Chapter 5
“Did your staff find anything?” Phoebe demanded as soon as she stormed into the dining room.
“Phoebe!” her father hissed. He was seated at the Duke’s right hand, looking as though he’d spent twice as long getting dressed for dinner as Phoebe had. It was nice to see such paternal concern in a man with a missing daughter.
The Duke had been taking a sip of wine as she entered. He put down the glass with exaggerated patience, then gestured for Phoebe to take the seat across from her father. Phoebe gritted her teeth but followed the implied order, too desperate for information about Hannah to do otherwise.
It was only when she was in her seat that the Duke answered her question.
“One of the footmen found carriage tracks leading away from the house,” he said without inflection.
“The snow is still falling, so it’s impossible to know where they are going.
The house has been searched, and Miss Hannah is not in residence.
But it seems that she had a… collaborator in this escape. ”
In another circumstance, Phoebe would have been impressed by her sister. How had Hannah managed a collaborator when their father had been secretive and clever about his schemes? Phoebe had thought that secrecy to be excessive, but apparently, it wasn’t enough.
In reality, however, she was too worried to feel anything else.
She fingered the note in her pocket as her father leapt to explain that Hannah must have headed out with a respectable widow or a vicar’s wife or someone equally unobjectionable—though how on earth her father was supposed to know any such thing, Phoebe had no idea.
Lord Turner had always believed that he could simply insist something was true until it became so.
Phoebe did not think he would find this strategy particularly useful when it came to the Duke of Redcliff.
Call it a hunch.
She debated showing the two men sitting across from her the note in her pocket as her father’s frantic explanation petered out in the face of the Duke’s unflinching regard.
It was astonishingly awkward, but Phoebe was too busy fretting about her sister to even enjoy it properly.
On the reverse, she was too distracted to suffer from the properly excruciating silence that hung over the table for the remainder of the meal.
She picked at the food, which was probably delicious, her hand darting to her pocket every few minutes, almost as though she feared that if she stopped reaching for it, her one clue to her sister’s whereabouts would disappear, scant though it was.
If either of the gentlemen noticed that she was suspiciously quiet as they ate, neither commented upon it.
After dinner, they all, by unspoken agreement that nobody was in the mood for parlor games or port, retreated to their bedrooms, though it was absurdly early to do so, even for the country.
While Phoebe was grateful that she no longer had any eyes watching her, she found that she still could not settle, not even with the gentle drifting of snow outside her window.
The riotous wind from earlier had diminished, but Phoebe still found herself desperately hoping that Hannah was somewhere safe and warm.
By midnight, Phoebe couldn’t take it any longer. The room she’d been given was pleasant enough, if as sparsely decorated as the remainder of the house, but she’d run out of things to look at ages prior.
She wrapped herself in her dressing gown—even with the fires burning, as the Duke had said, all of these old houses got drafty at a certain point of the year and remained that way until spring finally broke. She crept her way down the hallway, searching for something to distract her.
Anything.
The warm glow of a fire burning, as yet unbanked, drew her to the library. The promise of a novel was too great for her to pause and consider why this room was still so cheerfully lit, so she was startled when she heard a voice.
“Impropriety must run in the family.”
Phoebe’s hand flew to her throat, something that irritated her immensely.
She hated seeming like the fragile miss from a Gothic novel, sticking her nose into ghostly things, too foolish to get out of her own way.
She drew her hand down, scrunching it into the folds of her dressing gown, and forced herself to adopt an unbothered mien.
“I beg your pardon?” she asked lightly.
“Impropriety,” the Duke repeated, a lilt in his voice that might have been humor in a less serious man. The tumbler of amber liquid in his hand suggested that this ease was bought and bottled, not natural. Phoebe suspected that this wasn’t his first drink of liquor, but he was far from drunk.
No, he just looked… a little lighter. Looser.
“I’m just seeking a book,” she said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
He hummed. “Your sister runs off, and you’re sneaking around my house in the dead of night.” He gestured with the glass. “Not the most precisely correct behavior, is it?”
