Page 64 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

The scandal, the hurried wedding, the awkward first days in separate rooms, she had braced herself for all of it to remain difficult indefinitely, a marriage built on obligation slowly, painfully learning to be something else. And then it simply hadn't been difficult.

He had given her the whole house and asked nothing in return. He had danced with her in the rain. He had shown her his library and called it hers. Every hard thing between them had seemed to resolve itself within the space of a single honest conversation, and she had let herself believe, foolishly perhaps, that this was simply what their marriage would be from now on: argument, honesty, resolution, warmth, in that order, every time.

This was proving to be more complicated. She watched the streets narrow toward Jermyn Street and felt the first real fear she'd had since the wedding, not the fear of a difficult evening but the fear of discovering that some part of him might be too closed off for even honesty to reach.

What if this is the one thing conversation cannot simply mend. The rooms were above the tobacconist's, and Amelia climbed the narrow stair with her heart beating faster than the modest distance warranted, her hand trailing the rail, and thought, absurdly, of how she had climbed a grander staircase only a month past believing herself prepared for whatever marriage required of her.

She had not accounted for this, learning to stand outside a locked door not knowing whether the man on the other side of it would let her in.

A light showed beneath the door at the top.

She knocked twice before it opened.

"Amelia." Sebastian stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, coat discarded, a glass in one hand, half finished. Whatever composure he'd left the house with had entirely abandoned him. His hair was disordered, his collar loose, his eyes carrying the hollow look of a man who had spent the last several hours arguing with no one but himself. "You should not have come."

"I came anyway." She stepped past him into the room before he could decide whether to bar the way, and found it smaller than she expected, spare, a single worn chair by an unlit hearth, a narrow bed in the adjoining alcove, shelves holding perhaps a dozen books rather than the hundreds that crowded his study at Ravensmere House.

"This is precisely why I left." His voice sharpened, temper rising fast. "I wanted an hour, Amelia. One hour, alone, to put myself back together before I had to face anyone, and you have followed me across half of London to deny me even that."

"I followed you because you vanished from your own table without a word to your wife, in the middle of the worst evening either of us has had since the wedding, and I had no notion whether you had simply gone for air or gone somewhere worse."

"I am a grown man. I do not require an escort for my own grief."

"No one said you did." Her own temper flared to match his. "But you left me sitting at that table with your mother, Sebastian, to manage the wreckage of an argument I did not start and barely understood, and then you disappeared, and I am meant to simply accept that and wait patiently at home for you to decide you are ready to speak to me again?"

"I did not ask you to manage anything."

"No. You never do. You simply walk out and expect the rest of us to arrange ourselves around the empty space you've left." She was breathing hard now, the fear that had grown during the carriage ride curdling fast into anger now that she had him in front of her. "That is precisely what I came here to say. You cannot keep doing this. Every time something difficult finds you, you disappear, and I am left alone, trying to make sense of things I have no context for."

"You do not understand the full context."

"That’s precisely the problem, give it to me." Her voice cracked, temper and fear tangling together now. "Instead of running to an empty room you kept secret from your wife."

"It is not a secret."

"It is the definition of a secret, Sebastian. I have been married to you a month and I did not know this place existed until Hopins told me tonight, out of what I suspect was pity for how little I actually understood." She gestured at the small room around her. "What else am I not permitted to know?"

He said nothing for a long moment, jaw working, and she watched him war visibly with himself before the anger began, unwillingly, to give way.

"This is where I have always gone," he said finally, "when everything felt like more than I could manage. I have not kept these rooms a secret. I meant to give them up, once I was married, and yet here I am."

"Here you are." She turned a slow circle, taking in the deliberate emptiness of it, the absence of anything that might require tending or feeling, and felt, for the first time since the wedding, genuinely uncertain of her own footing. Every other difficulty between us has had a door I could simply walk through. I am not entirely sure this one does. "There is nothing of you in this room, Sebastian. No papers. No work. Nothing that requires you to care for it."

"That is rather the point of it."

"I know." She faced him fully now, steadying herself against the small, cold fear still sitting low in her chest. "That is precisely why I came."

He said nothing, and she watched him war with himself again, the same battle she'd seen play out at the dinner table just a few hours past, struggling to hold the wall up and knowing, plainly, that she had already seen straight through it.

"I needed to be away from the house," he said. "After all that. Every word she said tonight, I have carried for a decade, and hearing her say them aloud, in front of you, made me feel as though I were suffocating. I did not trust myself to be a fit husband tonight."

"So you ran here instead. To the one place that asks nothing of you."

"Yes."

"And found, I imagine, that it did not actually help."

Something in his face cracked, making him look more vulnerable than she had ever seen him. "No. It has not helped at all. I have sat in this chair,accomplishing nothing except discovering that an empty room does not make a difficult argument any quieter."