Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Julian was waiting with the carriage two streets away from the Hartwell house when Amelia arrived. He looked unsurprised to see her.
"I had begun to wonder whether you would come."
"I nearly didn't."
"Nearly?"
She gave him a pointed look.
"Do not look so pleased with yourself, Your Grace."
"I am not."
"You are."
"Perhaps slightly."
Amelia folded her arms.
"I know what the Circle actually is, Your Grace. I am not entirely unworldly."
"I did not think you were. That is rather why I asked." His expression stayed calm, careful.
"And you expect me simply to trust you?"
Julian's expression became serious.
"No. I expect you to trust yourself."
That caught her off guard.
He continued quietly.
"You may leave whenever you wish. If you dislike the atmosphere, we leave.
If someone makes you uncomfortable, you tell me.
No one there would press you into anything you have not chosen for yourself.
I only thought, given your particular curiosity about the world, you might like to see it rather than hear it filtered through gossip. "
"Why would you offer me this."
"I suspect you already know why," Julian said, gently, and did not elaborate further, and did not need to.
Amelia studied him.
"And if I decide not to participate in anything?"
"Then you participate in nothing."
"At all?"
"At all."
She hesitated.
Julian smiled faintly.
"Curiosity is not a contract, Miss Hartwell."
That, strangely, reassured her.
"Very well."
He offered his arm.
"Then let us satisfy it."
She should have refused outright. She had turned the invitation over alle night and half the following day, telling herself firmly that a well-bred woman did not sneak from her own house to attend a gathering she had no business witnessing.
And yet she had found, despite every sensible argument, that she could not stop thinking of Sebastian long enough to actually decline.
Julian handed her up the carriage, settling across from her with the same careful courtesy he'd shown from the start. "You may ask me anything on the way. I would rather you arrive prepared than frightened."
"What actually happens there."
"People talk more honestly than society permits elsewhere. Some of them do considerably more than talk. No one is obliged to do anything they have not chosen for themselves." He said it plainly, without embarrassment. "I will stay near enough that you need only ask, should you wish to leave."
The house, when they arrived, gave nothing away from the street, an ordinary door in an ordinary row, and it was only once she stepped past the threshold that the whole evening rearranged itself around her.
Two figures stood close together near the hearth, foreheads nearly touching, murmuring something that made them both smile before their mouths met, unhurried, entirely unconcerned with being seen.
Music drifted through the rooms. Candlelight caught against large mirrors and polished wood. Servants moved quietly with trays of wine. Laughter came from somewhere upstairs.
But it was the people that startled her. There was no rigid separation between men and women, no carefully maintained distance. No matrons watching from corners. People spoke freely, flirted openly and touched each other's hands without pretending it was accidental.
Amelia stopped just inside the doorway.
Julian noticed.
"Overwhelmed?"
"A little."
"That is understandable."
"I have never seen anything like this."
"That is rather the point."
A gentleman passed them with a woman on his arm, both laughing over some private joke.
Another couple stood beside the fireplace speaking in low voices about erotic literature as casually as if they were discussing the weather.
Amelia glanced toward Julian.
"Do people actually speak about such things here?"
"They speak about almost everything."
"Without embarrassment?"
"Embarrassment is terribly inefficient."
She gave him a look.
"That sounds like something Sebastian would say."
Julian's expression changed slightly.
Amelia noticed.
"Is he here?"
Julian didn't answer immediately. "Yes."
Her heart gave one hard, traitorous beat.
She hated that Julian noticed. He did. But he was kind enough not to comment.
"Would you like to leave?"
"No."
The answer came too quickly, and Julian's mouth curved.
"I thought not."
I only mean to observe. She held to that thought like a rope, moving carefully through rooms that offered her no polite fiction to hide behind, no pretense that desire was something to be managed rather than simply felt.
A door stood ajar further down a haze of tobacco smoke emanating from it and through it she glimpsed a woman reclining before an easel in considerably less than a morning dress, entirely unbothered.
"Amelia?"
She turned, and her heart dropped straight through the floor.
