Chapter 21
“Oh, hullo there, Clio,” Aaron said, faintly surprised to find his sister when he’d gone searching for his wife.
Clio looked so pleased to see him that he didn’t have the heart to resume his search for Phoebe.
“Aaron,” she said, setting aside the novel that she had been reading. “Come, sit.”
He went and sat. Part of him distantly observed that he had a lot of people ordering him about recently, but another part of him… didn’t really mind. These weren’t the cruel, authoritarian orders that his parents had delivered to him. Phoebe and Clio just… wanted to spend time with him.
It was strange but not unpleasant.
Although… he might have to amend that determination, he thought, when Clio peered at him in a knowing sort of way.
“What?” he asked, immediately regretting the defensiveness in his voice. He’d once known the value of patience, of waiting an enemy out and forcing them to make the first move. Why could he do that when he was eye-to-eye with a cannon but not with his little sister?
She tilted her head in an assessing sort of way. “How are you?” she asked in a way that suggested more than a casual inquiry.
Aaron had once, before getting promoted to the admiralty, been forced to face down a panel of the highest-ranking members of the Navy.
It had been a tableful of men who had spent their lives being commanding, tactically brilliant, and incisive—all in circumstances that had meant their deaths if they failed.
He had squirmed less facing them than he did right now, facing Clio. Then again, the senior admirals had only been asking about his military career. He was pretty sure his sister was going to ask about his feelings.
“I’m fine,” he said.
Clio tilted her head in the other direction.
“Are you?” she asked.
“I… am,” he said. He tried to remind himself that he could just stand up and leave—this was his own house, damn it—but something held him back.
There was a very worrying gleam in his sister’s eye.
“And how is Phoebe?” she asked.
That was… a very good question. His wife had given him a great number of looks during their carriage ride back from the soldiers’ rehabilitation home the day prior, but when he had asked what she was thinking about, she had insisted that she was thinking back on the games of whist she had played with a few of the men.
It had not been a believable lie, but he didn’t feel that he could demand she reveal her every thought to him, not when he’d recently told her that he would only let her in on rare occasions.
“She is also fine,” he told Clio.
She hummed consideringly.
“What?” he demanded again, then inwardly cursed himself again. What had happened to him at that altar that had made him lose his nerve when it came to the women in his life?
“It’s just that the two of you seemed to be getting along a bit better,” Clio observed.
Aaron tried desperately not to think of anything that had happened in any carriages or corridors outside ballrooms. He tried not to think of the strange, desperate hunger he felt for his wife.
In one way of viewing things, his longing made sense. He’d been married for weeks now, and they still hadn’t consummated their union. In another way, though, it didn’t make any sense at all.
He’d spent his early adult years following the same pattern: a brief possibility for pleasure, snatched upon various shore leaves, followed by months of celibacy enforced by close quarters, limited access to bathing water, and the unpleasant pitching and canting of a ship which Aaron had always found distinctly un-arousing.
But now, mere days after feeling Phoebe’s slim fingers around him—which, even with his trousers in the way, had been one of the most consuming sensual experiences he’d ever enjoyed—he was ravenous for more.
Ravenous to make good on his comment about using a bed for once.
But the part that unsettled him the most wasn’t his carnal desire for his wife. That part was normal. She was a beautiful woman, and he had eyes.
The part that bothered him was the… feelings.
He was having feelings. He’d felt them when he watched Phoebe laugh while playing cards at the soldiers’ home. He’d felt them when he had seen her walking through the icy garden arm-in-arm with Clio.
They felt… soft.
It was deeply strange.
“Surely,” he told his sister, “it is good that my wife and I are getting along.”
He thought this was said with an appropriately neutral tone, so he was irritated when Clio gave him a knowing smile.
Did these women know some kind of secret language? Did they have some sort of magical powers that men couldn’t understand? Why were they always giving him these looks?
“It is good,” she agreed. “I like her.”
He tried not to grumble, really, he did. “Yes, that’s perfectly apparent.”
Clio laughed.
“You know, there’s no reason to be jealous, brother,” she told him. “You could spend more time with her if you only—and this is going to sound completely mad, I know—were nice to her.”
“I’m not jealous,” Aaron protested, ignoring this latter bit, which was also obviously nonsense.
