Chapter 16 #2
“Hannah,” Phoebe said, really, truly digging deep to try to sound understanding, “it already has come to that. The longer this plays out, the more obvious it will be when the babe arrives early.”
At the word babe, Hannah blanched so dramatically that Phoebe feared that her sister was either about to swoon or to cast up her accounts right there over both of them.
Thankfully, however, Hannah did neither. Her voice was somewhat weaker as she said, “He will convince her. It will be fine. He’s just… a good son.”
Phoebe ground her molars together until she could control her temper.
Loyd, to her reckoning, sounded pathetic.
What kind of man was so afraid of his own mother that he couldn’t face the consequences of his own actions?
If Loyd hadn’t wanted to disappoint his mother, maybe he ought to have thought about that before he got Hannah in the family way.
But complaining about Loyd’s weak character wouldn’t help Hannah.
For one, she was already expecting the man’s child.
There was no way to turn that clock back.
And for another, even when she was practically weeping over the fellow, there was a gleam of infatuation in Hannah’s expression that told Phoebe that she would get nowhere by insulting the Viscount.
All she would manage to do was alienate her sister.
“Does someone need to have a word with him?” she asked instead, her mind racing through the possibilities.
Loyd likely wouldn’t listen to Phoebe herself, which meant that she would likely have to ask Aaron.
That was a decidedly unpleasant thought—with everything so uncertain between them, she didn’t want to ask him for a favor, especially favors that revealed that her family was almost certainly about to be embroiled in scandal.
Could she ask Ariadne to ask David to do it?
The, well, wild Duke of Wilds would probably enjoy playing the role of an avenger seeking reparations for a young lady’s honor, but presumably, Aaron would eventually find out that she’d sought aid from another man.
Would that offend him? It seemed likely.
Phoebe resisted the urge to rub her temples. Marriage was so complicated.
“No,” Hannah said firmly, and Phoebe oughtn’t have felt so relieved that she didn’t need to take on this burden—at least not yet. “He will convince her.”
Phoebe sucked in a breath.
“Very well,” she said, then added, “for now. If things haven’t resolved themselves in a few weeks…”
She settled on trailing off ominously rather than articulating a clear threat, mostly because she did not have one.
Or rather, she did. She really would have to go to her own husband; that much was clear—but she didn’t want to.
“All right, Phoebe,” Hannah agreed, shoulders slumping in relief. She scooted next to her sister and then laid her head on Phoebe’s shoulder. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would do without you.”
Phoebe swallowed against the hard knot in her throat. It was clear that now was not the time to discuss her own troubles, given how distressed and vulnerable Hannah clearly was.
Besides, Phoebe reasoned, if there was one good side to coming here today, it was that her own problems no longer seemed quite so terrible.
At least her husband was just annoyingly high-handed and frustratingly attractive.
It could have been far worse—he could have been a pathetic milksop who was too scared of his own mama to do the right thing.
Phoebe pressed her cheek against the top of Hannah’s head, glad that her little sister wasn’t looking at her and therefore couldn’t see any of the thoughts running through Phoebe’s mind.
“Never fear, sweetheart,” she reassured her little sister. “You’ll never have to find out. I’ll always be here. Always.”
Phoebe’s mind stayed on this promise as she took the carriage back home—strange, that she was already thinking of Aaron’s house as her home—even though her eyes remained fixed on the gentle fall of snow outside the window.
It really was a remarkably snowy winter, particularly for December. She spared a cheerful thought for all the children who were likely eagerly hoping for a white Christmas.
That was a bit of good spirit in the midst of all this… complication.
The thing was, Pheobe could promise that she wouldn’t leave her sister. That was true. Nothing short of death would keep her from her sister’s side whenever Hannah wanted her.
But that didn’t mean that Phoebe knew how to solve this particular problem.
With a sigh, she rested her cheek against the thick windowpane, the chill from outside penetrating even the high-quality glass.
It grounded her, a little, that press of cold against her overheated face. It made her feel as though maybe, just maybe, everything was under control.
That lasted only until the moment she stepped through the front door of her new home… and found the place in utter chaos.
Phoebe opened the door herself, which was already odd. There was usually a footman posted at the door day and night. But there was nobody there as she hauled open the heavy oak doors.
She blinked at the bare entryway in confusion. Then, a maid scurried through the space, saw Phoebe, and let out a little closed-mouth shriek as though she’d seen a ghost that she did not wish to provoke into ghostly acts.
And then she… ran away.
Phoebe was still thinking through this odd display when the housekeeper rushed into the front of the house, an expression of naked relief on her face.
“Your Grace,” she sighed. “Thank God.”
