Chapter 16
“You are about to be a very happy man,” Jacob said as he swanned into Aaron’s office without so much as a by your leave.
“I doubt that,” Aaron said.
This was a fair enough assessment—never, in all his born days, had Aaron accurately been described as a very happy man—but he was in a particularly foul mood this morning.
The party the night before had… not gone according to plan.
Aaron’s plan had been simple. He was going to show up, lend ducal significance to the event in the hopes that others would open their purses—something he’d been assured would be more effective than just opening his own purse, though of course, he had done that as well—then leave.
Everyone would focus on the fact that he’d recently married—the ton loved gossip—and nobody would bother him.
And nobody had. Instead, someone had bothered Phoebe.
And he had found that… unacceptable.
It was, frankly, unacceptable how unacceptable he’d found the man’s words. He shouldn’t have gotten so angry—but he had. He’d barely held himself back from striking the man. He couldn’t recall ever being so outraged, not even during the worst, bloodiest battles he’d ever been embroiled in.
But the man had insulted Aaron’s wife.
It had made Aaron’s blood boil, and since he hadn’t been able to rid himself of that rage with violence, he’d gone with… another method.
One that he had found distressingly pleasurable.
He’d almost erupted in his trousers like an untried lad for Christ’s sake. He’d woken up in the night half a dozen times, hard as stone, and only Phoebe’s presence in the adjacent room had stopped him from doing something about it.
All in all, this whole business with his wife—with his attraction to his wife—was becoming a problem.
“Well, reconsider,” Jacob said jovially. “Because the fundraising efforts last night were beyond our wildest expectations. And that’s not even accounting for your own generous contributions.”
This was, Aaron supposed, good news, though he seized upon it less due to any joy it brought him than for the potential for distraction.
Anything to take his mind off the woman who was rattling around this house somewhere and, even without being in his eyeline, ensuring that he would never feel any kind of peace in his own home ever again.
“Aren’t ladies meant to be the ones cooing over fundraising?” he asked. “Why am I not being graced by one of the iron-haired matrons who live for this sort of thing?”
“They are mostly afraid of you,” Jacob answered with such promptness that Aaron just knew that the louse was waiting for this precise question. “I volunteered for duty. Mostly so I could come drink some of your good liquor.”
Aaron narrowed his eyes at his friend, but he waved him tiredly in the direction of the drinks cart.
He needed to get some sleep. This part was Phoebe’s fault, too. She really had a lot to account for.
He shouldn’t have been so affected by her. She wasn’t even his first bloody choice for marriage!
And yet…
The thought of being married to anyone else felt instinctually wrong to him.
Aaron blinked and realized that Jacob was looking at him expectantly, as if he’d called his name more than once.
“Warson,” he said, looking completely delighted, “are you daydreaming?”
“I will have you keelhauled,” Aaron threatened. “I don’t care that we’re both out of the navy. I will find a boat and drag you beneath it.”
Jacob, perverse little thing that he was, looked even more thrilled at this threat.
“This is good for you,” Jacob said, gesturing at Aaron with a tumbler. The man really did only ever come over to drink Aaron’s spirits. And pester him. One or the other.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aaron said.
“I think you do,” Jacob contended.
Aaron pressed his lips into a thin line. The problem was that he didn’t know what was happening to him. He had almost bedded his wife—for the first goddamned time—in another man’s house. Up against a wall. Like it was some sort of quick dockside romp, not the first encounter between a man and wife.
He was furious that he’d done it. He was furious that he was feeling so bloody sentimental about it.
He was furious that Phoebe made him feel all these—things.
His marriage was supposed to be an arrangement of convenience. These feelings were bloody inconvenient. Not at all what he’d planned upon.
“It’s better if I stay in control of things,” he said eventually to Jacob’s probing look because this was as close as he could come to admitting any of the things rioting inside him, most of which he could not describe even to himself.
Jacob paused, like he was thinking carefully about each and every word before he let it pass his lips.
“Warson,” he said, voice wretched with understanding, “we’re not at war any longer.”
Aaron pressed the tip of his tongue against the point of one of his teeth, hard enough that he tasted a hint of the iron tang of blood. It wasn’t a comforting taste, but it was a familiar one—and sometimes that was all he needed.
“I know,” he said eventually, his voice quiet. “But maybe that’s the problem.”
