Chapter 23
As Aaron drifted toward wakefulness, he had the strangest sensation that he was—somehow, impossibly—back on a ship. Where else would he be hearing a quiet whistle of someone’s breath? Where else would he be feeling the gentle rise and fall that reminded him of the endless rocking of the waves?
Except… he’d never felt quite so calm while on a ship. And he did feel calm—calmer than he had since he was a child, perhaps.
He felt safe.
Indeed, he felt safe enough that he did not feel a pressing need to immediately solve this little puzzle. Instead, he allowed himself to drift for a while longer, trusting that the details would come to him in due time.
And they did. He floated in and out of sleep, and each time he bobbed toward the surface, another piece of information revealed itself.
He was home. He was in his own bed. And the rocking and the sounds—that was Phoebe.
Phoebe. His wife. Safe. Here. With him.
Each detail clicked into place like a building block that heightened his satisfaction.
“I know you’re awake,” Phoebe murmured. Her head was tucked against his shoulder, and they were still entirely unclothed from the night before.
Aaron had never spent a full night naked with a woman before; the kinds of quick encounters he’d enjoyed during his years in the navy had not lent themselves to such a thing, and the past few years had been spent in self-inflicted celibacy.
It was nice, waking this way. It was tempting to think that he could have more of this.
“Shush,” he chided. “I’m not really awake. You’re dreaming, probably.”
A ghost of a laughter huffed over his skin.
“My mistake,” she said, then pressed a kiss to his chest, right above his heart.
Something inside him cracked at that brief, chaste kiss. It cracked, but it didn’t hurt. It felt like the first step in shedding something that had been holding him too tightly. It felt like he could take a deep breath when he’d been surviving on mere sips of air for years.
There was, of course, no going back to sleep after that, but Aaron found he didn’t mind, particularly as there was no rush to rise from their bed, either.
Phoebe did not seem inclined to rush to start the day.
Her fingers traced idle patterns across his arm in a way that caused sensation to shiver pleasantly over him.
It was comforting more than arousing, but there was a great deal of satisfaction in learning that he could enjoy time with his wife like this, too.
She’d given him more than he’d ever thought that she could.
The idea made him wonder…
“Do you have something that you want for Christmas, Phoebe?” he asked.
To his surprise, the question—which he thought innocuous—made his sweet, soft armful of wife go rigid in a heartbeat.
“I’m… sorry,” he said—a fumbling, instinctual reaction. “I… don’t understand.”
Phoebe sighed, and it was the sort of thing that released tension from her body. It wasn’t enough to return her to the previous languid state she’d had upon waking, but Aaron began stroking a hand up and down her back in the hopes of returning her to that place.
“I think you may have been right about something,” she said, and he tried not to let his surprise appear in his movements. He kept caressing her lightly, then pressed a soft kiss to her hair for good measure.
“What’s that?” he asked gently.
“Yesterday, you said I was afraid.” She paused and pressed her face a little more tightly against his shoulder, and as much as he disliked her dismay, a deeply masculine part of him was extremely satisfied that she was turning to him for comfort. “And I think you were right.”
He frowned. “And this has to do with Christmas?”
She heaved another heavy sigh. “It just makes me think of my mother. When she died, it was Christmas. And right before she died—the last things she ever said to me in fact—was that I should always be true to myself. That I shouldn’t let the fear of way others perceive me hold me back from living the life that I want for myself. ”
“It isn’t bad advice,” he said cautiously. Having this conversation felt more precarious than most of the battles he’d fought in. At least then, all he risked was getting blown to bits by enemy fire. Here, he worried that he might hurt his wife, which felt far, far more frightening.
“No,” she agreed. “But I think that I may have taken the advice and made it into the life I supposedly wanted for myself. And I think that maybe means that I’m living the life she wanted and not the one that I chose for myself.”
“And Christmas reminds you of that?”
She laughed a little, but it was more sad than amused.
“Well, Christmas doesn’t remind me of precisely that since I didn’t realize that until about twenty seconds ago,” she admitted. “But it reminds me of losing my mother. And it reminds me that she died with regrets about her life. And that’s—it’s just darned heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
He clutched her close to him. His arms couldn’t protect her from the pain of her past, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth trying.
