Page 54 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

A ghost of warmth crossed his face, quickly smoothed away as the vicar cleared his throat, and the ceremony began in earnest. Amelia had always imagined that when the moment came, she would feel certain. Instead, she felt everything at once. Her heart pounded so violently she was certain someone must hear it. Her palms were warm despite the coolness of the church. Every word the vicar spoke seemed to carry an unbearable weight.

She said her vows when it was her turn, her voice steadier than she expected, and heard Sebastian say his in a tone that carried more than the words alone required, something underneath the formal language that she could not entirely name, though she felt it land close to her heart regardless.

They signed the register side by side, her hand not quite steady on the pen, his signature beneath hers bold and certain in a way his voice had not quite managed to be.

"I now pronounce you husband and wife."

The words settled over her strangely, final in a way the whole preceding week had somehow failed to prepare her for, and when Sebastian turned to her, something raw moved briefly across his face before he mastered it back into composure, and she wondered, watching it happen, whether anyone else in that crowded church had seen it too.

They walked back down the aisle together to a wave of murmured congratulations, her mother dabbing at her eyes, Mary grinning outright despite the whole complicated mess of how they'd arrived here. Tristan was calling out something teasing that she didn't quite catch over the general noise, and Julian, near the back, offering her a small, private nod that felt, somehow, like the truest congratulation of the entire church.

Outside, the afternoon light hit them both at once, and the crowd gathered on the steps to watch them emerge, husband and wife, the scandal of the Season concluded properly, exactly as society required.

"It is done," Sebastian said quietly, beside her, watching the same crowd she was watching.

"It is done," she agreed.

Neither of them moved to take the other's hand, not yet, both still too careful, too uncertain what the gesture might mean or fail to mean, and Amelia stood there on the church steps in her wedding gown, married to a man she was no longer entirely sure she understood, and thought, with a clarity that startled her, that whatever scandal had brought them to this moment, the far harder work of actually knowing each other as husband and wife had not yet even begun.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ravensmere House rose out of the dusk like something out of a different century, its tall windows glowing amber against the darkening sky, a house Amelia had glimpsed only briefly from the outside and never once entered until tonight.

"It is larger than I expected," she said, as the carriage rolled to a stop before the front steps.

"It was built for a much larger household than mine." Sebastian's voice carried an odd, careful lightness, and she noticed, as he handed her down, that his hand lingered before he released it and stepped back.

The entrance hall swallowed her whole, marble underfoot, a staircase curving up into shadow, portraits of Ravensmere ancestors watching from the walls with the particular disapproval only oil paint could manage. A butler met them at the door, bowing low. He led the rest of the staff, and they all bowed in unison. Amelia stood very still, suddenly conscious of dozens of unfamiliar faces turned toward her.

"Welcome to Ravensmere House, Your Grace. Your Grace." He said it twice, first to her and then to Sebastian, and Amelia felt the strange, unsteady thrill of hearing the title applied to herself for the first time.

"Thank you, Hopkins. That will be all for tonight." Sebastian dismissed the assembled staff with a nod, and the hall emptied by degrees until only the two of them remained beneath the great, curved stair, the silence between them stretching.

"This is the drawing room." He gestured vaguely toward an open doorway, and she noticed his hand did not quite settle, moving instead to adjust a cuff that did not need adjusting. "The library beyond it. My study is through there, though you need never trouble yourself with it unless you wish to."

"You are giving me a tour."

"I am attempting to make you feel less a stranger in your own home." He said it too quickly, and she caught, beneath the words, that he was less composed than his tone let on, his eyes not quite meeting hers, his jaw set the way it had been the day he'd walked away from her in the park. "I confess I am not entirely certain of the correct etiquette for a wife's first evening in a house she has never once seen."

"Neither, am I."

They stood a moment in the vast hall, both clearly aware that the conversation had arrived, unavoidably, at the one subject neither had yet found the courage to address directly.

"I do not wish to share your bedchamber," she said finally, the words arriving faster and blunter than she'd intended, though she watched them land and forced herself not to soften them after the fact.

Something flickered across his face—relief, she though, though not entirely. "You need not."

"I mean it plainly, Sebastian."

"I heard you the first time." His hands moved to clasp behind his back, a posture she recognized now as the one he adopted whenever he wished to appear more composed than he felt. "You may take whichever room in this house you prefer. The blue room overlooks the garden. It gets the morning sun, and my mother favored it before she removed to the dower house. There is a small sitting room adjoining it, should you want somewhere entirely your own."

"You are not going to argue with me."

"I have no wish to argue with you tonight." His voice had gone quieter, and she caught the way his throat worked before he continued, the way his eyes dropped briefly to the floor before returning to hers, as though the honesty cost him something to produce. "This house is yours now, Amelia. Every room of it. You need no permission from me to go anywhere you please. I would not have you feel otherwise on your first evening in it."

She had braced herself for duty, for the correct, cold performance of a husband claiming what she was not yet ready to give. She had not braced for this, offered without expectation of thanks, delivered by a man whose hands, she noticed, had not stopped moving since they'd stepped through the door, adjusting a cuff, smoothing a lapel, anything, it seemed, to avoid simply standing still in front of her.

"Thank you," she managed.