Page 45 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

Julian looked past him toward Amelia.

"One of your father’s servants saw you enter my carriage and followed. Your father is downstairs."

Amelia's face drained of color.

"My father?"

Julian nodded. "He is coming up."

"Oh, God."

Sebastian moved toward her instinctively.

"Amelia—"

"No." She stepped back. "What am I going to do?"

Before Sebastian could answer, another voice sounded from the corridor.

"Amelia."

Her father's voice.

"Papa."

Her father stood in the doorway of the library, and whatever composure he had carried into that house was already gone by the time his eyes found her, in that room where the two of them had been clearly and unmistakably alone.

"Get your cloak." His voice did not rise. It did not need to. "We are leaving."

"Papa, nothing happened, we were only talking⁠—"

"I do not care what you were doing." He said it without looking at her, his eyes fixed on Sebastian with a fury she had never once seen him direct at anyone.

His voice dropped.

"Do you understand where you are?"

Amelia swallowed. "Yes."

"No. You don't."

"You are unmarried, you left your home in secret, unchaperoned, to come to a house that exists for precisely the reasons everyone in London whispers about it. I find you secluded with a man. That is the whole of what matters tonight, Amelia. Not what did or did not happen behind this door. We are going."

Sebastian stepped forward. "Dr. Hartwell, if you will allow me to explain⁠—"

"There is nothing to explain. I have no wish to hear from you, Your Grace." Her father's voice shook on the title, contempt riding underneath it. "Amelia. Now."

She followed him out. There was nothing else to do, no argument capable of undoing what the simple fact of being in that room had already done, and she felt every eye in the front hall find them as her father walked her out, felt the murmur start behind them before the door had even fully closed, low and delighted in the way scandal always sounded.

The carriage ride home passed in absolute silence. Her father stared out the window the entire way, jaw tight, and Amelia sat opposite him with her hands folded in her lap, watching London slide by in the dark and understanding, with a cold, sinking certainty, that whatever this cost her, it would not stay contained to one night, or one house, or one carriage.

"By morning," her father said finally, not looking at her, "every drawing room in this city will know exactly where you were tonight."

"I know."

"Do you." He turned then, and the anger in his face had given way to something worse, something closer to grief. "I have spent your entire life trying to protect you from precisely this, Amelia. Not because I do not trust your judgment. Because I know precisely how little judgment matters, once a house like that one has your name attached to it."

She had no answer for that. She sat with the truth of it the whole rest of the ride home, and did not sleep at all that night. By the time the sun came up she understood exactly how right her father was.