Epilogue #2
“Well, now you have it whenever you wish,” Phoebe said. Then, because she couldn’t resist, she added, “Although, maybe a gentleman here will catch your eye, and soon enough, you’ll have a happy home of your own.”
Clio gave her a sidelong look.
“Married for, what, two months and you’re already a matchmaking matron,” she chided playfully.
“Oh, stop it,” Phoebe said, though she was not as horrified at the description as she might once have been. She’d learned that there were some parts of a conventional life that she did not mind in the least.
“Excuse me, Your Grace, but might I have this dance?”
As the opening strains of a waltz played, Phoebe heard her husband’s voice coming from her side. She turned to see him with a gleam in his eye and his hand extended.
“The two of you are terrible,” Clio chuckled, shaking her head. “Go. Go! I’m going to talk to someone who isn’t as dreadfully sentimental as the two of you.”
Phoebe didn’t mind being called sentimental, either; she found. She was extraordinarily sentimental when it came to her husband, and she was not apologetic about it in the least.
But she still was the kind of woman who flouted convention when it counted—because she danced many, many more dances with her husband than was socially approved of.
When the guests finally started leaving, either boarding their carriages or drifting upstairs to their rooms, Phoebe let herself linger in her husband’s arms, swaying together in the ballroom even though there was no more music playing.
It wasn’t quite how she was meant to behave as a hostess, but she found that she couldn’t manage to care.
“Are you happy with how the evening went?” Aaron asked as he reached up to tuck a loose tendril of hair behind her ear. Phoebe’s pins had put up an admirable fight, but after hours of dancing, celebrating, and scurrying around to talk to different people, her coiffure was not what it once had been.
“I am,” Phoebe declared, wrapping her arms around his waist and pulling him far closer than any real dance would allow.
“Even though there wasn’t any snow?” he prodded.
She let her forehead fall against his shoulder. “Why did you remind me?” she lamented.
His chuckle made his whole body shake with mirth.
“I’m sorry, my love,” he said, and this time she was the one shaking with a shiver of happiness. She didn’t think she would ever tire of hearing him refer to her that way.
“I suppose I have no choice but to be fine with it,” she said. “Since you’re not in charge of the weather and all that.”
“I’m good at other things,” he said in that low, seductive voice that made Phoebe’s body awaken automatically at this point.
She lifted her head and peered into his intense gaze.
“Oh?”
His smile was crooked. “Indeed. So good, in fact, that I bet you’ll forgive me for the mess with the weather.”
She feigned doubt, twisting her mouth to the side. “I don’t know,” she said. “That sounds like a significant hurdle.”
Aaron rose, as always, to the challenge. In a swift movement, he reached his arms down so that one looped down around her waist, and then, with a sweep, his other arm came around her knees, so he was carrying her.
“Aaron!” she exclaimed in a shriek that she only just managed to contain. “We have guests.”
“They’re in bed,” he countered, striding across the empty ballroom. “Which is exactly where we are going to be just as soon as I can get us there.”
Phoebe found that she had no arguments with that. And besides, what if someone did witness them? She’d never much cared for her reputation anyway.
So, let them talk, she thought as she let her husband carry her out of the room, stealing kisses as he went. Let them all say that the Duke and Duchess of Redcliff were absurdly in love with one another.
It was true, after all. And it was precisely the kind of reputation both she and Aaron would be pleased to have.
The risk-seeking part of Phoebe, the devilish part that had snuck out to countless events that she truly ought not have attended alone, was the teeniest, tiniest bit sorry that nobody saw them as they traveled up to their bedchamber.
That was fine. She and Aaron would merely have to flaunt their love in public in another way. She would nobly bear that sacrifice.
Besides, it was hard to be bothered by much when her husband was tossing her onto their bed hard enough to make her bounce.
She scowled up at him, though the gesture was more playful than anything else. They’d been through this before.
“Must you?” she demanded.
He grinned, as he always did.
“You can’t even pretend that you don’t like it when I do that,” he taunted, and damn her, she couldn’t.
“It’s just that you’re a very impressive war hero, and anyone would be thrilled by it,” she groused. “It’s not a personal weakness. Anyone would be affected.”
He pushed her back onto the bed, and she let herself be toppled.
“And here I was thinking it was a personal strength,” he teased, kissing her mouth, then her jaw, then her throat.
“Mine or yours?” she managed before letting out a low, thrilled moan.
“Hm, we can share it,” he said. “What’s yours is mine, and all that.”
“Oh, have it your way, then,” she returned, though it no longer sounded anything like complaint. It sounded like an invitation…and she was absolutely fine with that.
They had become wonderfully adept at taking off one another’s clothing, and they put those skills to good use in moments like these, moments where they couldn’t wait a single moment to have each other, where it didn’t matter that they had all their lives together.
Logic wasn’t terribly important when the hunger struck them. And it struck them quite a lot. It turned out that declarations of love did wonders for one’s sexual appetite.
Phoebe wondered why the scandalous shows she’d watched never mentioned such things.
She wasn’t wondering anything at all for much longer after that, because Aaron’s hands were on her, caressing her breasts, and her stomach, and then lower—and then he was inside her, and they were two people made one.
“I love you, Aaron,” she murmured when he was fully seated inside her.
“You are my wife, my life, and my love,” he said, tenderly reaching up to brush hair back from her face. “I am so, so lucky to have you.”
They were overcome with their mutual need to move after that, and for a long while there was no speaking between them, just mingled breaths and long glances and, finally, a shuddering climax that left them boneless and languid against one another.
“We are getting very good at that,” Phoebe said when she had regained enough breath to talk.
“We’ve always been good,” Aaron retorted, sounding offended. “But,” he admitted, “we are getting better.”
“Practice will do that,” she said, craning her neck to press a kiss to the underside of his jaw, where prickles were starting to make themselves known, even though he’d shaved before the night’s festivities.
“Indeed, it will,” he said, bending his head to capture her mouth with his. “Do you think we ought to practice again, then?”
Phoebe sealed her agreement with a kiss.
The End?