Page 66 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

He wrapped a discarded quilt around them both, shielding them from the evening chill. He held her with a steady, grounding pressure, his chin resting atop her head. Sebastian didn't speak, he simply held her to him, his heartbeat steady against her ear, providing a silent sanctuary where the intensity of the moment could slowly settle into a warm, humming peace.

She was still asleep when he woke, sunlight already climbing the narrow window, and Sebastian lay still for a moment simply watching her. One arm still curled loosely around her shoulders, thinking, with a quiet astonishment that had not yet worn off since the night before, that he had never once expected to wake in this particular bed with anyone at all.

I ought to send word to Ravensmere House. Hopkins will worry. He thought it, and did not move to act on it, some reckless, unfamiliar part of him unwilling to end the small, private peace of this room a moment sooner than necessary. He rose and dressed quietly instead, slipped down to the bakery on the corner while she slept, and returned with bread still warm from the oven and a jar of preserves he vaguely remembered favoring, once, in the years before any of this.

She woke to the smell, blinking up at him with sleep-heavy confusion that gave way, slowly, to a smile that undid him considerably more than he was prepared to admit.

"You cook now."

"I fetch, and I would not have you disappointed in me quite so early." He set the tray on the small table and drew the single chair round for her, settling himself on the edge of the bed instead, watching her tear into the bread with an unguarded appetite that made something in his chest go warm and unfamiliar. I have brought a great many women breakfast in my life. I have never once wanted to continue bringing breakfast to the same woman again and again..

"This apartment," she said, between bites, glancing round the small room properly now in the daylight, "you have kept it how long?"

"Since I was one and twenty. Nearly eight years."

"Eight years is a long investment in a place you claim means nothing."

"I never said it meant nothing." He turned the empty preserve jar between his hands, considering how much of the truth he actually wanted to give her, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he wanted to give her all of it. "I took this place the year I came of age and discovered what had been done to the estate in my absence. I wanted somewhere no one could reach me. No advisers. No mother requiring me to manage her grief and her reputation in the same breath. No expectation whatsoever, of any kind, from anyone."

"And did it work. Being unreachable."

"For a while." He looked at the small room properly himself now, seeing it, for the first time in years, through someone else's eyes rather than his own. "I came here whenever London demanded more of me than I felt capable of giving. I told no one. Not Tristan. Not Nathaniel. Not Julian, not until very recently. I built an entire second life composed entirely of absence, and told myself that absence was simply prudence, the same lesson I'd learned watching my mother's grief exploited by men who understood her feelings better than she did."

"You have never let anyone else see this room."

"Never." He met her eyes, something in his chest tightening at the plainness of the admission. "You are the first person I have ever brought here, or who has ever followed me here uninvited, which I suppose amounts to the same violation of the rule either way."

"I am sorry for the violation, then." Her mouth curved, though something gentler moved behind the humor. "Though I confess I am not sorry for what came of it."

"Neither am I." He reached for her hand across the small table, turning it over in his own, tracing the lines of her palm with an idle, wondering attention. "I do not know how to explain to you what it costs me, letting you see this. I have spent eight years believing that no one being able to reach me was the same thing as safety. I am only now beginning to understand that it was simply a different kind of loneliness, dressed up more convincingly than most."

She said nothing to that. She only turned her hand in his so their fingers laced together properly, and Sebastian sat with her a long while in the small, sunlit room, eating bread gone slightly cold, understanding, with a clarity that both frightened and steadied him in equal measure, that he had just handed her the key to the last locked door in his life. And now some quiet, long-guarded part of him felt, for the first time, considerably lighter for having done it.

CHAPTER TWENTY

They walked back toward Mayfair rather than summon the carriage, the morning bright and unhurried, and Sebastian found himself matching his pace to hers without any conscious decision to do it, the way he always seemed to when they walked anywhere together.

I have not walked this city simply for the pleasure of walking it in years. The thought arrived with some surprise, and he turned it over as they passed a flower seller's cart, a boy selling papers, an old woman feeding pigeons on a low wall, all of it ordinary, all of it somehow more vivid than he remembered London ever being.

Fenn's bookshop drew Amelia's attention the moment they passed its window, and Sebastian watched her slow, then stop entirely, her eyes already tracking the shelves visible through the glass with the hunger he had come to recognize as entirely, wonderfully hers.

"You may go in," he said, before she'd even asked.

"I did not say anything."

"You did not need to. I have watched you make that exact face over a shelf of books more times than I can count, and I have learned to simply open the door before you work yourself up to requesting it."

She laughed, and went in, and Sebastian trailed her through the narrow aisles, watching her gather volumes with the same quiet, focused pleasure she brought to dismantling an argument, a history of the Athenian assembly, a slim book of essays she'd apparently been wanting for weeks, a translation of Sappho she touched with something close to reverence before setting it regretfully back on the shelf.

"Why are you not buying that one?"

"It is dear, and I have already chosen two others."

"Buy all three." He said it simply, and watched her hesitate, torn between wanting and some old, careful instinct he recognized instantly, because he had spent eight years cultivating a version of it himself. "Amelia. Buy the book."

"I do not wish you to think I am taking advantage, Sebastian. Simply because we are married does not mean I ought to treat your purse as though it exists purely for my enjoyment."

She thinks this is a transaction too, the same way I once thought withholding was safety. The realization landed with more weight than he expected, some old, careful part of himself recognizing its mirror in her hesitation, and he reached for the Sappho himself, before she could set it any further from her own reach.