Sebastian stood not three feet away, a glass forgotten in his hand, staring at her with an expression of such open shock that for one long moment neither of them said anything at all.
"You should not be here," he said finally.
"You should know by now that telling e where I ought not be is unikely to discourage my curiosity." She lifted her chin, though her pulse was racing considerably faster than the words let on. "The Duke of Dunhaven invited me."
"Julian." Something moved behind his eyes, quick and complicated, gone before she could name it.
Then Julian shifted beside her. Sebastian's gaze moved to him.
"You brought her."
Julian raised an eyebrow.
"She came willingly."
"I did," Amelia said.
Sebastian looked at her.
"Why?"
She bristled immediately.
"Is that your way of welcoming guests?"
"It is my way of asking why you are here."
"Curiosity."
His eyes remained on hers.
"Curiosity."
"Yes. You appear displeased."
"I am surprised."
"That is not the same thing."
"No."
His voice softened.
"It isn't."
They stood there for another moment.
"Come,” he said quietly. “There is a quieter room just beyond the hall.”
He led her into a small library, shelves rising into shadow, a single lamp burning low on the mantel, the noise of the gathering fading to a distant murmur through the closed door. She looked at the books that filled almost every shelf and let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.
"You actually have a library here."
"Some of us retain our scholarly habits. This is mainly for the four of us."
She smiled faintly.
"I suspected you might."
Sebastian closed the door halfway behind them.
"Why does this exist, Sebastian?" She used his name deliberately this time, watching it land the way it had in the park. "This place. The real Circle. "
"Because society asks men and women to pretend they do not want what they want and calls the pretending virtue." He set his glass down, unhurried, though something in his stillness told her the question cost him more than his tone let on.
"And what exactly do you do here?"
"Talk."
"About?"
"Philosophy. History. Human behavior."
"And desire."
His eyes met hers.
"Yes."
She waited.
Sebastian's mouth curved faintly. “You are wondering whether we merely sit about discussing it.”
“I You are making it sound remarkably academic.”
“We do discuss it,” he said. “But that is hardly the point.”
“Then what is?”
He leaned back in his chair, his expression becoming almost amused.
“Experimentation.”
Amelia's brows rose.
“On one another?”
“Among consenting adults,” he said smoothly. “We speak frankly about desire, rather than pretending it does not exist. And, when curiosity demands more than conversation, we are inclined to explore what we have been discussing.”
Amelia stared at him.
“So, this is a house for debauchery.”
Sebastian's smile turned slow and wicked.
“Such an ugly word.”
“Is it inaccurate?”
“Not entirely. We built this because we grew tired of the hypocrisy of it. Discussing desire as though it were shameful in the daylight and indulging it anyway once the candles were low enough that no one need admit to it."
"And you believe that. Truly."
Sebastian's mouth curved slightly.
"I helped create it."
"That isn't an answer."
He stepped closer.
"I believed it entirely, once." He looked at her steadily, something raw beneath the composure. "I am considerably less certain now what I believe about anything."
"Because I am standing in it."
"Because you are standing in it," he agreed, "and I find I would rather explain myself honestly to you than perform whatever version of myself I have been performing for everyone else in this house for the better part of a decade."
"Then be honest." She stepped nearer, close enough now that she could see the exact tension in his jaw, the same one she'd watched shutter closed in the park two days past, only now, here, it did not close. "Tell me what restraint has actually cost you, Sebastian. Not the argument. The truth."
"I believe people should be honest about what they want."
Amelia's breath caught.
"Even when what they want is inconvenient?"
"Especially then. It has cost me the chance to feel anything without first deciding whether it was safe to feel it.
" His voice had gone low, unguarded in a way she had never once heard from him.
"I have wanted a great many things in my life and I have allowed myseld almost anything I could walk away from afterward.
It is the things I could not that I have denied myself.
I am finding it considerably harder to deny this one. "
"This one."
"You," he said simply, and the single word landed somewhere low in her chest, warm and entirely undoing.
The music from the other room drifted faintly through the door, slow and unhurried, for a moment neither spoke. Then Sebastianheld out his hand, and she took it without quite deciding to, and then they were moving together in the small space between the shelves.