Phoebe pressed her lips into a tight line. She would not be charmed by this less uptight version of him. He was, after all, trying to insult her. He didn’t know that she wasn’t the kind of person who was flattered by being called improper.
“You should get out more,” she said pertly, even though he was the last man with whom she ought to be engaging in banter. “Get a good look at what ‘improper’ really is.”
Briefly, she thought he would smile, but then his expression tipped, teetered, and went the other way. The lightness around him evaporated so completely that it practically sucked some of the warmth out of the room.
“I’ve seen more than enough of the world, Miss Turner,” he said, voice full of ice.
He put the tumbler down on the table beside him with a very final sort of clink.
“I suggest that you do not seek to see more of the improper side of life either. I suspect that you will find things that you do not wish to uncover.”
There was such vehemence to his tone that Phoebe was taken aback, literally so—she retreated a step toward the door, then watched as the Duke regarded her with a kind of savage satisfaction.
His icy words hadn’t been emotionless just then.
By contrast, they had been sharp, the kind of ice that cut and sliced.
“I—I’m sorry,” she said reflexively, not even certain what she was apologizing for. It wasn’t for being in the library—no matter what persnickety dukes might maintain, she was well within her rights as a guest to be there.
But she sensed that someone needed to tell this man that they were sorry for whatever was hurting him, and she’d learned to trust her instincts.
A muscle moved in his jaw, and he looked away to gaze into the grate.
“Go back to bed, Miss Turner,” he said, any emotion wiped from his voice. “I mean it. You already know I could carry you there myself if need be.”
Phoebe knew he was trying to scare her off with that little jab, but knowing as much didn’t stop it from working. She didn’t dare risk the kind of thoughts her mind could conjure if he carried her again.
So, even though it made her a coward, she turned on her heel and fled, her heart beating a furious tattoo in her chest all the way back to her bed.
Aaron didn’t miss the navy, not generally speaking, but as he listened to Turner prattle, he thought longingly of the days that he could make anyone who irritated him go scrape barnacles off the hull of the ship until their hands bled and they thought better of ever bothering him again.
If there was anyone who deserved that treatment, it was Lord Turner.
“And I simply cannot apologize enough,” he continued. Aaron disagreed. The man had apologized enough about seven apologies ago. Though in truth, Aaron suspected that Lord Turner wasn’t really trying to make amends as much as he was seeking Aaron’s absolution.
If that was what he wanted, he would be waiting forever.
“Phoebe is tempestuous. I hate to say it about my own daughter—” Aaron would bet his last pence that the man did not hate to say it.
“—but she has been that way ever since her mother died. A pity, truly, but one never can predict how a young girl will react to such a loss. And Phoebe always has been such a sensitive soul.”
He said the words sensitive soul like they tasted foul.
If Lord Turner had a bit more sensitivity, Aaron thought, sipping his tea, he might have realized about five minutes ago that Aaron wasn’t responding to his ceaseless bloody chatter.
“But Hannah is a good girl. She’ll be an honorable wife for you. And I have no doubts—none at all, not a single one—that she will settle into her role once she is out from under Phoebe’s influence.”
Every time Turner insulted his elder daughter, Aaron ground his back molars together a little harder.
It was appalling, the lack of loyalty that the man showed to his own child.
His move was obvious—he was trying to convince Aaron that Miss Hannah was still worth accepting, even after her flight the night before. He really did understand that.
But denigrating Miss Turner was not the way to get into Aaron’s good graces.
He was as annoyed by that as anyone else.
Annoyance really was the primary emotion that Aaron had experienced since Miss Turner—and her family, of course—had arrived in his home yesterday evening.
He had been annoyed when Miss Turner had raced off into the snow.
He’d been annoyed at her strange silence at dinner—though that was one that he should have enjoyed.
But by far, the thing that irked him the most was that he hadn’t been annoyed or frustrated or anything of the like when she’d shown up in his library when he’d been on his third scotch, his defenses down.
No, his first reaction had been pleasure.
And then—somehow even more idiotically—he’d been worried that she would be cold.
It was only when she’d teased him about seeing the wider world that he’d remembered to feel the way that he ought.