Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
The carriage door opened before Amelia had drawn a second full breath, and a man climbed in without so much as a glance at who already occupied it, settling himself against the opposite squab with the unhurried ease of someone perfectly certain of his welcome.
"Driver, Grosvenor—"
"This is not your carriage."
He stopped mid-word and looked at her and in the wavering light of the carriage lamp Amelia watched recognition arrive on his face in stages: surprise, then something closer to disbelief, then, infuriatingly, amusement.
"You."
"Me," she agreed. "In my carriage. Which you have just climbed into."
"This is my carriage." He rapped once on the roof to forestall the driver, who had already begun to move, and the whole conveyance lurched to a reluctant halt.
He knocked again, and the horses started forward before she could protest, the city sliding past the window in a blur of torchlight and shadow. "Driver! Stop the carriage at once."
Nothing happened. The carriage rolled steadily on.
"He cannot hear you over the wheels," Amelia said, with more satisfaction than the situation strictly warranted.
"My coachman was told to wait second in line from the gate."
"As was mine." Amelia folded her hands in her lap with a composure she did not entirely feel, her heart still unsteady from the shock of the door flying open.
"I would ask you to consider, Your Grace, which of us is more likely to have confirmed the arrangement with the driver, and which of us is more likely to have simply assumed the world would arrange itself correctly around him. "
"That is an uncharitable assumption for a woman who has not yet told me her name."
"I have not told you my name because you have not yet earned it, and climbing uninvited into a lady's carriage does very little to improve your case."
"I did not climb in uninvited. I climbed into what I believed to be my own carriage, which I am entitled to do without securing your permission first."
For the first time since he had climbed into the carriage, Amelia allowed herself to look at him without the distraction of an argument.
It was a mistake.
He was, quite simply, an extraordinarily handsome man.
Tall enough that the carriage seemed a little too small to contain him, broad-shouldered beneath his perfectly fitted evening coat, he possessed the sort of physical presence that made space around him seem to arrange itself without conscious effort.
His dark chestnut hair, brushed back from his forehead, had begun to loosen slightly from the evening, a few strands falling with careless precision near his temple. His eyes were a deep, compelling brown, darker in the shadowed carriage and startlingly direct whenever they settled upon her.
His features were sharply aristocratic with a strong, clean jaw, high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a mouth that looked far too severe when he was silent and unexpectedly compelling when amusement touched it.
There was nothing soft about his face. Nothing boyish.
He looked every inch the duke he was, no doubt controlled, assured, accustomed to being obeyed.
And yet there was something else beneath that composure.
Something warmer. More dangerous.
Perhaps it was simply the closeness of the carriage, or the flickering candlelight that softened the hard lines of his features, but Amelia found herself suddenly aware of details she had not permitted herself to notice at the ball: the breadth of his shoulders, the strength of his hands resting loosely against his knees, the way he occupied the small space between them.
He caught her looking.
Of course he did.
Amelia’s spine straightened. “We must remedy this situation, you’re in my carriage.”
Sebastian’s brow arched, slow and insolent. “Once again, I assure you, I am not.”
“I assure you that this one is mine.”
He leaned back, stretching long legs that ate up the space between them. “Then perhaps you climbed into mine by mistake. Either way, here we are.”
Amelia’s lips curved, sharp as a blade. “How gallant. Most men would apologize and remove themselves.”
“Most men haven’t paid the driver already.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Then I’ll find a solution.”
She reached for the handle. Sebastian slapped his palm flat against the door, body angled across the narrow gap. The motion brought him close…close enough that his scent, dark and spiced, wrapped around her. Their faces hovered inches apart. The argument died on her tongue.
“Don’t be ridiculous, we are already moving,” he said, voice low. “I’ll see you safely home.”
Amelia’s breath caught. “I don’t need an escort.”
“Indulge me.”
She opened her mouth to refuse again, but the carriage lurched and the movement pressed her back into the seat. Sebastian was flung forwared and braced above her, one hand still on the door, the other gripping the frame near her head. The vehicle’s sway rocked them closer.
