Chapter 25 #2
“What do I do with that?” he asked, throwing up his hands. “I already knew that I had erred grievously—I already knew I had to make amends. But now, knowing this—knowing how I feel about her… What am I supposed to do now?”
It all seemed so impossible. But to Clio, apparently, it was simple.
“If you love her,” she told him, her gaze pinning him like a bug to a card, “then you have to show her.”
Phoebe spent the last few days leading up to Christmas alternately moping in the room that Ariadne had given her—“For as long as you need it; I mean that,” her friend assured her—and trying not to make her friend regret this by forcing a bit of cheer whenever she encountered her hosts.
And then, on the twenty-third of December, Phoebe got her courses, and she spent most of the day in bed, weeping.
Even she didn’t know if she was weeping because she was relieved not to be expecting—as this gave her an undeniable reason to see her husband again—because she was mourning the possibility of a child—which would tie her irrevocably to Aaron—or merely because she’d always gotten weepy when her courses arrived.
On Christmas Eve, David and Ariadne were scheduled to go to the house of her brother, Xander Lightholder, the Duke of Godwin.
This was evidently where the majority of the extended Lightholder clan gathered each Christmas, lest they risk the Duke of Godwin’s wrath.
Ariadne invited Phoebe along, but Phoebe declined the invitation.
“You are part of the family now,” Ariadne reminded her.
“If I’m forced to go, you should be forced to go,” David said less diplomatically as his wife kicked him under the table.
This, at least, got a small smile from Phoebe.
“I’m in no spirits for it,” she said, shaking her head. “I have to go see my sister and father today, anyway.”
Christmas never had been much of a jolly affair at the Turner household, but that suited Phoebe’s mood perfectly.
Since she was apparently suffering from the worst luck in the world, however, she was greeted by an ebullient Hannah, who was leaping to and fro with such vigor that she marveled over how such a thing was even possible in her sister’s condition.
“Phoebe, Phoebe, Phoebe!” Hannah trilled, grabbing Phoebe’s hands and twirling her in a circle before Phoebe even managed to get out of her cloak and hat. “Happy Christmas! Isn’t everything so wonderful?”
Absolutely nothing at all was wonderful, and Phoebe was prepared to say as much…
And then she caught the glint of a ring on her sister’s finger.
Despite her own troubles, a wave of relief washed over Phoebe.
“Oh, Hannah,” Phoebe breathed, seizing her sister’s hand to examine the beautiful gold and sapphire band that sat there. “Tell me it’s Loyd that you’re going to marry.”
“Yes, yes, of course it is!” Hannah said, cheeks red, apparently too happy to protest Phoebe’s clear tone of doubt. “It’s the most wonderful thing. He came here—with his mother—and said that he loved me, and he was going to marry me, and that was that!”
Phoebe privately reflected that she did not consider the presence of a future mother-in-law to add to the romance of a proposal, but she supposed that, in Hannah’s particular circumstance, it was likely a relief to know she would no longer have to hide in the shadows while her husband-to-be kowtowed to his mother’s every whim.
“That’s wonderful,” Phoebe said. She managed to shake Hannah off just long enough that she could remove her cloak and hand it to a nearby footman, who had waited through all of this with considerable patience.
“It is wonderful,” Hannah agreed with a happy sigh.
“Loyd and his mother did already have plans for Christmas, which is just too bad, but Loyd told us all that this would be the last event in which his mother was the priority, so he wanted to give her that. It was very thoughtful of him,” Hannah added, lest Phoebe mistake the import of this gesture of filial piety.
“Besides,” she continued, dragging Phoebe through to the parlor, where a fire was blazing and plates of shortbread and bowls of wassail were waiting for celebrants to enjoy, “he said it—right to his mother’s face!
—that I would be his priority after we are wed which will be as soon as the banns are read.
” Hannah let out a little squeal of delight.
“Less than three weeks and I shall be Lady Loyd.”
She said it the way another woman might have said the Queen of England.
“And not a moment too soon,” Phoebe said, trying to hide any sarcasm in the words, out of deference to his sister’s joy.
