Chapter 7
Abetter strategist, Aaron knew, would let things lie.
Lord and Miss Turner would be gone in—he glanced at the clock on his mantelpiece—two hours. Maybe less, if Aaron’s staff proved particularly efficient. All he had to do was sit right here in this chair and not move, and many of his problems would be solved.
If any of his problems in the war could have been solved by doing nothing, Aaron would have sent a prayer of thanks up to the heavens—and he had never been a particularly religious man.
And yet, here he was, safe in his own home. Comfortable. He even had a hot pot of tea at his elbow.
He got to his feet.
Christ, he was a fool. Miss Turner was making a fool of him.
Kissing her had been lunacy. Going to speak to her now was lunacy.
He was supposed to marry her sister for the love of all that was holy.
And yes, that particular arrangement wasn’t going as well as he might have hoped, but that didn’t mean that he needed to embroil himself in the snake’s nest of trouble that was Miss Phoebe Turner.
And bloody yet, here he was. Knocking on her door.
The moment she saw who was standing outside her bedchamber, she scowled—which was fair enough, if not precisely the reaction a man might hope to receive from a woman he had recently kissed.
“Go away,” she said acidly.
“No,” he said.
She let out a sigh that was so fantastically beleaguered that it was frankly a work of art, then grabbed him by the front of his jacket and hauled him into the room. He went, amused more than coerced.
What must it be like, he wondered, to express every emotion so clearly? How did Miss Turner bear to go about the world like that with her heart on her sleeve?
Because it was. Aaron looked at her pose, standing with arms defiantly crossed, with her chin held high, with her lower lip thrust mulishly out, and saw every thought that passed her bothersome little mind.
She clearly felt bad about the incident between them the night before, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still intrigued—at least enough to draw him into her bedchamber rather than slamming the door in his face.
Aaron was intrigued by her, too—though, sadly, he wasn’t here to explore that particular bit of curiosity.
There was something else, something more important than mere allure.
Something he needed to know before he could decide whether or not he wanted to continue any sort of alliance with the Turner family.
“Those secrets of yours…” he said, keeping his posture loose and open, a contrast to her defensive stance. He didn’t need to put himself on the defensive. He held all the cards—or nearly all of them at least. “… are you ready to reveal them yet?”
She laughed in his face.
“Your Grace,” she said, and Aaron had heard his title used as an insult before—there were many enlisted men in the military who felt that nobles who purchased their commissions were softer than butter in July; Aaron put them straight quickly enough—but Miss Turner was as adept at any of them in turning politeness into poison.
“You have been too long at war,” she said. “You see deceit at every turn. Or perhaps, you just have so many enemies that you must constantly be on the lookout for betrayal. That sounds tiring. Might I suggest changing your ways?”
She fluttered her eyelashes at him in a distinctly vicious manner.
Aaron found, to his intense surprise, that he was enjoying this already.
She was right, of course, that he’d spent too long at war. It had made him patently unsuitable for Society. That was the origin of all his current problems.
But as he stared into her flashing eyes, Aaron wondered if he hadn’t been gone from war too long—if he wasn’t like a knife, sharpened to a deadly edge, then left, languishing in a drawer. It felt good to cut again, even if their blades were only words.
Maybe because their blades were only words. Anything he dealt to Miss Turner, she would return in kind.
Maybe this was why men enjoyed fencing. He’d never understood playacting at battle before, but now, he started to get the point of it all.
“Your personal commentary, no matter how clever, is hardly the point here,” he said flatly.
Just because this was amusing didn’t mean that he wanted her to know as much.
This was a diversion, but diversions were only acceptable as long as he held the upper hand in continuing or ending them. “Tell me, what scandal are you hiding?”
“You,” she said, “are imagining things.”
Oh, that wretched little liar! She didn’t blink or look askance as she said it. She didn’t shift her posture or explain too much.
But she was lying. She was definitely lying.
“You do know that a woman breaking up a betrothal in the manner that your sister has chosen could cause a scandal, don’t you?” he asked evenly. “Add to that whatever you are hiding... Can your family's reputation really survive those dual blows?”
Something shifted, and Aaron realized that she was well and truly angry now. He wanted to regret it—it would have been gentlemanly to regret insulting a lady—but he felt nothing more than a fierce satisfaction that he’d found the right thread to pull.
“If our society cannot withstand the absolute audacity of a woman choosing not to marry—” she began hotly, “—if they cannot bear the idea that a lady might want to decide what man she submits herself to entirely—which of you entitled sots she decides to become legal property of—if they cannot tolerate a woman having her own mind, her own desires, her own direction—if they cannot bear a woman being unchaperoned, treating a lady’s solitude like the most grievous sin? ”
The furious sound in the back of her throat was more than a scoff. It was pent-up rage that had finally broken free. Her cheeks were bright red with it.
“If all that is true,” she said, “our society is too fragile, and I have no patience for it. I have no patience for you—a man who would blackmail a young woman in order to force her to wear his ring.”
Aaron took a step forward, no longer feeling quite so calm. How did she manage to disrupt his calm so easily?
“That wasn’t what I meant, and you know it,” he snapped back at her.
She didn’t smile so much as bare her teeth at him.
“Do I?” she returned, stepping forward herself. This wasn’t like the night prior, when he had advanced and she retreated. She was as much the aggressor as he, and Aaron wondered how—again—things with this woman had gotten so out of hand so quickly.
