Chapter 10
“Do my eyes deceive me? Is that really—my God, I daresay it is—Admiral Aaron Warson, late of His Majesty’s Navy?”
“Oh, do shut up, Dowling,” Aaron said, regarding his closest friend, Jacob Grand, the Earl of Dowling, as he strode into Aaron’s drawing room.
“Do you know,” Jacob said jovially, crossing to Aaron’s liquor cabinet and pouring himself a few fingers of whisky, “I don’t have to listen to you any longer. You’re not my commanding officer.”
“More’s the bloody shame,” Aaron growled, though there was no real heat in it.
He lacked the words to truly express it, but he was pleased to see Jacob.
They were brothers, bound by blood and battle—hell, Aaron felt far closer to Jacob than he had ever felt to his own late brother, Peter.
Aaron had been terrified when Jacob had been injured in battle and relieved beyond measure when he had acted swiftly enough to save his friend’s life.
His life, but not his arm, Aaron noted, glancing at where Jacob’s left sleeve was pinned to just below the elbow.
The damage from the cannon fire had been too extensive for the physicians to do anything except cut off the meaty pulp that had once been Jacob’s left hand and pray that infection didn’t do the rest.
It had been a near thing, but Jacob had survived. Still, Aaron couldn’t help but count his friend’s lost limb as one of his failures. Jacob would argue—had argued in fact—that he was alive, and that was what mattered.
But it had ended his naval career, and Aaron had never known anyone who loved the sea like Jacob bloody Grand.
“I had always wondered,” Jacob commented mildly, grinning as he took a sip of his drink. He was far more adept with his one hand than he had been when Aaron had seen him last, shortly after the injury.
Jacob had always been the sort to refuse to let anything keep him down for long, however. They could have been coming off a three-month stint at sea, down to rations of hardtack and little else, and the man would still whistle shanties as he prepared himself for bed each night.
It was annoying. It was lifesaving when life on the water got too bleak.
“Wondered what?” Aaron asked, unable to resist rising to the bait.
“Wondered if you were as persnickety on land as you were on the ship,” Jacob concluded, hiding his smile behind another sip of whisky, then laughing uproariously when Aaron scowled at him.
“Do fuck off, Grand,” Aaron told him.
Jacob just downed his drink.
He had always liked getting under Aaron’s skin, just for sport. And Aaron owed him as much—for life, given that was the duration of time that his friend would be forced to live without a left hand, all due to Aaron’s poor tactical planning.
Even when Jacob wasn’t in front of him, Aaron had a massive scar on his right shoulder to remind him of this failure every single day.
“All right,” Jacob said, snapping his fingers decisively. “Enough brooding from you. Come now. What’s brought you to London? At long last, I might add—you retired your commission, what, more than a year ago now? And you’re only now coming back to Town?”
It was closer to two years, but Jacob was being generous, given that in all that time, Aaron hadn’t come to see his dearest friend.
Sentiment fit him like a poorly tailored coat, however, so he just set down his own glass and regarded his friend.
“You may as well be the first to know,” he said. “I’m going to be married.”
Jacob, to his everlasting credit, looked genuinely delighted by this. Or at least he looked genuinely delighted in the moment that it took for all of Aaron’s words to process.
“What do you mean, I’m the first to know? What about Clio?”
Aaron cringed. He should have known that Jacob would ask.
Aaron had talked about Clio enough during his time enlisted after all.
She was far and away the best letter-writer in the family, and Aaron had always shared her charmingly acerbic descriptions of various ton’s goings on with Jacob.
There was little entertainment during long stretches of naval service, and mail, when it managed to arrive, was a rare treat.
“Clio is currently residing with one of our great-aunts, Mathilde, from my mother’s side. She is in Brussels, perfecting her French.”
It was apparently very nice there. Aaron had never been—the closest he’d ever gotten to Belgium was the frigid North Sea along the coastline, and he didn’t have particularly fond memories of that locale, given the unrelenting cannon fire from the French and whatnot.
But Clio seemed to like it, at least judging from the letters that Aaron perpetually failed to answer.
“Oh, that’s right,” Jacob said sardonically. “They don’t have post on the Continent.”
“Don’t be daft,” Aaron snapped, hoping his friend wouldn’t probe too deeply into why Aaron had severely limited contact with his sister.