And either Phoebe was more successful than she thought, or Hannah’s happiness was too big to be pierced by Phoebe’s barbs, because her sister released a happy little sigh.
“I know,” she said blissfully. A thoughtful little frown crossed her face as she continued her tale.
“At first, I thought we might have to alert Father to my—” She cleared her throat awkwardly.
“—condition, as he wasn’t terribly pleased that Loyd is a viscount, given that he’d almost married me off to a duke.
But I pointed out that he’s a viscount himself, and Loyd made the most romantic speech about how much he loves me, and then Aaron reminded father that there’s a duke in the family anyw—”
Hannah cut herself off, her eyes going wide as Phoebe turned to look at her.
“I’m sorry,” Phoebe said, her voice eerily calm. “But when you say Aaron, do you mean Aaron Warson, the Duke of Redcliff?”
Hannah squirmed in her seat. “Um,” she said. “Yes.”
“My husband?” Phoebe’s voice didn’t sound calm any longer. Now, it was high-pitched in the way that would set any nearby dogs to whining.
Hannah’s shoulders rose until they were practically kissing her ears.
“I don’t think I was supposed to tell you,” she said sheepishly. “But he has been helping. He was the one who talked to Loyd, who helped him get his mother and Father and me all together. He even brought his solicitor so that the marriage contract could be drawn up right away.”
“Aaron,” Phoebe repeated, her mind whirling with this new information. “My husband, Aaron?”
Hannah nodded. “He said—” She hesitated, clearly unsure if she should speak, and Phoebe wasn’t certain if she should laugh or cry at the revelation that her husband had so successfully won her sister’s loyalty. “He said that family should help one another.”
Phoebe stood—or she must have done because she was standing.
“I—need some air,” she stammered into Hannah’s shocked expression.
She moved through the house without thinking, her feet taking her to the garden on the force of habit alone. She was several yards down the path before she realized that she hadn’t even stopped to grab her cloak. By then, it seemed too great a hurdle to go back.
The snow was nearly all melted anyway, as if the mere atmosphere of London was taunting its residents for daring to hope for a white Christmas.
The pebbles of the garden path were damp but not slick as Phoebe wandered on, ignoring the cold in favor of trying to puzzle through what on earth she’d just learned from her sister.
It had to be because of the scandal. It was the only thing that made sense—that Aaron had helped Hannah because he didn’t want her pregnancy to cause a scandal.
Except…
Except that if that was what he had wanted, he would have been better suited by distancing himself from the affair as much as possible.
He certainly wouldn’t have come along with Loyd, wouldn’t have lent his ducal authority—not to mention his solicitor—to cleaning up the mess in which he had no hand in the making.
But if she dared to even consider another reason—if she dared to let herself think, for even a moment, that he’d done it for her—then she would start to hope.
And if she started to hope, her heart would break when those hopes were dashed.
She reached the gazebo, and evidently, she was some sort of glutton for punishment as she entered the structure, no matter that the whole thing was now painted over in the memory of kissing Aaron.
She wrapped her arms around herself tightly, creating a barrier against the cold and against any dangerous emotions that might try to creep in.
This changed nothing, she told herself. Nothing.
So what if she had increasingly come to feel that her heart was compromised by her marriage? So what if she felt more than she ought to for Aaron—both for the stern exterior that he wore to protect himself and the soft, kind, good man beneath? It didn’t matter.
What she felt didn’t matter because Aaron had been clear from the beginning, and he’d only made himself clearer with these last few days of silence. He wanted a wife who wouldn’t cause him trouble. And Phoebe was, and always had been, trouble.
She looked out over the garden where the snowmelt had made everything a drab gray, the kind of gray that made you feel like it would always be like this, like spring would never come, like the sun would never shine again.
She should get used to the cold, she reminded herself. She should let it sink into her bones until it no longer affects her.
And then, so sudden that it was startling, a warm weight draped over her shoulders, and she heard her husband’s voice—brimming with heat and irritation, enough to make her want to laugh in delight at hearing it.
“For Christ’s sake, Phoebe,” Aaron complained as he tucked his greatcoat more firmly around her. “Why in the hell is it that you never wear a bloody cloak?”