When it came to confidantes, Phoebe usually started and ended with Ariadne Nightingale. The best part of having a best friend was knowing you always had someone to turn to after all.
But she had other confidantes, Phoebe discovered as she hesitated before telling her driver—how strange to have a driver; it was utterly bizarre to suddenly find oneself a duchess after planning for a lifetime of spinsterhood—to go to the Duke and Duchess of Wilds’ residence.
It was perhaps not the best form to go talk to her friend about her new husband when that new husband happened to be Ariadne’s cousin.
And when the subject matter at hand was rather… sensitive.
“Please take me to my father’s house,” she told the driver instead. “That is—Viscount Turner.”
The driver pressed his lips together in a barely suppressed smile.
“Aye, I know who he is, Your Grace,” he said in broad northern tones.
Phoebe felt herself blushing. This whole business of being important could take some getting used to.
Hannah was perhaps also a somewhat unideal choice when it came to discussing matters regarding the Duke of Redcliff—Hannah had been slated to marry the man herself, after all, which made it all a little more snarled than Phoebe would have preferred.
But Hannah’s current, ahem, condition meant that she knew more about matters between men and women than a young, unmarried lady ought, and besides, she owed Phoebe.
So, Phoebe went to her sister, preparing to—for once—be the one seeking help, advice, and comfort.
Except, when Phoebe arrived to find her sister in the upstairs sitting room where the two sisters had often passed their afternoons, Hannah threw herself directly into Phoebe’s arms.
“Oh, Phoebe,” she cried, clearly already near tears. “Thank goodness you came!”
This arrangement—in which Hannah summoned her sister to help her through some minor crisis—was so familiar that, for a moment, Phoebe almost wondered if she hadn’t actually been summoned. But no—Phoebe was the one with the problem, no matter how Hannah was acting.
Phoebe was about to say so, too, but when Hannah pulled back, she saw her sister’s eyes were brimming with unshed tears.
So, Phoebe pushed aside her own troubles for now. They would keep, she supposed.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” she asked, leading her sister over to the settee like she had so many times before—when Hannah had been beside herself over her debut, when a fellow debutante had insulted Hannah’s gown in front of a gentleman her sister had briefly fancied, and on any of the many, many occasions when their father had said something carelessly unkind that had wounded Hannah to her core.
Hannah dabbed a handkerchief under her eyes, though she had thus far managed to keep any tears from actually spilling over. She was looking rather lovely, Phoebe noticed—one of those women who glowed with good health while they were expecting.
“It’s Loyd,” she said, keeping her voice low in case any of the staff was lingering nearby. “He—he says he cannot marry me.”
“What?” Phoebe nearly levitated out of her seat with the force of her indignation. “Hannah, I know I am a woman, but I do not care. I will challenge him to pistols at dawn if he tries to set you aside after—”
“No, no, no,” Hannah interrupted, shaking her head furiously. “It’s not his fault.”
Phoebe narrowed her eyes. This sounded to her like a shovelful of utter shite—the kind of thing a man might say to cover up the fact that he was acting like an utter cad. But for the sake of her sister, not to mention her sister’s current, delicate state, she held her tongue.
“How?” she asked, acidity barely even touching her tone.
Hannah blinked sadly, and one tear managed to escape down her cheek. She looked practically like a portrait of a lady in distress—that’s how lovely she was in the moment.
“It’s his mother,” Hannah confided. “She’s very… strict about whom she thinks is a good candidate for him to marry.”
Phoebe tried not to look completely unimpressed by this explanation, but she doubted that she had much success.
“I’d say that we’re rather beyond that point, Hannah,” she said patiently. “Given that…”
In the spirit of discretion, she just gave her sister’s middle a pointed look rather than speak the words aloud.
For now, there was nothing evident beneath Hannah’s gowns, but that wouldn’t last very much longer.
Phoebe would have bet all of her pin money—which was now a much larger sum since she had become a duchess—that Hannah’s maid, at least, already suspected.
“I know,” Hannah said miserably. “But he doesn’t want to disappoint her.”
It took Phoebe a moment to glean her sister’s meaning in all this.
“He hasn’t told his mother,” she said flatly.
A defensive gleam lit in Hannah’s eyes.
“He just wants to get her to agree without resorting to that,” she protested. “It’s not that he won’t if it comes to that.”