There were some things that a man simply didn’t speak about, not even to a friend and former military man.
“She’s just busy. And the betrothal happened rather quickly. ”
It was either the precise right thing to say or the precise wrong thing to say. Jacob always had possessed a nose for gossip, though he didn’t spread it with anything resembling malicious intent.
“You don’t say? Rather quickly. My dear admiral, have you fallen in love?”
Aaron couldn’t stop the derisive sound that came out of him.
“Christ. No.”
But Jacob’s delight only grew. “Oh, Lord, were you discovered in a compromising position?”
He sounded almost proud of Aaron at the thought.
Again, Aaron scoffed.
“No. God forbid. No, I just decided it was time to be married, and once that choice was made, there was no reason to delay. The ceremony is the day after tomorrow.”
Jacob choked on nothing.
“I—I beg your pardon. The day after tomorrow? As in, two days from now?”
“Have you finally mastered calendars, then? Well done, you.”
Jacob shot him a rude gesture.
“Who is the lucky lady, then?” he asked.
Aaron hesitated.
“In all likelihood, it will be Miss Phoebe Turner, daughter of the Viscount, Lord Turner.”
He tried to say this with confidence, as if there was nothing amiss at all. And he tried to say it as though he were completely and utterly unaffected by Miss Turner’s offer.
In reality, he had been anything but unaffected.
Oh, there was the reasonable, ducal part of him that had managed to examine the offer at arm’s length.
Clearly, there was some kind of scandal brewing in the Turner household, though, at this point, Aaron’s money was on the younger sister being the one embroiled in something or other.
He suspected the elder was mostly acting out of a sense of sisterly duty—which was something he could understand, even if he still felt certain he understood nothing else about Phoebe Turner.
But there was another part to Aaron, too, a part of him that he almost never let rise to the surface, not anymore. He’d only loosened the leash on that part of himself once in recent memory—when he had kissed Miss Turner, despite every good reason to do absolutely anything else.
That was the part of him that had battled with the enemy, sometimes from behind the relative safety of a musket, often with the bloody intimacy of hand-to-hand combat.
That was the part of him that had looked at the kind of violence that would make other men turn heel and flee, and had led Aaron to forge ahead.
That was the part of him that had taken a piece of red-hot shrapnel to the shoulder and still carried his friend, broken and bleeding, back to safety because when Aaron’s blood got hot enough, he didn’t feel the pain.
Of course, there was one other way to get his blood hot enough to avoid feeling pain, but that particular strategy, rehearsed with various women in various ports over the years, had never been quite as effective as the consuming chaos of battle.
But if he tried to summon the memories of any of those encounters, he found that he could scarcely recall any of the women, let alone any release he’d gotten from his time spent with them.
It wasn’t an honorable thought to have, and he held no disrespect for these women, no matter their profession.
They had done him a service, even if that service had had nothing to do with his heart.
He hadn’t been the same version of himself when he’d kissed Phoebe—Miss Turner. He had been… less or maybe more.
Not a duke.
Not even a soldier.
Not even a goddamn customer in a dockside brothel, seeking the kind, soft embrace of a woman who was willing to trade a bit of sweetness for a bit of coin, who was often distressingly relieved he turned out not to be a brute or a villain.
He’d listened only to the basest, most central part of himself.
That part of him was just a man, stripped of all the polite constraints of title and Society and law.
That part of him had listened to Phoebe’s offer and growled back in return.
Yes. Take. Keep.
Mine.
But that was a part of Aaron that had grown up on war, on battle, and blood and brutality. That part of him had no place in Society—that was the root of all of his problems, really.
So, he had forced himself to walk away without giving her an answer, forced himself to take the evening to think it over. Forced himself to have one modicum of bloody rationality where Phoebe was concerned.
He hadn’t managed it so far, but perhaps a conversation with Jacob would be an acceptable stand-in. Jacob always had been a reasonable man, that irrepressible good cheer aside.
His friend looked at him for a long, long moment.
“Let me get this straight,” Jacob said. “You are marrying in two days.”
“Yes.”
“But you do not—and really, Warson, I must be wrong about this because it is absolutely fucking insane, and I do hope you know that—know for sure which woman will be waiting for you at the altar.”
“Well, it is the man who waits at the altar,” Aaron said. Jacob’s mouth scrunched up like he’d bitten directly into a lemon. “But otherwise, yes.”