It was nothing like the careful, regulated distance of a ballroom waltz, his hand settling low at the small of her back, hers curling into the lapel of his coat the way it had in the carriage weeks ago, both of them unwilling to keep the proper span of space between them that propriety demanded.
"You are trembling," he murmured, close enough now that his breath stirred against her temple.
"I am not accustomed to any of this."
"Neither, as it happens, am I." His hand tightened slightly at her waist. "I have done a great many reckless things in my life, Amelia. I do not recall ever once being nervous while doing them."
"Are you nervous now?"
"Considerably."
The distant thrum of the music filtered through the heavy doors, sounding like the steady pulsing of a heartbeat. For Amelia, the world had shrunk down to the heat of Sebastian’s body pressed against hers and the intoxicating scent of cedar and wine clinging to his skin.
Their dance had shifted from a tentative sway to a desperate cling.
Sebastian’s hand was firm on the small of her back, pulling her hips flush against his.
Amelia let out a shaky breath, her fingers tightened into the fabric of his coat, pulling him closer as if she were drowning and he was the only thing keeping her afloat.
She lifted her face toward his, and he closed the last of the distance between them before either of them could think better of it. Sebastian’s tongue swept against hers tentatively at first, testing, and then it was not slow at all.
Her fingers twisted into his coat pullingl him closer, while his hand rose from her waist to cradle the back of her head as the kiss deepened, hungrier than either of them seemed able to control.
She felt the low, urgent sound he made against her mouth, felt her own breath go ragged in answer, and when he walked her back the few steps until her shoulders met the shelves behind her, she went willingly, both hands fisting in his shirt now, holding on rather than pushing him away.
Amelia moaned into his mouth, her head tilting back, exposing the pale line of her throat to his lips. He didn't hesitate, trailing hot, wet kisses down her neck, his teeth grazing her skin just enough to make her shiver.
"Sebastian." His name came out of her on a breath, half warning, half plea, and she wasn't entirely certain which she meant it as.
"Tell me to stop," he said against her jaw, his mouth trailing to the sensitive skin beneath her ear, "and I will."
"I do not want you to stop." The admission left her before she could weigh it, reckless and true, and his mouth found hers again, harder this time.
He slid his hand down from her waist, his palm skimming the curve of her hip.
Amelia gasped against his mouth, heat rushing through her leaving her lightheaded Her hips shifted instinctively into his touch, chasing something she had no name for and every intention of finding.
The caution she had entered the house with was evaporating, replaced by a searing need that made her blood boil.
Slowly, deliberately, Sebastian began to bunch the fabric upward.
The cool air of the library hit her skin, contrasting sharply with the heat of his hand.
He pushed the skirt higher, past her knees, until his fingers brushed against the silk of her stockings.
He didn't stop there. His hand slid upward, his palm flat against the warmth of her inner thigh, venturing higher toward the center of her heat.
His hand stilled.
"Amelia." Her name came out of him rough, strained, his forehead dropping to rest against hers, both breathing hard in the low lamplight. "If we do not stop now, I do not know that I will be able to stop at all."
The words landed through the haze of wanting him and did their work slowly, sense returning to her by degrees, the memory of her father's face on the terrace the night of the ball rising unbidden, the whole precarious architecture of her reputation balanced on considerably less than this.
She shifted her hips back and let her skirts fall back into place, her hands unclenching from his shirt with visible effort.
"We should stop," she said, though her voice betrayed exactly how little she meant it.
"We should." He did not move away immediately, his forehead still against hers, still breathing unevenly in the quiet of the library. "I am not sorry it happened."
"Neither am I." She let herself rest there a moment longer, her hand flat against his chest, feeling his heart beating as unsteadily as her own. "Though I begin to see, rather clearly, why your Circle believes restraint costs a great deal more than anyone admits."
"It costs far more than I believed possible," he said quietly, "until tonight." Neither moved to step back for a long moment more, reluctant to let the small, dangerous world of that library give way to the one waiting on the other side of the door.