She was surprised he remembered, having forbidden them from their wedding breakfast.
“I have good reason for not liking them,” she defended, hoping he would drop the subject. She hurried over to the door leading to the small courtyard behind the house.
“No good reasonIcan think of,” he argued, moving quicker than her and blocking her exit. He held the ledger under his arm, clearly intending to continue work later. “Are his pieces much too structured for you? Or perhaps you reject the Austrians altogether?”
She feigned a smile, trying to step around him.
“Why should thatnotbe the case?” she said, unconvincingly.
His playful expression dropped in response.
“What is it?” he asked with an exhale. “What are you hiding from me now?”
Amelia looked up at him, surprised by her rising irritation. Of course there was a reason she disliked Haydn! But who was Nicholas to accuse her of being dishonest—when he had told her nothing about himself voluntarily?
“Hidingfrom you?” she repeated slowly, shaking her head. “I am an open book.”
He laughed.
“Iam,” she protested. “Certainly, compared to you.”
“If that makes you feel better,” he said jokingly. “So be it.”
“It is not aboutfeelingbetter,” she quipped, and the sudden tension between them reminded her of their unfinished encounter in the bathing room. “What would be the use in trying to beat you in this marriage when it will all end one day soon anyway?”
“Amelia, is that what has been bothering you? You knew as well as I—”
“Yes, Iknewa great many things before I married you,” she groused, turning too quickly and making herself dizzy. “And though I sought to learn more—”
Something flashed in the periphery of her vision, and Amelia cut herself off. With an angry groan, she tried to barge past Nicholas, grabbing the door handle behind him.
Suddenly, her ears began to ring.
And it dawned on her what was happening.
Her hand fell limply from the door handle as she stumbled backward. She grabbed Nicholas’s arm, fingers clutching the thick fabric of his coat.
“Amelia?” she heard beyond the fog of her thoughts—that infernal ringing. “Amelia, what are you—”
Nicholas’s voice fractured into discordant sounds as the room tilted unnaturally.
Terror, like an old friend, gathered its forces within her.
She clutched onto his coat, her whole world listing like a ship in a storm.
“Look at me, Amelia! Amelia!”
But she could not. His arms came around her fast and hard, holding her against him. Her body went rigid, eyes rolling in the back of her head.
Her last thought was of those damnable ledgers.
And the sweetness of her husband’s embrace.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Ihave written Baron Spencer and informed him that we shall be arriving a day late to the hunting party,” Nicholas explained, entering Amelia’s bedchambers. “And should that brother of mine have remembered your invitation to dinner tonight, I will—”
Nicholas paused in the doorway.
