Page 43 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

“Experimentation.”

Amelia's brows rose.

“On one another?”

“Among consenting adults,” he said smoothly. “We speak frankly about desire, rather than pretending it does not exist. And, when curiosity demands more than conversation, we are inclined to explore what we have been discussing.”

Amelia stared at him.

“So, this is a house for debauchery.”

Sebastian's smile turned slow and wicked.

“Such an ugly word.”

“Is it inaccurate?”

“Not entirely. We built this because we grew tired of the hypocrisy of it. Discussing desire as though it were shameful in the daylight and indulging it anyway once the candles were low enough that no one need admit to it."

"And you believe that. Truly."

Sebastian's mouth curved slightly.

"I helped create it."

"That isn't an answer."

He stepped closer.

"I believed it entirely, once." He looked at her steadily, something raw beneath the composure. "I am considerably less certain now what I believe about anything."

"Because I am standing in it."

"Because you are standing in it," he agreed, "and I find I would rather explain myself honestly to you than perform whatever version of myself I have been performing for everyone else in this house for the better part of a decade."

"Then be honest." She stepped nearer, close enough now that she could see the exact tension in his jaw, the same one she'd watched shutter closed in the park two days past, only now, here, it did not close. "Tell me what restraint has actually cost you, Sebastian. Not the argument. The truth."

"I believe people should be honest about what they want."

Amelia's breath caught.

"Even when what they want is inconvenient?"

"Especially then. It has cost me the chance to feel anything without first deciding whether it was safe to feel it." His voice had gone low, unguarded in a way she had never once heard from him. "I have wanted a great many things in my life and I have allowed myseld almost anything I could walk away from afterward. It is the things I could not that I have denied myself. I am finding it considerably harder to deny this one."

"This one."

"You," he said simply, and the single word landed somewhere low in her chest, warm and entirely undoing.

The music from the other room drifted faintly through the door, slow and unhurried, for a moment neither spoke. Then Sebastianheld out his hand, and she took it without quite deciding to, and then they were moving together in the small space between the shelves.

It was nothing like the careful, regulated distance of a ballroom waltz, his hand settling low at the small of her back, hers curling into the lapel of his coat the way it had in the carriage weeks ago, both of them unwilling to keep the proper span of space between them that propriety demanded.

"You are trembling," he murmured, close enough now that his breath stirred against her temple.

"I am not accustomed to any of this."

"Neither, as it happens, am I." His hand tightened slightly at her waist. "I have done a great many reckless things in my life, Amelia. I do not recall ever once being nervous while doing them."