Page 58 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

She looked back at him. He had gone very still.

"This room was the one place I could come when everything else became too loud," he said. "When I was younger, I would spend hours here. I suppose I never really stopped."

Amelia looked around again. "It feels like you."

"I had hoped you might say that." His mouth curved faintly.

She turned toward him.

He crossed the room. "Every volume in it. Every manuscript, every note in the margins. It is yours now, Amelia, as much as mine."

She blinked. "Sebastian..."

He gestured toward the shelves.

" Every ridiculous argument I have had with half the scholars in England. Every piece of this room that has mattered to me." He looked directly at her. "It belongs to you as much as it belongs to me."

Her throat tightened. "You would let me touch the books?"

He stared at her for a moment. Then he laughed.

"That is what moved you?"

"I thought you might have rules."

"I have rules."

She raised a brow.

"Naturally."

"None I expect you to obey."

She smiled.

"That sounds dangerous."

"It probably is."

She walked toward him.

"Thank you."

He reached for her hand.

"There is something else I would tell you, while we are here. Something no one outside the Circle knows. "

"That sounds considerably more serious than a bookshelf."

"It is." He drew her down onto the small settee near the hearth, keeping her hand in his, and for a moment simply looked at the fire rather than at her, as though gathering the courage to begin. "You know what the Circle became, once the four of us had built it. What you have not asked, because there was no reason to, is why four young men who claimed to prize scholarship above all else decided to build something so unscholarly instead."

"I confess I had assumed simple boredom, or the general recklessness of young men left too much to their own devices at university."

"I wish it were that simple." He drew a slow breath.

"We were four boys when it began. Friends from Eton, then Cambridge. We read together, argued together, drank rather more than was sensible, and convinced ourselves we were engaged in something profound."

"How very scholarly."