Page 60 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

She studied him suspiciously.

In the weeks that followed, they had slowly begun learning one another’s habits and preferences. Sebastian had left before breakfast that morning, called away to some estate matter in Kent that could not, apparently, wait for luncheon, and so when Lady Henswick’s carriage arrived that afternoon to collect Amelia for the opera, she gave her husband's absence no further thought at all.

He had mentioned nothing of his evening plans before he'd gone, and she had assumed, reasonably enough, that he intended a quiet night at his club, or perhaps an early return to Ravensmere House to bury himself in whatever correspondence Kent had generated.

He did not think to mention it either way, she thought, settling into the box beside Lady Henswick, which I suppose is rather the natural way of two people still learning each other's habits. They had been married scarcely a month. There was, she told herself, no reason either of them ought to account for every evening's whereabouts to the other, not when so much of the marriage itself still felt new enough to require careful navigating.

"Mrs. Casterton has worn that same puce velvet to every performance this Season," Lady Henswick murmured, fan lifted to hide her mouth, nodding toward a box across the house. "I begin to wonder whether she owns a second gown at all."

"Perhaps she simply prefers consistency."

"Perhaps she simply cannot afford a second gown, and consistency is the more flattering explanation." Lady Henswick's eyes glittered with the delight of a woman who considered gossip a civic duty. During the interval, unable to bear another act accompanied by the whispered dissection of Mrs. Casterton's velvet, Amelia excused herself toward the corridors behind the boxes, ostensibly in search of lemonade, actually in search of a little peace.

She found neither lemonade nor peace. Rounding a narrow corner near the stage door, she found, instead, the very last person she expected to encounter.

"You," she said, startled into a laugh. "I thought Kent had claimed you for the day, or at the very least that you would be safely at your club by now."

"I returned from Kent rather earlier than expected, and found myself with an evening unaccounted for." Sebastian's mouth curved, equally caught off guard. "Nathaniel had a spare ticket and no interest in using it himself, having some prior engagement he declined to specify. And you, dear Wife, were nowhere to be found. How could I imagine where you’d got to!” "

"It would not have been a leap of the imagination, dear Husband,” Amelia tipped her head amused. “As dear Lady Henswick has held the same box for the Season and I have attended every performance with her since the wedding." Amelia laughed. "We might have spared ourselves considerable astonishment had either of us simply mentioned our plans over breakfast this morning."

"You were still abed when I left for Kent."

"And you were still in Kent when Lady Henswick's carriage collected me. There, you see. A perfectly reasonable explanation for two people who somehow ended up at the same opera without either intending the coincidence." She said it lightly, though something warm settled beneath the words, a small, private pleasure at finding him here regardless of how it had happened. "What did you make of the first act?"

"I found the tenor's interpretation of the second aria regrettably thin. All volume, no genuine feeling behind it."

"I disagree entirely. I thought the volume rather effective, given the character's grief in that scene."

"Grief does not require quite so much shouting, Amelia."

"Says the man who once argued for a full quarter hour with Tristan over the correct pronunciation of a Latin word neither of you could actually prove."

"That was an entirely different matter."

"It was precisely the same matter. You simply enjoy being right regardless of the subject." She laughed, and he laughed with her, low and easy, both forgetting, for just a moment the constraints of propriety tied to the title they both carried..

"You cannot simply enjoy a performance, can you," he said. "You must analyze the architecture of it first and decide whether it has earned your feeling."

"I might say precisely the same of you, Your Grace, given how thoroughly you were frowning most likely at that tenor just now."

"I was not frowning."

"You were frowning magnificently."

He laughed again, the sound echoing pleasantly off the narrow walls, and his expression, unguarded and genuinely delighted, caught her off guard. "I confess I do not know when arguing with you became one of my favorite occupations."

"Somewhere around the third time I proved you wrong, I imagine."

"Somewhere around the first, if I am honest." His gaze dropped to her mouth, and the careful distance they usually maintained in public simply dissolved, and before any conscious decision was made, he kissed her softly, in a shadowed corner of a building full of people who might have discovered them at any moment.

She kissed him back without a single thought of caution, and when he finally drew away, a little breathless, something in his expression looked genuinely, helplessly surprised by his own happiness.

"We ought to return to our boxes," she managed in between kisses, "before the second act begins and Lady Henswick begins to wonder if I’ve run off."

"We ought," he agreed, and neither of them moved for a long moment more, reluctant to let the small, stolen quiet of that corridor end.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN