Page 35 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"I did not throw it. I knocked it."

"With considerable feeling." Hopkins straightened, folding the ruined papers into a neat stack on the corner of the desk. "Shall I have Cook send up something? You missed your dinner."

"I am not hungry."

"No," Hopkins agreed, mild as ever. "You rarely are, when something is actually troubling you."

Sebastian said nothing. He dropped into his chair and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, and the study was quiet except for the small sounds of Hopkins tidying what remained of the papers, in no hurry to leave.

"It is Miss Hartwell," Sebastian said finally.

"You need not say, Your Grace."

"I know…I just…" He lowered his hands and looked at the old man, who had buttoned him into his first coat and stood at his father's funeral without once losing his composure, and who was, Sebastian realized with some discomfort, very possibly the only person in this house who had ever actually known him. "She said something to me today. About the paper. About why I wrote it."

"And was she wrong?"

"That is the trouble. I don’t think she was." Sebastian stood, restless, and crossed to the window, though there was nothing to see but his own reflection in the dark glass. "She saw straight through years of careful argument to the one thing underneath it, in the space of a single walk in the park, and I have spent a decade making certain no one managed that. Not Tristan. Not my own mother. No one."

"That does not sound like a fault in her, Your Grace."

"It does not feel like a fault in her." He pressed his palm flat against the cold glass. "It feels like losing something I have held onto rather carefully."

Hopkins set the last of the papers down and came to stand a respectful distance behind him, the way he had for years when the subject grew larger than either of them cared to say directly. "Your mother lost control of herself for a great many reasons, Your Grace, most of them poor ones. Questioning what you believe is not among them. I would say it is closer to the opposite."

"You are not paid to philosophize, Hopkins."

"No, Your Grace. I am paid to see that the glassware survives your evenings, and I find myself failing rather badly at it tonight." A faint, dry humor crept into the old man's voice, gentling the room by degrees. "For what it is worth, sir, I have watched you build a very tidy argument to keep yourself safe from precisely this. I confess I am not sorry to see it give way."

Sebastian did not answer. He stood at the window a long while after Hopkins had gone, turning the day over in his mind, and finding no version of it in which he could simply set her words aside and call the matter closed.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

From the outside, the house Curzon Street looked entirely ordinary. Inside it was anything but.

Spiced wine came round on trays that never seemed to empty. Somewhere past the hall a quartet played something too loose and warm for a ballroom, and a dozen conversations tangled over it.

Couples lingered in shadowed corners, their murmurs blending with the clink of glasses as flirtatious glances passed between them.

Through an open doorway Sebastian glimpsed a few painters’ easels, their models posed in languid repose under flickering candlelight, reclined on a chaises and divans. Two of the artists were arguing cheerfully over the exact angle of a model’s wrist. Further down the corridor, a couple had stopped kissing long enough to lose the thread of whatever debate they'd been having about jealousy and picked it back up between kisses as though the two pursuits required the same breath.

A woman in emerald silk approached, her smile inviting. "Your Grace, the music calls for a turn about the room. Might you join me?"

He inclined his head. "Another time, perhaps. I am not much fun tonight."

"Sebastian." Julian appeared at his elbow with two glasses, handing one over without asking whether he wanted it. "You look like a man attending a funeral."

"I look like a man who has had a long day."

"You look like a man who has had a long day and brought it along with him." Julian studied him over the rim of his glass, the same unhurried attention he'd leveled at half the arguments Sebastian had ever lost to him. "Something happened with Miss Hartwell."

"Nothing happened."

"You have said that exact sentence to me twice this month, and both times it meant the opposite." Julian let it go, mercifully, and nodded toward a cluster of women near the hearth, one of whom had already noticed Sebastian and was making her way over. "Brace yourself. Lady Ormond has been asking after you since you arrived."

"Your Grace." Lady Ormond arrived exactly as predicted, clad in silk, rouged lips pouting, she rested a hand lightly on his sleeve. "I had begun to think you'd abandoned us for scholarship entirely."

"Merely delayed, my lady."