“You are profoundly talented at missing the point,” Clio said sardonically. “But then again, you are a man.”
“Why do people keep focusing on that?” Aaron demanded. “First Jacob, now you—”
“I always did like that Jacob,” Clio said.
“I miss the navy,” Aaron said with a sigh. It wasn’t entirely true.
Mostly.
Clio smiled at him in a way that could only be described as indulgent.
“Since it’s Christmas, I’m going to give you a gift of some good advice,” Clio said.
“Women like it when you talk to them. They don’t like it when you push them away due to idiotic masculine pride.
I am quite literally begging you to think about this the next time Phoebe asks you a very normal question about your past. Because if you keep pushing her away, eventually, she’ll listen.
And I don’t think you actually want that. ”
Aaron’s logical mind wanted to argue. He wanted to protest that he didn’t do things that he didn’t want to do.
But some instinct held him back. And when he probed that instinct, he started to wonder if maybe Clio wasn’t right. Maybe he was being more proud than terribly rational.
Maybe.
He wasn’t going to admit it, though. He might have spent years away from Clio, which might have meant that he was out of practice when it came to being an older brother, but he still knew the basics.
You didn’t admit that you were wrong. Not if you didn’t want to hear about it for the rest of your bloody life.
Besides, Clio looked smug enough just at his silence.
“Stop that,” he told her.
She grinned broadly.
“You don’t know anything,” he said.
He could see all of her teeth now. Everyone. It was alarming in the extreme.
“Go away,” he said tiredly. “Let me wait for my wife in peace, would you?”
At that, Clio surged to her feet with an adorable little hop that reminded him of when she’d been a much younger girl.
“Those are the magic words,” she told him, crossing the room to peck a kiss on his cheek. “Extend my greetings to Phoebe.”
He hid his smile as she left the room—just for the look of the thing.
But that same instinct, the one that had warned him not to protest, the one that had kept him alive so many times, the one that he had learned to trust—that feeling was extremely satisfied by the idea that he had made his little sister happy for once.
Phoebe didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when she returned home from visiting her sister to find her husband waiting for her.
“Phoebe,” he said, offering her a sheepish sort of smile from where he sat in the library, his ankle draped over his knee, his posture suggesting that he’d been sitting there for a while.
She… didn’t know what to make of that.
She had just been complaining to Hannah about the way that Aaron had been blowing hot and cold. Then hot. Then cold. Then back and forth a few more times, just for fun—just to keep Phoebe feeling as though she was well on her way to madness.
“I am fairly certain that he isn’t doing it just to annoy you,” Hannah had argued as she reclined on a settee, her hand draped over her stomach, which was now visible unless Hannah stood just so.
She hadn’t bothered to do so when she was alone with Phoebe, and the curve of her stomach was a stark reminder of the timeline for Loyd to get himself in order.
But Phoebe was going to focus on that later. Right now, she was going to whine a bit more.
“You don’t know that,” she’d objected. “You don’t know him. He might have a secret passion for driving women to bedlam.”
“Oh, right, because you married a gothic villain?”
Phoebe had waved at her sister. “I don’t like this. I don’t like this whole thing you’re doing right now. Be on my side, please.”
Hannah’s look was fond in a maternal sort of way. It was very irritating.
“I am on your side,” she said. “I am trying to show you that the root of your problems isn’t actually about how the Duke reacts.”
She dangled this in front of Phoebe like a morsel of meat in front of a dog.
Phoebe was extremely angry with herself for taking the bait.
“What is it about, then?” she asked wearily.
Hannah smiled. “It’s about how you react. It’s about how you feel.”
This had been so preposterous that Phoebe had been unable to speak for a full minute.
But now, home and staring at Aaron, she couldn’t help but hear her sister’s words ringing in her ears.
How she felt. How she felt.
She didn’t know how she felt; that was a good part of the problem.
“Good afternoon, Aaron,” she said for lack of anything wiser to say.
“Would you sit?” he asked, and when he gestured, it wasn’t to any of the chairs around the room—it was to the other side of the same settee where he was seated.
Choosing any other place—or refusing to sit entirely—would have sent the kind of message that she didn’t think she wanted to send. Not, of course, that she knew what she wanted to say.
But she was afraid of closing a door before figuring out what was inside it.