering honesty."

"Ah. Then I have failed you."

"Quite."

He smiled.

She tried not to smile in return and failed.