Page 14 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

He chuckled, the sound warm against her cheek. “Then we’ll drive until you change your mind.”

The carriage hit a rut. Sebastian shifted to keep his balance, his thigh sliding between hers, pressing against the thin layers of her skirts. Heat bloomed low in her belly. She should have pushed him away. Instead, her fingers curled into the lapel of his coat, anchoring herself as the world outside blurred past the windows.

“Still refusing?” he murmured, his breath warm against the shell of her ear.

“Still none of your business,” she managed, though her voice had gone husky.

She tilted her face up. Their mouths hovered, breaths mingling, the air suspended like a held note.

“Say the word,” Sebastian breathed, “and I stop the driver. Or we keep going until neither of us cares where we end up.”

She pushed him away from her and he settled back against the squabs.

"Very well. Where do you live?"

"I would rather do a great many things than give a man my direction after he has already demonstrated, twice tonight, that he considers his own judgment vastly superior to mine."

"I have demonstrated no such thing."

"You refuse to admit you climbed into the wrong carriage. You are currently attempting to extract my address without my consent. And but a short time ago you informed a ballroom full of witnesses that women lack the discipline for rigorous thought, which I can only assume extends to a disinclination to respect their preferences generally." She lifted her chin, pleased with the shape of the argument even as some traitorous part of her noted how the carriage lamp caught the line of his jaw when he turned his head. "I find myself disinclined to make this easier for you."

"You are enjoying this."

"I am enjoying watching a duke lose an argument for the second time in one evening. It is not an opportunity I expect to have often."

"You have not won this argument. You have simply refused to engage with it, which is a different sort of victory, and a far less impressive one."

"It is precisely as impressive as the argument you made an hour ago, which you also did not win, merely abandoned the moment it became inconvenient."

"I abandoned nothing." He leaned forward slightly, and the space between them, which had seemed perfectly reasonable a moment before, suddenly wasn’t. "I am simply choosing my battles."

"You are choosing to sit in a carriage arguing with a woman whose name you still do not know, rather than admit you were mistaken about a great many things tonight."

"I was not mistaken about the carriage."

"You were entirely mistaken about the carriage. You are, at this very moment, sitting in the wrong one, arguing with the wrong woman, and somehow still contriving to sound as though you have the advantage." She should not have found that amusing. Though she did, enormously amusing, and worse, she suspected he could see it in her face, because something in his expression eased, the irritation giving way to a reluctant, answering warmth that did nothing at all to steady her pulse.

"You have a considerable talent for making a man feel entirely outmaneuvered."

"I have a considerable talent for being correct. The two are frequently confused."

The carriage swayed around a corner, and the motion carried her forward half an inch before she caught herself, close enough now that she could see the exact shade of his eyes in the lamplight, dark and steady and fixed on her with an attention that had nothing to do with the argument they were supposedly still having.

His gaze dropped, again, to her mouth, and returned, and Amelia felt the whole of her composure falter under the weight of being looked at that way.

Neither of them moved for a long moment, the carriage rattling on around them, the lamp swinging gently overhead and throwing his face in and out of shadow, and Amelia was abruptly, acutely aware of how very little space remained between them, how easily the distance might be closed if either of them simply leaned a few inches further, how badly, despite every objection she had catalogued against him not twenty minutes past, some reckless part of her wanted exactly that.

This is absurd. She had known this man for the length of a single argument. He had insulted her entire sex not two hours ago in front of witnesses. And yet here she sat, breathless, watching his gaze trace the line of her jaw with an intensity that made her wonder, wildly, what his mouth would feel like against hers, whether it would be as maddening and as certain as everything else about him.

"Stop the carriage," she said, too sharply, and sat back hard against the squabs, putting distance between them that felt, absurdly, like a physical effort.

He blinked, and something shuttered behind his eyes, the same careful neutrality she imagined he wore in every ballroom in London. "I beg your pardon?"

"I said stop the carriage. I wish to walk the rest of the way."

"It is nearly midnight."

"I am aware of the hour."