Page 74 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

“You knew what was at stake. You knew what this family has already survived. You knew what your decision could cost, and you made it anyway because you believed you knew better.”

“I made the decision because I believed it was right.”

“And there it is.”

He stepped away from the window.

“That certainty. That absolute conviction that because you believe something is right, the consequences somehow cease to matter.”

Amelia stared at him, stunned.

“That is what she did.”

His mother's name did not need to be spoken.

“I am not her,” Amelia said again, quieter this time.

"You do not understand the weight of what I carry, Amelia. The responsibility. The damage a single careless choice can cause an entire estate, an entire family name."

"I never wanted to carry it for you, or control it, or replace whatever version of authority you believe a wife threatens simply by having opinions of her own. I wanted to stand beside you. That is the whole of what I have ever wanted from this marriage." Her voice broke entirely now, tears she refused to let fall burning behind her eyes instead. "If you cannot see the difference between that and what your mother did, then I do not know what I am doing here at all."

"Perhaps," he said, his voice low and rigid, "you ought to return to your family. If you cannot accept who I actually am , what this family requires, or the responsibility that comes with standing beside me, then you have no business remaining here."

The words landed with a finality that stole the breath clean out of her chest.

"Is that truly what you want?"

He met her gaze without wavering.

He said nothing. The silence stretched, unbearable, and Amelia understood, standing there in a study that had felt, only hours before, like the safest room in the entire house, that he had just done the very thing she had told him, she could not accept from him ever again: a door closing between them, with her still standing on the wrong side of it.

"Yes, return to your family, that is what I want." His jaw tightened, but hebdidn’t take the words back.

"Very well," she said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt, though it cost her everything to make it so.

She stood a moment simply absorbing it, the shock of hearing the thing she feared most spoken aloud by the one man she had trusted not to reach for it, and felt something in her chest give way entirely, some final, fragile hope she had not realized she was still carrying until it was gone.

"I believed," she said, very quietly, "that you had finally stopped hiding from me."

She did not wait for an answer. She turned and left the study, , understanding only that whatever trust she had believed they'd built these past weeks had just proven, in the space of a single terrible evening, considerably more fragile than either of them had wanted to admit.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

She did not remember walking back into the ballroom. She remembered only her mother's face finding hers across the crowded room, the immediate, sharpening alarm in it, her father already crossing toward her before she'd managed a single step further into the light.

"Amelia." Her mother's hand found her arm, steadying her though Amelia had not realized she was swaying. "What has happened?"

"Nothing. I am simply tired." The lie came out thin, unconvincing, her voice already fracturing on the second word.

"We are leaving. Now, darling. Before anyone else sees you like this," her mother said. And her father took her arm and steered her toward the side entrance, away from the worst of the crush, murmuring some excuse to the nearest cluster of guests that Amelia did not catch and could not have repeated afterward, and by the time the carriage door closed behind the three of them, whatever composure she'd been holding together with sheer will finally gave out entirely.

She wept the whole ride home, silent at first, then not silent at all, her hand pressed hard against her own chest as though she might physically hold herself together by force, her mother's arm around her shoulders offering what comfort it could against a grief neither of them yet understood the shape of.

Mary was waiting when they arrived, waiting for news of her sister’s ball. She took one look at Amelia's face, crossed the room with haste and simply held her, no questions yet, only the steady, familiar weight of her sister's arms.

"Oh, love."

Amelia went into them without a word, and the whole of it broke loose at once, three days of exhaustion and one evening of humiliation and a single sentence that had undone weeks of careful, hard-won trust, all of it arriving in a single, wracking sob against her sister's shoulder.