Page 67 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"I do not offer this because I wish to purchase your affection, if that is what concerns you. I have watched you deny yourself small pleasures more than once now, out of some notion that wanting things makes you a burden rather than simply a person with tastes of her own."

He held the book out to her properly this time. "I want you to have things that make you happy, Amelia. Not because I owe you a debt for the scandal, or because I am attempting to buy some version of your regard I have not already earned honestly. Simply because I have begun to care, rather more than I expected to, whether you are happy, and this is one of the few languages I have ever actually trusted myself to speak fluently."

Something in her expression shifted, understanding arriving slowly, and she took the book from his hands at last, holding it against her chest the way she might hold something more fragile than paper and binding.

"You are not trying to make me happy?"

"Yes." He watched her realize it fully, watched the careful guard she'd been holding since he’d paid everything at the modiste's shop finally ease. "I am simply trying to care for you in the only way I have ever properly learned how, clumsy as it apparently still is."

"It is not clumsy." She held the book a moment longer, then set it atop her other purchases, something warm and unguarded finally settling into her face. "It is rather the loveliest thing anyone has ever said to me."

He paid for all three books, waved off her last protests with an ease that made her laugh despite herself, and they walked the rest of the way home with her arm looped through his, three new volumes tucked under her free arm, both of them quiet in a way that felt, for once, entirely comfortable rather than fraught.

Sebastian thought, watching the sunlight catch in her hair as they turned onto their street, that he had spent years building a life no one could reach, and had somehow, without ever quite meaning to, let this one woman walk straight through every wall of it in the space of a single month.

"Welcome home, Your Grace." Hopkins held the door with the particular stiffness of a man determined not to smile and failing rather badly at it. "Both of you."

"Thank you, Hopkins." Sebastian handed off his hat without looking at it, and Amelia watched the butler's eyes move between them, quick and assessing, the way she imagined servants had been trained for generations to read a house's temperature from its master's face alone.

We must look thoroughly transparent, she thought, feeling heat rise in her cheeks despite herself, married but one month and already wearing the whole of it plainly enough for the staff to read.

She felt absurdly pleased that even a man who had been a stranger not so long ago, at least to her, could see the change that had come between her and Sebastian. Her pleasant thoughts were interrupted by the sight of a footman crossing the hall at a pace that could only be described as fleeing.

"Is something the matter?"

Hopkins’ expression did something complicated. "Her Grace the Dowager Duchess has been waiting since half past nine, Your Grace."

Sebastian went still beside her, the whole loose, unguarded ease of their walk home draining out of him in the space of a single sentence. Amelia felt it happen through the arm still looped with hers, the sudden rigidity of him, and understood, with a small sinking clarity, that whatever ground they had gained in that narrow bed last night was about to be tested rather sooner than either of them would have chosen.

"She is still here."

"In the morning room, Your Grace. She asked to be informed the moment you returned."

"Of course she did." Something flat and dangerous had crept into his voice, the tone she had learned to recognize from that first ball, the sound of a man bracing for an argument he had not asked for. "Thank you, Hopkins. That will be all."

He did not move toward the morning room. He stood in the hall, jaw working, and Amelia watched eight years of careful distance reassert itself across his face in a matter of seconds, watched him retreat behind it the way she imagined he had a hundred times before she ever knew him.

He is going to walk in there already furious, and she is going to meet him exactly the way she always does, and neither of them will hear a word the other says.

"Sebastian." She kept her voice low, steady, and felt him startle slightly, as though he had genuinely forgotten she was still holding his arm. "Look at me a moment."

"Amelia, I do not have the patience this morning for —"

"I am not asking you to have patience for her. I am asking you to have it for me, , before you walk into that room." She turned to face him properly, and watched the anger flicker, just slightly, uncertain of its footing. "You do not have to forgive whatever she is about to ask of you. You do not even have to be pleasant about it. I only ask that you let me stand beside you while you refuse, instead of leaving me in the hall to hear about it afterward."

Something in him eased, fractionally, the tightness around his eyes softening into something closer to tired than furious. "You make it very difficult to remain properly angry."

"Good." She smoothed the front of her pelisse with more composure than she felt. "Shall we?"

The Dowager Duchess rose the moment they entered, and Amelia had exactly enough time to register the sharpness of her gaze, moving from Sebastian's face to Amelia's and back again with an assessment so thorough it felt almost indecent, before the woman spoke.

"You are still here." His voice had lost every trace of the warmth she'd grown used to over the last hours, hardening back into the flat, guarded tone he apparently reserved for his mother.

"I told you I would leave in the morning,and I had a matter of some urgency to discuss before I go."

"You look considerably improved," she said, to Sebastian, in a tone that suggested she had drawn several conclusions from the observation and intended to keep every one of them to herself. "I confess I did not expect that, given the state you left in last night."

"Mother—"