Chapter 6
Phoebe did not generally look to her father for good advice. Even so, she knew that even broken clocks were right twice a day, and her father likely had been sensible when he told her to hold her tongue.
It would not help Hannah for Phoebe to get into an argument with the man who was going to be her husband. Probably. Possibly. It would be better if she did not pick a fight with the Duke of Redcliff.
Her resolve lasted past dinner. That was a personal best!
But after supper—which Phoebe requested be sent to her room, citing a nonexistent headache that obscured a real fear that she’d get into a war over the soup course—she ran out of determination. Or rather, her determination to say something outweighed her determination to say nothing.
She found him in the library again.
This time, there was no amber liquid in his hand, but he still gazed impassively into the fire as he sat, a contemplative air about him. She almost hated to disturb him—she had the strange impression that he was the sort of man who didn’t get much in the way of peace—but she’d come this far.
Besides, once he had seen her, there wasn’t much else to do.
He sighed—a bit theatrically, Phoebe might have said.
“What can I help you with, Miss Turner?” he asked.
Phoebe promptly said the exact wrong thing.
“Do you realize that this is all your fault?”
She cringed as he turned slowly—theatrical again, she thought—to regard her.
“Oh, please,” he drawled. He might not be drinking, but he was, apparently, at his leisure. “Tell me how.”
His tone was desert dry, clearly designed to dissuade her, but Phoebe was no shrinking flower—and he was not her admiral.
“All you had to do was be just a bit gentler.” She held two fingers close together to show just how little this bit was. “Just a tiny bit. And she wouldn’t have fled like a startled deer.”
“Hm,” he said.
Phoebe would have been prepared to blame his ducal status for just how desperately irritating he was, but she’d met the Duke of Wilds, who was married to her friend Ariadne.
David Nightingale was about as fun-loving as they came; before he’d met and fallen desperately in love with his wife, his love of the more ribald forms of fun had given him quite the reputation amongst the ton.
He had settled down since marrying—or at the very least, he’d started enjoying ribald fun with his wife instead of with various lovers—but he hadn’t become the over-starched, uptight, absolute bother that was the Duke of Redcliff.
No, Phoebe couldn’t blame his title. She’d have to blame the man himself.
“What does hm mean?” she demanded.
The Duke got to his feet. He wasn’t a tall man, but he had a large presence. It was his command over his body, Phoebe decided. He moved like he knew precisely how every inch of his form would respond to his commands. He had never fallen on his bum in a parlor. She’d bet her hat on it.
“What it means,” he said, his words as slow and deliberate as his movements, “is that you and your father both seem remarkably determined to absolve your sister of any responsibility for her own actions.”
This was a dirty play, and Phoebe suspected that the Duke knew it. Comparing her to her father? Honestly.
“I can only assume that he laid the blame at my door,” she said, refusing to be put off. “But I am not speaking of whatever witchcraft my father believes I have cast over Hannah to make her leave. I am speaking merely of the usual way of young ladies which you yourself might have known.”
He paced closer to her in a way that was meant to seem idle but was transparently anything but.
“Do you think I have extremely high experience with young ladies?” he asked with dangerous mildness.
Phoebe fought the urge to roll her eyes. She understood how this man had used feigned casualness to get soldiers in his command to obey without even needing orders, but she hadn’t come up through the navy. No, Phoebe had been through endless ballrooms in the ton. She’d been to Almacks!
He wasn’t even in the top half of people she’d met who could make cutting remarks with the tone of one talking about the weather. He should really try his skill against some of the Society matrons. Then he would see.
“Don’t be difficult,” she told him. “I know you have a sister, and I know you know what I’m talking about.”
“Pretend that I don’t,” he said, taking another few steps in her direction.
He didn’t sound quite so mild now, but he wasn’t angry.
She knew anger. She could hardly live with her father without learning how to recognize it—Lord Turner was always furious about something. It was only Phoebe about half the time.
But the Duke was… disquieted, she suspected. He didn’t seem to know what to make of her defiance.
Well, this was going to be a learning opportunity for him then. Phoebe was a master of defiance.
“Young ladies,” she said with exaggerated sweetness, “often dream of love. My sister is one such young lady. And then she was brought here, told she was to be married, and thrust at a man who still carries with him the habits of war. Can you blame her for balking?”
His eyes narrowed. He was standing close enough now that she could see the way the brown blended with the gold to make that dreamy hazel—far too dreamy for a man like him.
“She dreamed of love,” he repeated in a knowing tone.
“Yes,” Phoebe said. “So if you had just been a little kinder—”
“No,” he interrupted. It really was so nice to see such pretty manners in a gentleman. “No, that’s not it, is it? Because she would have to be completely mad to flee out into the snowstorm by herself. And she’s not mad, your sister, is she?”