“You’re insufferable,” she whispered.
“And you’re flushed.” His gaze dropped to her parted lips, then traced the rapid rise and fall of her chest beneath silk. “Where shall I accompany you?”
“You’ll do no such thing!”
He chuckled, the sound warm against her cheek. “Then we’ll drive until you change your mind.”
The carriage hit a rut. Sebastian shifted to keep his balance, his thigh sliding between hers, pressing against the thin layers of her skirts.
Heat bloomed low in her belly. She should have pushed him away.
Instead, her fingers curled into the lapel of his coat, anchoring herself as the world outside blurred past the windows.
“Still refusing?” he murmured, his breath warm against the shell of her ear.
“Still none of your business,” she managed, though her voice had gone husky.
She tilted her face up. Their mouths hovered, breaths mingling, the air suspended like a held note.
“Say the word,” Sebastian breathed, “and I stop the driver. Or we keep going until neither of us cares where we end up.”
She pushed him away from her and he settled back against the squabs.
"Very well. Where do you live?"
"I would rather do a great many things than give a man my direction after he has already demonstrated, twice tonight, that he considers his own judgment vastly superior to mine."
"I have demonstrated no such thing."
"You refuse to admit you climbed into the wrong carriage.
You are currently attempting to extract my address without my consent.
And but a short time ago you informed a ballroom full of witnesses that women lack the discipline for rigorous thought, which I can only assume extends to a disinclination to respect their preferences generally.
" She lifted her chin, pleased with the shape of the argument even as some traitorous part of her noted how the carriage lamp caught the line of his jaw when he turned his head.
"I find myself disinclined to make this easier for you. "
"You are enjoying this."
"I am enjoying watching a duke lose an argument for the second time in one evening. It is not an opportunity I expect to have often."
"You have not won this argument. You have simply refused to engage with it, which is a different sort of victory, and a far less impressive one."
"It is precisely as impressive as the argument you made an hour ago, which you also did not win, merely abandoned the moment it became inconvenient."
"I abandoned nothing." He leaned forward slightly, and the space between them, which had seemed perfectly reasonable a moment before, suddenly wasn’t. "I am simply choosing my battles."
"You are choosing to sit in a carriage arguing with a woman whose name you still do not know, rather than admit you were mistaken about a great many things tonight."
"I was not mistaken about the carriage."
"You were entirely mistaken about the carriage.
You are, at this very moment, sitting in the wrong one, arguing with the wrong woman, and somehow still contriving to sound as though you have the advantage.
" She should not have found that amusing.
Though she did, enormously amusing, and worse, she suspected he could see it in her face, because something in his expression eased, the irritation giving way to a reluctant, answering warmth that did nothing at all to steady her pulse.
"You have a considerable talent for making a man feel entirely outmaneuvered."
"I have a considerable talent for being correct. The two are frequently confused."
The carriage swayed around a corner, and the motion carried her forward half an inch before she caught herself, close enough now that she could see the exact shade of his eyes in the lamplight, dark and steady and fixed on her with an attention that had nothing to do with the argument they were supposedly still having.
His gaze dropped, again, to her mouth, and returned, and Amelia felt the whole of her composure falter under the weight of being looked at that way.
Neither of them moved for a long moment, the carriage rattling on around them, the lamp swinging gently overhead and throwing his face in and out of shadow, and Amelia was abruptly, acutely aware of how very little space remained between them, how easily the distance might be closed if either of them simply leaned a few inches further, how badly, despite every objection she had catalogued against him not twenty minutes past, some reckless part of her wanted exactly that.
This is absurd. She had known this man for the length of a single argument.
He had insulted her entire sex not two hours ago in front of witnesses.
And yet here she sat, breathless, watching his gaze trace the line of her jaw with an intensity that made her wonder, wildly, what his mouth would feel like against hers, whether it would be as maddening and as certain as everything else about him.
"Stop the carriage," she said, too sharply, and sat back hard against the squabs, putting distance between them that felt, absurdly, like a physical effort.