But he still was the man that he was. And that man did not back down.
“Do you know,” he said musingly, even as he admired the flush on her cheeks and the way her eyes shone when she was angry, “I don’t think you’re wrong about our society.”
He’d said it to put her on the back foot, and it worked—metaphorically, at least. She did not physically retreat.
“I am?”
He lifted a shoulder. “In the navy, you see another side of life than what transpires on Mayfair streets. And in those parts of the world… Yes, there are still roles for women and roles for men. I daresay that happens everywhere. But I challenge anyone to watch a shepherdess carry a sheep over each shoulder while herding a passel of children as well and suggest that women are weak and inherently needful of men’s protection. ”
He kept his tone level, watching the minute changes in her expression as he spoke. She really was the most expressive little creature. Her eyes told him what he wanted to know—that the hook was well and truly baited.
“It does make me wonder,” he said in that same level tone, “where you have been going unchaperoned, Miss Turner.”
She sucked in a breath, her cheeks flushing anew.
Well. That was telling.
“This—it’s not about me,” she said blusteringly. “This is about you. I’m not intimidated by this little show of yours.” She waved a hand between them, very nearly touching him. “If something happens to my sister, I will blame you. And you will not like the results.”
Oh, this little hellion!
He leaned in.
“Tell me, Miss Turner,” he said softly. “How do you plan on unleashing that fury?”
His nose was inches from hers; it would be so easy to kiss her again. So easy, so tempting. He warred against his better judgment.
But it was her judgment that won the day. She sucked in another breath, this one sounding more like a sigh.
“We can’t,” she said, finally breaking her gaze from his. “We shouldn’t. It was a mistake—one we shouldn’t repeat.”
He took a step back, and so did she.
“Very well,” he said. He tucked his desires back into the box where he kept them. He had a lot of practice at this, but still, it was harder than it ought to have been.
She didn’t say anything, just kept looking at the floor. And somehow—even though half the things she said drove him absolutely mad—this silence stung even harder than her rejection.
He pushed that hurt away, too, as he left. She would be gone from his life soon enough. And then he could go back to his orderly life… which was, he told himself again and again, just the way he liked it.
The ride home from Redcliff Estate was… uncomfortable to say the least.
Lord Turner spent the entire time—a full two hours or more, as the two estates were not close to one another but not terribly far apart, either—glaring at his daughter.
Phoebe would have been impressed by his determination if she were not too busy with her own thoughts…
the kind of thoughts that she did not want to be unduly scrutinized while having.
She couldn’t believe that he’d agreed with her about Society. Yes, it had clearly been—at least in part—a trick to get her to confess her secrets, but she thought that he meant it.
That was surprising. It was a version of surprising she could stand to think about.
She could not stand to think about the part where they had almost kissed.
Again.
She was getting really, truly tired of these absurd repetitions. Was she not an intelligent woman? Could she not learn from her mistakes? For goodness’ sake.
She might be absolutely fit to be tied at Hannah at the moment, but that didn’t mean that her sister deserved the betrayal of Phoebe kissing her betrothed. Not even if Hannah seemed to be… looking elsewhere. Not even if the whole thing might have been destined to head nowhere.
Not even if the kiss had been… remarkable.
She felt a blush threaten to overtake her, but her father was still watching.
She pretended to sleep for the rest of the journey. It was uncomfortable, and she got a wretched crick in her neck, but it was better than sitting in that miserable silence with her father’s rage.
When they finally arrived back at their estate, Phoebe found the housekeeper looking distinctly unsettled.
“Welcome back, Lord Turner, Miss Turner,” she said with a bobbed curtsey, during which she tried to catch Phoebe’s eye.
Phoebe gave the woman a subtle nod of acknowledgment.
The staff generally came to her first with any concerns; they’d done so ever since Phoebe’s mother had died more than a dozen years ago.
Lord Turner might pay the bills, but he generally considered himself far too important to deal with women’s work, like handling domestic matters.
That was what daughters were good for, after all.
“I’m going to go clean up after the journey,” Phoebe murmured. “Excuse me.”
“Don’t dally!” her father demanded as Phoebe headed up the stairs. “You still have plenty to account for!”
Phoebe, who had approximately nothing to account for, ignored him and kept heading up the stairs. The housekeeper waited a beat, then followed Phoebe.
“Miss Turner,” she said when they were out of sight, “you need to return to your bedchamber—at once.”
Her expression was wide and uncertain. Phoebe felt fairly certain she knew precisely what this was about.
“Thank you, Mrs. Gulliver,” she said, her mouth flattening into a line. “I will do that at once.”
The woman’s shoulders relaxed.
“Thank you, Miss Turner,” she said. “Now I must—His Lordship—”
“Go,” Phoebe said. Her father would often remind the staff of his returned presence after coming back from traveling, typically by issuing a flurry of deeply irritating commands. The longer they went unanswered, the more persnickety he would get.
“Thank you, Miss Turner,” the housekeeper repeated, bobbing one more curtsey before heading back to corral the staff, who would no doubt be scurrying hither and yon.
Phoebe took a moment to rub the sore spot between her eyes. She suspected that her headache was going to get worse before it got better.
Then, she headed to her room and opened the door.
“I can explain everything,” Hannah said.