Page 76 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

Sebastian walked its length again and again, past the abandoned supper tables, the arrangements Amelia had chosen, the small, careful details he recognized now as evidence of exactly how much of herself she had poured into an evening meant to give his family's name back some of what it had lost.

She did this to give me something. And I handed her, in return, the very fear that has cost me everything I have ever actually wanted.

He stood a long while in the center of the empty ballroom, surrounded by the ruins of a celebration that had cost his wife days of careful, thankless labor, and understood, with a clarity that arrived far too late to do him any good: none of it—the candles, the flowers, the whole gleaming architecture of the evening—had ever meant anything at all beside the simple fact of her presence in the house, and that he had just thrown away the one thing that actually mattered while defending himself against a danger that had never once been real.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

He woke reaching for her before he was fully conscious of doing it, some old, unconsulted instinct expecting the warmth of her shoulder beneath his hand, and found only cold linen and the grey light of a morning he had no wish to be awake for.

The house was silent in a way it had not been silent in weeks.

He lay for a long moment listening to the familiar sounds of the house stirring around him, and beneath it all the lack of the most important sounds of all, from the one who mattered most. In her place only silence, only absence. Eventually he rose, because lying still with the silence was unbearably worse than facing it on his feet.

Her books sat on the drawing room shelf where she'd left them the day of the bookshop, the familiar spines now left untouched. The blue room's small sitting area held her needlework, abandoned mid-stitch. Even the study smelled faintly of her, some trace of lavender water she favored, and Sebastian stood in the doorway of his home a long while, understanding, fully, for the first time, precisely how thoroughly she had filled the house he had spent eight years occupying alone.

He did nothing about it for a week.

I have no right to ask her forgiveness. The thought repeated itself daily, a justification he wore like armor against the far more frightening alternative of attempting to earn it back. He buried himself in estate correspondence he did not need to answer so urgently, avoided his own reflection in the hall mirror, and told Hopkins, each morning, that he required nothing, wanted no callers, expected no letters, though he checked the tray each evening regardless and found it disappointingly empty.

Julian arrived on the eighth day without being announced, letting himself into the study the way only his three closest friends ever did.

"You look worse than you did the night of the ball."

"I have been occupied."

"You have been hiding, which I recognize, because you’ve done it since Eton. " Julian settled into the chair opposite, unhurried, though his expression carried none of its usual mildness. "Do you intend to do anything about your wife?"

"She has every reason to refuse me."

"She may well refuse you. That is not the same question as whether you ought to try." Julian leaned forward. "You are in love with her, Sebastian. I have watched you become an entirely different man in the space of two months, warmer, more honest, considerably less determined to argue every feeling into submission before it can touch you, and I have watched you throw the whole of it away in a single evening because an old fear finally caught up with you before logic and reason could stop it. You are destroying the best thing that has ever happened to you, and you are doing it from a chair in this study, accomplishing nothing except confirming every fear you have ever held about your own unworthiness."

Sebastian said nothing for a long moment, the truth landing in a way he could not easily argue with.

"What if she will not see me."

He looked away. He had known even before Amelia left the house that he’d made a grave mistake, the comparison was false. That was perhaps the ugliest part of it. He had not mistaken her for his mother. He had simply been frightened enough to reach for the accusation he knew would wound her most.

"Then you will have lost nothing more than you had not already lost by staying in this chair." Julian rose. "Go, Sebastian. Today. Before the fear convinces you it is already too late to try."

He was in his carriage within the hour.

The Hartwell townhouse looked exactly as it had the first morning he'd called there.

The footman who answered the door recognized him, and something in the young man's face suggested he had already been given instructions regarding precisely this eventuality.

"I am afraid Miss— Her Grace is not receiving visitors, Your Grace."

"Please tell her I am here regardless. I do not require an audience with the household. I require five minutes of her time, or less, if that is all she can bear to give me."

The footman disappeared and returned some minutes later with an expression that told Sebastian everything before the words arrived.

"She declines to see you, Your Grace."

He waited an hour on the front step before her father appeared, grim-faced, clearly under some obligation not to simply have him removed, and informed him, with considerable coolness, that Amelia had no wish to see him today, or, as far as her father understood it, any day soon.

"I will wait regardless, sir, if you have no objection."

He had, evidently, several objections, none of which he voiced beyond a long, assessing look that reminded Sebastian uncomfortably of his own mother's scrutiny, before retreating back into the house and leaving him on the step in the cold and whatever patience he could summon.