Page 71 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

She wanted, badly, someone beside her to say so to. She climbed the stairs instead, alone, past a study door closed and dark, and told herself, without entirely believing it, that Sebastian's estate matters would keep him only one more night before this loneliness resolved itself into something easier to carry.

The ballroom, when he finally entered it, did not look like it belonged in his home at all.

It glittered, banked with hothouse roses that must have cost more than half his tenant farms cleared in a season, candles by the hundred throwing gold across silk and jewels and the polished self-satisfaction of a room built only to be admired. Sebastian stood just inside the doors a moment, feeling the noise close over him like water, and found, to his own dismay, that he felt none of the pride he had been told, his whole life, a man was meant to feel surveying his own consequence laid out so lavishly for the ton's inspection.

This is precisely what I swore I would never become. The thought arrived with an old, familiar bitterness, watching a footman refilling glasses no one had finished, and two matrons assess the flowers with the same flat calculation his mother once used on tradesmen. He stood watching guests glide past him in silk and jewels, and felt the old memory rise unbidden.

His stomach turned as he remembered his mother, hosting increasingly extravagant evenings while the tenant cottages fell further into disrepair, every candle another shilling that ought to have gone toward mending a roof instead of dazzling a room full of people who would forget the evening by morning. My mother kept this family looking prosperous while it slid toward ruin, and here I stand hosting the very spectacle that nearly finished us.

"There he is." Tristan materialized at his elbow with the ease of a man who had been watching the door for the express purpose of catching him the moment he crossed it, green eyes already bright with the evening's promise of gossip. "Looking precisely as delighted as I predicted, and rather better dressed than usual, which I attribute entirely to your wife's influence."

"The tailor's, actually."

"Do not deflect. It suits you." Nathaniel arrived on his other side, grey eyes assessing the ballroom's excess before returning to Sebastian's face with rather more attention than the roses had merited. "Though you do not look like a man enjoying his own triumph. You look like a man calculating the cost of the orchestra."

"Four hundred pounds," Sebastian said, before he could stop himself, "for a single evening."

"There it is." Julian's voice, quiet, from just behind them, faintly amused in the way that meant he had already diagnosed the trouble and was simply waiting to see whether Sebastian would admit to it himself. "You have the look of a man standing in his father's shadow rather than his own ballroom."

"I do not know what you mean."

"Of course you do, you would just rather not discuss it at a ball where people are already watching to see whether you'll smile at your guests or frown your way through the evening." Julian nodded, minutely, toward a cluster of matrons near the refreshment table whose fans had gone suspiciously still. "Your mother orchestrated this evening to prove the Ravensmere name has recovered its footing. You are standing in the middle of it looking as though you'd rather be anywhere else, which rather undercuts the point of the exercise."

"I am aware of the point of the exercise."

"Then perhaps look aware of it," Tristan said, not unkindly, clapping a hand briefly to his shoulder, "rather than looking like a man doing sums. Where is Amelia? A wife on your arm would improve your countenance considerably."

Where is Amelia, indeed. Sebastian scanned the room and found her near the far wall, receiving a line of guests with a composure that looked, from this distance, entirely unbothered, though he had learned by now the particular set of her shoulders that meant otherwise. She had not looked toward him once since he'd entered. He could not, examining the thought honestly, entirely blame her for it.

"You have gone somewhere else," Nathaniel observed, watching him with the same sharpness he usually reserved for a column of figures that would not balance. "This is not merely the expense troubling you."

"It is nothing."

"It is your mother," Julian said with quiet certainty, "or some version of her, standing in every corner of this room reminding you what all this extravagance cost the last time a Ravensmere hosted it in earnest." He said it gently, but there was no retreating from the accuracy of it. "You built an entire life out of proving you were nothing like him. This ballroom does not know the difference between the two of you tonight, and I suspect that is precisely what is troubling you, rather than the orchestra's fee."

Sebastian said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not confirm it at least in part. He looked instead across the glittering room to where his wife stood receiving guests alone, three days of exhaustion carefully hidden behind a composure he recognized because he had spent eight years perfecting the very same mask himself.

He watched her incline her head to Lady Featherstone, watched the smile that did not quite reach her eyes.

"Sebastian." Tristan's voice, unusually serious, cut through the thought. "Go and stand beside your wife. Whatever this is, it will keep until the two of you are no longer performing separately for the same room."

He crossed the ballroom without answering, aware of a dozen watching faces tracking his progress, aware that his mother's eyes had found him from across the room and narrowed, faintly, in something that might have been warning. Amelia turned as he reached her, and for one unguarded moment before her expression composed itself into the same careful welcome she'd shown every other guest that evening, he saw exactly how tired she was, and exactly how long she had been standing there alone.

"Your Grace." Her voice was light, pitched for the guests still within earshot, though something considerably cooler moved beneath it. "How good of you to finally join our little ball."

The words landed harder than she likely intended them to, or perhaps exactly as hard as she intended, and Sebastian felt the whole evening's unease curdle, suddenly, into something with a shape and a target at last.

"Amelia." He kept his voice low, aware of the guests still drifting past them, aware of his mother's eyes finding them from with the fixed attention of a woman watching a scene she had helped construct.

"What is all of this," he said, and heard, even as he said it, that the question had come out sharper than he intended.

"It is the ball, Sebastian. I wanted the Ravensmere name to feel welcoming again, after so many years of silence, and I believed it mattered to the estate that we host it properly." She smiled, clearly expecting some measure of shared pride in return. "Do you not think it turned out well?"

She does not see it. She cannot see what this looks like to me. The old fear rose like a wave inside him, memory and present collapsing together until he could no longer entirely separate his wife's careful planning from his mother's ruinous extravagance a decade past.

"You believed." He heard his own voice sharpen and could not, in the moment, stop it. "You spent three days deciding how this family would be presented to hundreds of guests, without once asking whether I wanted any part of it."

"You have not been available fot the asking these past days though, have you? And besides, you agreed to the ball yourself, Sebastian, in the morning room, not a fortnight past."