“It is,” he agreed.
He felt a hot drip against his shoulder and realized, to his utter horror, that his wife was crying.
Aaron was a man who accomplished things. He encountered problems and then solved them. But this, he did not know how to fix. She was sad, and he couldn’t fight it for her.
So he held her even tighter, and after a few agonizing moments, she let out a little sniffle.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything,” he argued, and there was only the faintest note of bitterness in his tone at the admission.
Even so, it made Phoebe laugh, and this time the laugh wasn’t overly tainted with sadness. That was something, he supposed.
“Yes, you did,” she corrected. “You didn’t try to fix it. You just let it be bad.”
“And that was… good?” he clarified doubtfully.
She laughed again, and perhaps there was some merit to ignorance if it could make her laugh like that.
“Yes,” she told him, pushing up to her elbow to look down at him. She looked lovely in the morning light, all sleep mussed and with a crease from the bedsheets pressed into her cheek. “That was good. You are a good man, Aaron.”
Her eyes were earnest when she said it, her expression open and sweet as sugar.
Possibly for the first time in his life, Aaron felt bashful.
“I don’t know about that,” he demurred.
She gave him that pert look that was all Phoebe.
“Well, I know enough for the both of us,” she said, and then she kissed him right on his mouth.
There was little for Aaron to do but respond in kind, and thusly they lost several intensely enjoyable minutes.
They pulled apart from one another only when Phoebe’s stomach let out an audible grumble. She cringed adorably and pressed a hand to her belly.
“I missed supper last night,” she confessed.
“Which is your fault, given that you distracted me so thoroughly with all your—” She waved a hand up and down his form, which was still tangled in the bedsheets.
She was trying to be teasing, but she blushed faintly as she did so, and Aaron felt his chest swell with masculine pride.
His wife was doing a wonderful job of flattering him this morning. It was a rare experience for him to feel so damnably lucky.
“Well,” he said, letting his eyes trace over her blush where it faded down her neck and came to kiss the tops of her breasts, “you may recall that one of my stipulations when we wed was that we share our meals.”
“I do recall,” she said, tugging up the coverlet a little higher when she saw the progression of his gaze. He could have pointed out that they were rather beyond the point of such modesty, but he was too charmed to make anything close to an objection.
“Well,” he continued, running his fingers through her hair and gently tugging through the snarls that had collected through their evening’s entertainment and the night of sleep, “you might also recall that I did not say where we had to have those meals together.”
The corner of her mouth kicked up in a smile.
“And do you have a suggestion, Your Grace?” she asked pertly.
“Thank you for asking, wife,” he replied, and grinned when the blush appeared again at the endearment, “because I propose that we have breakfast right here in our bed as we are.”
She stole another kiss.
“Do you know, Aaron,” she said, winking at him in a way that made him thank God that Society hadn’t managed to stamp all the impishness out of this wonderful woman, “I think you might be a very clever man with ideas like those.”
And so, they ordered breakfast brought up to their rooms, and Aaron laughed when Phoebe squeaked and hid under the covers when a maid delivered the tray.
He fed her little bits and bobs from plates that they shared, and he learned that while his wife was powerfully fond of kippers, she did not care for sausages in the least. He discovered that she’d always drunk tea and had never even tried coffee, so he offered her some of his, then nearly spilled the drink laughing when she made an expression of disgust at its bitterness.
And throughout it all, that feeling of peace remained. That feeling of safety.
Today, he promised himself, he would not think of survival. Today, he would think only of truly living—and of doing so with his wife at his side.
“I’m looking forward to meeting your sister,” Clio said.
Phoebe startled and glanced over at her sister by marriage, whose presence she had entirely forgotten. Judging by the smirk on her face, Clio had known this before she’d spoken.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Clio said, sounding not sorry in the least, “were you busy making eyes at my brother?”
“No,” replied Phoebe, who absolutely had been busy making eyes at Aaron. But it wasn’t her fault that he looked so handsome in his evening wear, nor that she was utterly charmed by his stern, unimpressed look when it wasn’t directed at her.
It was possible, she admitted, that lovemaking had addled her mind.
She didn’t object, she found.