Page 22 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

She held to that intention for the better part of an hour after arriving home.

She held to it through tea, and through half of a very tedious letter from her aunt in Bath, and through nearly twenty minutes of staring resolutely at her needlework while the papers sat, entirely too visible, on the corner of her writing desk.

"This is absurd," she said aloud, to no one, and reached for them.

They are his private notes. Unfinished thoughts, not meant for anyone's eyes but his own. She knew it even as she unfolded the first page, and found she did not particularly care, curiosity winning out over conscience with an ease that would have alarmed her under any other circumstance. His handwriting was quick and slanted, corrections crossed through and rewritten in the margins, whole paragraphs struck through entirely and replaced with sharper, more considered versions, and she found herself reading not merely the argument but the process of it, the visible workings of a mind reconsidering itself in real time.

"Absolutely not."

He is wrong here. She reached for her own pen almost without deciding to, and began, in the narrow margin beside his third paragraph, to explain precisely why.

And here. A second note, longer, disputing his characterization of a source she happened to know rather better than he apparently did.

She sat back. Her pulse had quickened. This was ridiculous. She was arguing with him in the margins of a paper he did not even know she possessed. She turned the page.

Then smiled despite herself. He had anticipated the objection. He had answered it in the following paragraph.

Amelia's smile disappeared. "Oh, you clever man."

She read his answer twice. Then wrote beneath it.

Better, but still insufficient and here, though I grant this point has some merit, however grudgingly given. By midnight her handwriting had grown smaller, more urgent, crowding into every available margin, and by the sixth page she had entirely abandoned any pretense of restraint, filling the reverse side of one sheet with a counterargument three full paragraphs long, growing more irritated with each line, though the irritation, she noticed distantly, carried a great deal more warmth in it than irritation generally did.

On one page, she drew a line beneath a paragraph and wrote:

If you were standing in front of me, I would ask you to defend this.

She stared at the words. Then, after a moment, added: And I suspect you would.

She closed her eyes. This had gone too far. She gathered the pages together. She should return them.

Tomorrow.

Without another word written. Amelia placed the papers carefully on her desk. Then looked at them. She picked them up again.

One last page. Only one.

She opened it and found herself smiling before she had read the first line.

"The Duke of Ravensmere is here."

Mary delivered the news at a volume entirely unsuited to the drawing room, bursting through the door with a speed that left the ribbon in her hair listing badly to one side, and Amelia felt her stomach drop straight through the floor.

"Here. Now?"

"Barrow has just shown him into Papa's study. Mama is already fussing with her hair in the hall mirror, and Papa looks as though he has swallowed something unpleasant, and I have never in my life seen this house in such a state over a single caller." Mary dropped onto the settee beside her, eyes bright with an excitement Amelia did not remotely share. "Do you suppose he has come to propose?"

"He has most certainly not come to propose. We have met twice, both times to argue, and on neither occasion did the conversation suggest anything resembling romantic intention."

"Papa seems to think he has come to complain of you. He has been muttering about it since the note arrived this morning requesting a call." Mary's grin turned wicked. "Mama, on the other hand, has been humming since breakfast, which she only ever does when she is hoping for something she does not wish to say aloud."

"Mama is hoping for nothing. There is nothing to hope for."

"Mm." Mary's expression suggested she believed this exactly as much as Mary generally believed Amelia's protests, which was to say not remotely at all. "Well, whatever he has come for, you had best go and find out, because Papa has just sent Barrow to fetch you, and he did not look pleased about it."

The papers. Her heart began beating harder and she smoothed her hands on her gown.

Her father's study seemed to shrink in size, or perhaps it simply felt that way with Sebastian standing in the middle of it, dressed with his usual precision, hands clasped behind his back, studying the modest shelf of her father's books with an attention that made her instantly, uncomfortably certain he had already guessed exactly where his missing papers had gone.