Page 34 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

"I have told you why. Discipline, tradition, formal instruction⁠—"

"You've presented the argument. I'm asking about the reason underneath it." She kept her eyes forward, on the path, giving him room not to answer if he chose it. "I don't think you came to that conclusion from evidence at all, Your Grace. I think you decided what you believed first and built the argument around it afterward."

He stopped walking.

“And I think whatever taught you to expect so little of women has to do more with something painful than it does with scholarship.”

The words landed somewhere he had not expected them to reach, somewhere he kept locked well behind the composed, argumentative version of himself he presented to the world, and for one unguarded second he felt it plainly.

"That is not what happened."

"Is it not?" She turned to face him, and there was no triumph in it, none of the sharp satisfaction she wore when she won an argument, only something gentler, something that looked, unbearably, like concern. "You argue like a man defending a wound, not a theory."

Do not let her see it. Do not let anyone see it. The old instinct rose fast and hard, the same one that had carried him through a decade of his mother's visits, through every ballroom conversation he'd ever performed his way out of. He reached for it now with something close to relief, because the alternative, standing here and actually answering her, felt like stepping off a ledge he had spent years making sure he'd never have to find.

"You don't know what you're talking about."

"Then tell me. Help me understand it properly, instead of guessing."

"There is nothing to understand. It is a scholarly position, not a confession, and I would ask you not to treat the two as though they were the same thing simply because it suits your argument better." He heard his own voice go flat, controlled, and hated the sound of it even as he could not stop producing it. "You are reaching for something that isn't there, Miss Hartwell."

"I don't think I am."

"Then we disagree." He looked away from her, jaw tight enough to ache. "I have matters to attend to this afternoon. I ought to see you home."

"Sebastian."

He stopped.

The sound of his name in her voice did something absurdly unsettling to him. She had never called him that. Not once. ‘Your Grace’ had always kept the proper distance between them, a small but reliable boundary he had never thought about until she crossed it with a single word.

He turned slowly.

Amelia seemed to realize what she had done only after the fact. Her lips parted, and for the briefest moment, uncertainty flickered across her face.

Neither of them spoke.

"I will have my carriage sent round," he said at last, though his voice had come out lower than he intended.

He turned away before she could say his name again, putting distance between them with a speed that had nothing to do with matters awaiting him anywhere, only the raw, unfamiliar need to be away from her before she more of his hidden truths.

He did not look back, though every step away from her cost him more than he wanted to acknowledge, and the whole walk home passed in a single, circling argument with himself, her words returning again and again, no matter how firmly he tried to set them aside.

She has no right to see that clearly. No one has ever seen it that clearly. And beneath the anger, quieter, harder to dismiss, the thought he liked least of all was that he had not wanted to leave her standing there nearly as much as the rest of him insisted he had, and that some reckless, ungoverned part of him was already, infuriatingly, composing the apology he had no intention of delivering.

The study door slammed harder than he meant it to when he arrived home that evening. The afternoon’s business having done nothing to improve his mood.

Sebastian crossed to his desk and swept the nearest stack of papers aside. They scattered across the floor. His elbow caught the glass beside them. It hit the rug and rolled, wine bleeding dark into the weave.

He stood there a moment, breathing hard, staring at the mess as though it had appeared without his help.

The door opened quietly behind him. "Your Grace."

"Not now, Hopkins."

Hopkins came in anyway and knelt to gather the papers without comment. He righted the glass, set it well out of reach, and only then looked up.

"Permit me, Your Grace. I have known you since you were nine years old. I have never once seen you throw a glass."