“Um,” said Phoebe, who had a rather positive view of herself but did not see her arrival as something meriting divine thanks.
“Mary,” the housekeeper said to the first maid, who was lurking nervously behind her, “go tell one of the footmen to notify His Grace.”
Phoebe still had no sense of what was happening here at all, but she did spare a thought for the housekeeper’s wisdom.
If the little maid had been too afraid to speak to Phoebe, the poor girl had no chance against Aaron.
Using a footman as an intermediary was a good decision, given that Aaron apparently needed to be involved in… whatever this was.
The maid left, still scurrying rather like a little mouse, and the housekeeper began fussing.
“Come, now, Your Grace, you must be chilled through. Let me take your cloak and let’s get you in front of a fire, yes? Come, come.”
Phoebe was helpless in the face of this relentless, cheerful bullying, and so she let herself be cajoled to stand in front of a fire despite the fact that she wasn’t actually that cold after all. The carriage was very well insulated, and her cloak was nice and warm.
She had just found herself with a blanket tucked firmly around her shoulder when Aaron stormed into the room, looking…
Well, looking downright panicked.
He hid it quickly, replacing the wide-eyed look of fear with his usual stern frown.
“Where were you?” he demanded. “What were you thinking? Are you hurt?”
He delivered these questions with all the rapid-fire cadence of a line of muskets, and Phoebe had to blink at him briefly. There had been an awful lot of bustling in the past few minutes, and all of it had been wholly unexpected.
Her admiral husband, however, seemed to take this delay, brief though it was, as some sign of clear loss of sense.
“What happened, Phoebe?” he demanded, taking another step forward and placing a hand on her blanket-covered shoulder.
“I… nothing,” she said. “I went to go see my sister.”
This time, it was Aaron’s turn to blink.
“In this weather?” he managed eventually.
Phoebe turned to look at the window where the world outside looked like the idyll that might appear in a print, suggesting the splendor of the Yuletide season.
“Yes?” she ventured.
His fingers tightened on her shoulder.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded. “Do you not remember the last time you went out in the snow? You are not to go out without informing me, not if you can’t be trusted to keep yourself safe!”
Phoebe found her confusion vanishing in a puff of anger.
She tried to take a step back out of Aaron’s grasp, but he reached out with his other hand and grasped her at her elbow. It wasn’t a harsh grasp, but it prevented her from stepping away, not unless she wanted to be forceful about it.
Strangely, she found that she did not want to be forceful about it. The way he was touching her now was… almost like a hug—if she squinted about it.
It probably said something about her that she found an almost hug to be so pleasant, but that was neither here nor there, not when Aaron was looking down at her with another flash of true alarm in his eyes.
“You promised me my freedom,” she reminded him, torn between being angry and feeling an odd sort of tenderness that he had noticed that she was gone and then worried about it.
Phoebe had been sneaking out for years before her father had noticed. Aaron had taken, what, two hours? And when her father had discovered her excursions, he had only worried about the way that it would harm him.
Aaron’s concern was misguided. It was overbearing. It was remarkably overblown.
But it was clearly concern for her, not for himself.
“Aaron,” she said again, this time more gently, “I need to have my freedom.”
“Yes,” he said after a long pause in which he seemed to be corralling his emotions. “I know. I just… I was worried.”
She could see how the admission cost him. His eyes closed for a long moment, and she was seized by a temptation to reach up, to hold his face in her hands, and to give him a long, consoling kiss.
This was silly. What was she thinking—that he wanted her to kiss him? That he would find comfort from such a thing?
But she couldn’t banish the thought from her mind—from her expression—before he opened his eyes.
The pain in his gaze changed, and for the span of a breath, there was a true tenderness there.
She leaned toward him, the movement no more than a shifting of her weight to the balls of her feet. His hand grew heavier on her shoulder; his fingers cupped her elbow just a hair more tightly.
She looked at his mouth and was struck by the memory of what they felt like against her mouth, against her…
But this was not that. This wasn’t the desire of the body; it was—something too soft and sweet and dangerous for all those things.
So, she pulled back, and then so did he.
“Thank you for your concern,” she said, hiking the blanket higher around her shoulders in a way that dislodged his grasp. He let his hands fall. “I will make sure to let you know before I go out in bad weather.”
It was a concession, and his expression said that he recognized it as such.
“I appreciate it,” he said, taking a step back of his own. “I… Thank you.”
She nodded, and so did he. Then, he left her in her warm spot by the fire.
The cozy glow of the flames was not enough, however, to burn away the strange sense of loss that hung over her like a cloud far denser than the ones that were filtering snow down over the London skyline.