Page 28 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"This is absurd," she murmured.

She shook off the wistful thoughts and laughed with a young Mr. Pembroke when he nearly turned the wrong direction during the country dance, accepted an apology from Lord Hatherleigh after he stepped on the hem of her gown, and found herself genuinely amused by a story told by a naval captain who had spent three minutes trying to explain why he considered dancing a greater military trial than any battle he had endured.

A new set was announced. Several gentlemen immediately approached. Amelia accepted the first invitation.

She was having a pleasant evening. A very pleasant evening. So why did she keep looking toward the entrance? She noticed herself doing it after the third dance. Then again when the doors opened to admit a late-arriving party. Again, when a tall gentleman entered with his mother. And once more, when someone moved past the doorway and for one ridiculous instant the shape of his shoulders looked familiar.

"You keep looking toward the door, Miss Hartwell." Her partner said with a curious smile as the dance turned them. "Are you expecting someone?"

"Not particularly." She recovered her attention with visible effort, offering a smile she hoped read as merely distracted rather than transparently disappointed. "I believe I simply enjoy watching people arrive. It is one of the more entertaining aspects of a ball, I find, guessing who will make an entrance and who will simply slip in unnoticed."

He accepted the explanation with easy good humor, and she spent the remainder of the set performing an interest in his conversation that she did not entirely feel. She told herself, firmly that she was perfectly content, that the evening required nothing further from her than pleasant company and a few good partners, that she had absolutely no reason to feel the hollow disappointment that settled deeper into her chest with every hour that passed without a tall, dark-haired duke appearing in the doorway to argue with her about something.

He did not come. The orchestra played its final set, and the candles burned lower, and the ballroom began its slow, reluctant emptying, carriages queuing beyond the gates the way they always did, and Amelia climbed in beside her parents, with a disappointment considerably heavier than she had any business feeling over a man who had never once promised to attend.

Sebastian was three pages into a memorandum concerning a dispute between two of his tenants when Nathaniel was announced.

"You are missing rather a fine ball at Ashvale." He said when he entered the study.

"I am aware. I made a considered decision to miss the Ashworth’s ball several hours ago, and I have not yet found reason to regret it." Sebastian did not look up, though something in Nathaniel's posture, too deliberately casual, too clearly pleased with himself, kept a fraction of his attention from the page.

"A pity. Miss Hartwell is in attendance."

The pen stopped mid-stroke.

"Tristan tells me she asked whether you generally attended events of this kind." Nathaniel settled into the chair opposite the desk, watching him with satisfaction. "She has been by all accounts perfectly charming all evening, danced well, spoken with half the room."

"That signifies nothing."

"It signifies precisely what you think it signifies, which is why you have already ruined that sentence you were writing." Nathaniel nodded at the blotted ink spreading slowly across the page beneath Sebastian's abandoned pen. "You have perhaps an hour before the ball concludes, if you intend to do anything about it."

Sebastian set the pen down with deliberate care , weighing an argument he already knew he had lost. "I have no engagement with the Ashworths."

"No. You have simply changed your coat with remarkable speed on prior occasions for considerably less compelling reasons, and I begin to wonder whether tonight might prove another." Nathaniel's mouth curved, insufferably knowing. "Shall I have your carriage brought round, or do you intend to keep arguing with yourself about it until the decision makes itself for you?"

He suddenly found himself wanting to see whether she had enjoyed the evening and some irrational part of him had also become intensely curious about the expression she would wear when she saw him walk through the doors.

He was in his carriage minutes later, and cursing the London traffic within fifteen, and standing in the Ashworth’s emptying ballroom within the hour, scanning a thinning crowd of departing guests with an urgency he had no intention of examining too closely and finding, at the end of the search, precisely nothing. The candles were being snuffed along the far wall. The orchestra was already packing away its instruments.

I am too late. The thought landed with considerably more weight than it should have, for a woman he had known the length of a few encounters, none of them longer than an afternoon.

"You look," Tristan observed, materializing at his shoulder with a drink already in hand and an expression of open, delighted amusement, "precisely like a man who has just realized he rushed across half of London for a woman who left twenty minutes before he arrived."

"I came for the company. Nathaniel mentioned the Ashworths kept an excellent cellar."

"I’d wager Nathaniel mentioned nothing of the sort, and you have never once cared what any host keeps in his cellar." Tristan's grin widened, entirely unrepentant. "You put on your good coat, Sebastian. For a ball you have declined, without exception for years."

"I decline to discuss my coat with you."

"You decline to discuss a great many things with me lately, and every single one of them appears to circle back to the same woman." Tristan clapped him once on the shoulder, entirely too pleased with the evening's proceedings. "You could admit you are disappointed."

"I am not disappointed."

"Sebastian."

"I am annoyed."

"At missing her."