He stepped forward again, and suddenly, Phoebe felt like the mouse realizing that the cat had crept forward without making a sound.
“No, not mad,” he said. “Clever. Cleverer than any of us gave her credit for. Including you, I gather. Because you haven’t been quite as worried today as you were last night.
Not once have you demanded that we go out searching.
Which means that you suspect she’s safe. You know she got into that carriage.”
“I don’t know it.” She hadn’t meant for her inflection to sound quite like that; she’d meant more of a broad-scale denial, but his proximity was making her struggle to think. This was, of course, absurd. He was a man. They really weren’t that interesting.
“But you suspect.”
It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t give a response. She didn’t trust herself not to give too much away.
“Here is what I think,” he said. He was close enough now that he had to look down at her.
“I think that you have some information that I lack. It has reassured you, at least to an extent, that your sister’s accomplice—whoever brought that carriage to squire her away—has taken her to safety.
And I think, as you say, she did it for love. ”
“If you think that,” she said, feeling as though her mouth struggled to form around the words, “then why don’t you call off the marriage?”
The corner of his mouth kicked up.
“Oh, Miss Turner,” he said, a chiding note in his voice.
It was the most emotion she’d heard from him yet.
“You misunderstand me. I have never quit anything. I have never allowed my will to be bent to someone else’s.
I was not deterred by Napoleon’s armada.
I’m not likely to be scared off by a flighty child. ”
This was overall a very good point, which irritated Phoebe to no end.
“It’s no secret that you’re unbendable,” she scoffed, annoyed when the sound came out rather breathless. “That’s really what I came in here to talk about as you might recall.”
The Duke might not have been scared off by Hannah’s actions—but he wasn’t scared off by Phoebe’s attitude either. It was an uncomfortable realization. Confidence—real or otherwise—had been the thing that had kept her from peril when she visited London’s less savory corners.
“It’s interesting that you bring up secrets,” he said. The leonine edge to his smile had Phoebe backing up a step, which she loathed. “Because I think that you have secrets of your own.”
Phoebe willed every inch of her body not to react.
She had too many secrets, really. She had Hannah’s note burning a hole in her pocket.
Then, there was her father, and that time he had caught her sneaking out of the house; she assumed he wouldn’t reveal this indiscretion to the Duke, out of worry that it would reflect poorly on Hannah, but one never could tell with her father.
And then there was the real secret—that Phoebe had snuck out many, many, many times before her father had seen her.
That she had been to the kinds of places that most young ladies of the ton couldn’t even imagine, let alone ones that they would ever visit.
That she was, in effect, a walking and talking scandal.
She took another stumbling step back. The wall prevented her from retreating any further.
The Duke’s smile grew sharper as he took that last step forward.
“Then it’s good, I suppose, that you aren’t marrying me,” Phoebe said. She couldn’t believe that she managed it. She could scarcely draw breath. When she sucked one in, the front of her bodice grazed just against the front of the Duke’s waistcoat.
He looked down at the point of contact.
“Good, indeed,” he said, his eyes fixed first on her heaving bosom, then his gaze trailed upward like a touch until it landed on her mouth.
She knew he was going to kiss her a split second before it happened.
She gasped at the first contact, for all that she had accused the Duke of being cold, his mouth was warm—blazing hot.
He didn’t touch her anywhere except for where his lips pressed against hers—the way he bent his head down to reach her put an inch or so of space between their fronts, and she felt the loss.
It was the only part of it that felt like anything resembling loss, however, because the warmth from that kiss spread through her in tendrils that overtook her more and more with every heartbeat.
Phoebe might not have her own experience with kissing, but she’d seen things—she’d seen many, many things—and so she knew that this was very nearly as chaste as kisses came. He didn’t try to slip his tongue into her mouth. He didn’t try to tug her closer or grasp any of her softer parts.
And yet she felt it. She felt it so much.
And it felt incredible. Wonderful. Right.
Which meant that it was so wrong.
That wrongness crashed down on her later than it ought to have done, and she was so caught up in the pleasure of it by that point that it took her another heartbeat before she reached up, put her hands flat against his chest, and shoved him back.
She knew that she would feel that extra heartbeat as an avalanche of shame when she next had to look her little sister in the eyes.
He stumbled a step or two away from her, and she did not doubt that it was due to surprise more than the force of her thrust. He looked surprised by all of it, actually; his eyes shot open, and he gaped at her like he didn’t understand how they’d come to be there together.
“I can’t,” she said, feeling wild.
“Go,” he said, sounding just as out of control as she felt.
Phoebe didn’t know if it was a rejection or permission. She didn’t wait to find out.
She shoved past him and raced back to her room, only pausing when the door was closed and locked behind her.
Then, she pressed her spine against the unyielding hardwood, feeling it support her as she sank to the floor, put her face in her hands, and tried to figure out how in the hell she had let herself do something so unbelievably awful.