Page 9 of The Duke’s Defiant Love

No.

Not simply hazel.

The color shifted with the light, flecks of amber dissolving into green and back again until he could no longer decide which shade they truly were. Intelligent eyes. Steady ones. Entirely too direct.

They met his own without hesitation.

Without coyness.

Sebastian became aware—several seconds too late—that no one had spoken. His friends were looking at him.

Good God.

He had been staring.

"Forgive me," she said, in a tone that suggested she intended no such thing. "I only wondered whether His Grace noticed he'd done it."

"I beg your pardon," Sebastian said.

"I could not help overhearing. You spent the better part of ten minutes arguing that women lack the natural discipline for rigorous scholarship and then complimented women's perception. Those two positions cannot both be true, Your Grace. Either we are perceptive enough to see through a rogue at twenty paces, or we are too governed by our sensibilities to reason properly. You seem to require whichever suits the joke."

"Oh, this is excellent," Tristan murmured to Nathaniel, not troubling to lower his voice.

Silence, briefly, from all four of them. Tristan's mouth twitched, dangerously close to a laugh he was visibly fighting to swallow. Nathaniel's grey eyes had sharpened with something that looked remarkably like interest. Julian, damnably, was grinning.

"I noticed," Sebastian said, "that you have been listening to a private conversation."

"A private conversation conducted at a volume audible from the refreshment table is a public conversation that is simply not aware of its circumstances." She did not so much as blink. "Though I notice you have not disputed my point. Only my presence."

Irritating. That was the word, the only word, for the intense heat climbing up the back of his neck.

He had spent a decade defending papers in front of Cambridge's most exacting minds and rarely felt this precise combination of affront and, beneath it, something far less comfortable to name, something that had settled low and sudden in his chest the moment she opened her mouth and proved herself right. "I have not disputed it because it does not merit dispute. You have restated my own argument back to me as though it were an accusation."

"I restated it because you did not seem to realize you had made it, and because the version you started with, that women's sensibilities render them unfit for scholarship, is not merely wrong, it is lazy, and I confess I expected better from a man whose paper on the Peloponnesian sources I read with genuine admiration three months ago." She tilted her head slightly, and something in her expression sharpened, quick and assessing, the same look he imagined he wore over a difficult text. "Which makes the sloppiness of tonight's discourse all the more disappointing."

Tristan made a sound suspiciously like a cough.

"You read my work."

"I read a great deal, Your Grace. It does not follow that I am obligated to agree with all of it, nor that agreeing with some of it excuses the rest." She said it simply, without triumph, which somehow made it worse. Sebastian had been contradicted before. He had rarely been contradicted by someone who seemed entirely uninterested in whether he minded.

"And what, precisely, is your authority on the matter?"

"The same authority as yours. I have read the sources. I have studied the languages. I have spent a great many hours doing precisely the disciplined, rigorous work you claim women are constitutionally unsuited to perform, and I have done it without the benefit of a Cambridge fellowship, an allowance, or four friends standing about to nod at my conclusions."

Behind her, he registered two matrons drawing subtly nearer under the pretense of admiring the flower arrangements, fans lifted just enough to hide their mouths, not nearly enough to hide their interest.

Her chin lifted, just slightly, the only sign that the words cost her something to say. "I would be very interested to hear you argue that my conclusions are less rigorous than yours simply because no institution has yet agreed to examine me on them."

Julian's mouth curved.

"I believe we should let His Grace defend himself."

"I have no need to defend myself."

"Of course not," Tristan said. "You merely appear to be losing an argument before our eyes."

Sebastian ignored him and returned his attention to the woman before him.