Chapter 4 #2
He blinked, and something shuttered behind his eyes, the same careful neutrality she imagined he wore in every ballroom in London. "I beg your pardon?"
"I said stop the carriage. I wish to walk the rest of the way."
"It is nearly midnight."
"I am aware of the hour."
"You cannot walk London's streets alone at this time of night."
"I have walked considerably worse streets than these, Your Grace, and I have no wish to spend another moment in a carriage with a man who cannot decide whether he intends to argue with me or something else entirely.
" She reached for the door handle before he could stop her this time. "Stop the carriage."
"This is unreasonable."
"Stop the carriage, or I shall open the door while it is moving, and I promise you the resulting scandal will be considerably worse for your reputation than for mine."
He studied her for one long moment, some calculation moving behind his eyes, and then rapped sharply on the roof. "Stop here."
The carriage rolled to a halt. Amelia had the door open and herself down onto the pavement before the wheels had fully stilled, gathering her skirts against the damp cobblestones and setting off without a backward glance, her pulse still unsteady, her face far too warm for the cool night air.
She heard the carriage start again behind her, slow, matching her pace at a distance, and refused to look back and confirm what she already knew.
She made it perhaps four streets before the carriage stopped entirely, and she heard the door, and then footsteps, unhurried, closing the distance behind her with an ease that suggested he was in no particular rush to catch her and entirely confident he would.
"You dismissed the carriage," she said, without turning around.
"I dismissed the carriage." Sebastian fell into step beside her, hands clasped behind his back, as though this were a perfectly ordinary evening stroll and not the aftermath of whatever had very nearly happened between them minutes earlier.
"I found I did not much care to sit inside it while you walked London alone. "
"I am perfectly capable of walking myself home."
"I do not doubt your capability. I doubt the wisdom of the exercise, which is a different objection entirely." He glanced sideways at her, and the corner of his mouth curved, infuriating and warm all at once. "You may argue with me the entire way, if it improves your opinion of the arrangement."
"I fully intend to."
"I would expect nothing less."
They walked in silence for a stretch after that, the city settling into the particular hush of very late evening, gas lamps throwing pools of amber light across the pavement, their footsteps the only sound beyond the distant clatter of some other carriage on a crossing street.
Amelia was uncomfortably aware of how easily he matched her pace, how close his shoulder came to hers without ever quite touching, how the whole business of walking beside him felt considerably more dangerous than sitting across from him ever had.
"You still have not told me your name," he said, eventually.
"No."
"Nor your direction, and yet here I am, walking you toward it regardless."
"I did not ask you to."
"You did not refuse strenuously enough to stop me, which I have begun to suspect is the closest thing to permission I am likely to receive from you tonight."
"That is a very generous interpretation of events."
"I am given to generous interpretations. It is one of my few remaining virtues, according to my mother." Something flickered across his face at that, brief and quickly smoothed away, and Amelia found herself curious about it despite every intention not to be curious about him at all.
They turned onto Wexworth Street a few minutes later, and Amelia slowed despite herself, some part of her reluctant to end an argument she had, against all reason, rather enjoyed having.
"This is my street," she admitted, before she could think better of it.
"I gathered, from the manner in which you slowed just now, though you would sooner have walked past your own front door than confirm it aloud."
"You are entirely too observant for a man who spent the better part of this evening questioning women’s intellectual abilities."
"I never said it was not yours." He stopped as they reached the front steps of a modest townhouse, its windows dark but for a single candle left burning in the hall, and looked at her with an expression that had lost, somewhere along the walk, whatever careful neutrality he'd worn at the start of it.
"I begin to suspect it is considerably better than mine. "
"A dangerous admission, Your Grace."
"I have made several tonight. I find I am not entirely certain what to do about any of them."
Amelia climbed the first step, putting herself, for once, above him, and found the vantage did nothing at all to steady her. "Good night, Your Grace."
"Good night, Miss—" He stopped himself, the ghost of a smile touching his mouth. "I still do not have your name."
"No," she agreed. "You do not."
She held his gaze a moment longer than was strictly proper, long enough to see something shift behind his eyes, something that looked almost like reluctance to let the moment end.
Then she turned, climbed the remaining steps, and let herself inside without looking back, though she stood in the darkened hall for a long moment afterward, breathing rather harder than the short walk from the street could account for, listening for the sound of his footsteps finally retreating.
They did not retreat immediately. She counted nearly a full minute before she heard them go.