His life, but not his arm, Aaron noted, glancing at where Jacob’s left sleeve was pinned to just below the elbow. The damage from the cannon fire had been too extensive for the physicians to do anything except cut off the meaty pulp that had once been Jacob’s left hand and pray that infection didn’t do the rest.
It had been a near thing, but Jacob had survived. Still, Aaron couldn’t help but count his friend’s lost limb as one of his failures. Jacob would argue—hadargued in fact—that he was alive, and that was what mattered.
But it had ended his naval career, and Aaron had never known anyone who loved the sea like Jacob bloody Grand.
“I had always wondered,” Jacob commented mildly, grinning as he took a sip of his drink. He was far more adept with his one hand than he had been when Aaron had seen him last, shortly after the injury.
Jacob had always been the sort to refuse to let anything keep him down for long, however. They could have been coming off a three-month stint at sea, down to rations of hardtack and little else, and the man would still whistle shanties as he prepared himself for bed each night.
It was annoying. It was lifesaving when life on the water got too bleak.
“Wondered what?” Aaron asked, unable to resist rising to the bait.
“Wondered if you were as persnickety on land as you were on the ship,” Jacob concluded, hiding his smile behind another sip of whisky, then laughing uproariously when Aaron scowled at him.
“Do fuck off, Grand,” Aaron told him.
Jacob just downed his drink.
He had always liked getting under Aaron’s skin, just for sport. And Aaron owed him as much—for life, given that was the duration of time that his friend would be forced to live without a left hand, all due to Aaron’s poor tactical planning.
Even when Jacob wasn’t in front of him, Aaron had a massive scar on his right shoulder to remind him of this failure every single day.
“All right,” Jacob said, snapping his fingers decisively. “Enough brooding from you. Come now. What’s brought you to London? At long last, I might add—you retired your commission, what, more than a year ago now? And you’re only now coming back to Town?”
It was closer to two years, but Jacob was being generous, given that in all that time, Aaron hadn’t come to see his dearest friend.
Sentiment fit him like a poorly tailored coat, however, so he just set down his own glass and regarded his friend.
“You may as well be the first to know,” he said. “I’m going to be married.”
Jacob, to his everlasting credit, looked genuinely delighted by this. Or at least he looked genuinely delighted in the moment that it took for all of Aaron’s words to process.
“What do you mean, I’m the first to know? What about Clio?”
Aaron cringed. He should have known that Jacob would ask. Aaron had talked about Clio enough during his time enlisted after all. She was far and away the best letter-writer in the family, and Aaron had always shared her charmingly acerbic descriptions of variouston’sgoings on with Jacob. There was little entertainment during long stretches of naval service, and mail, when it managed to arrive, was a rare treat.
“Clio is currently residing with one of our great-aunts, Mathilde, from my mother’s side. She is in Brussels, perfecting her French.”
It was apparently very nice there. Aaron had never been—the closest he’d ever gotten to Belgium was the frigid North Sea along the coastline, and he didn’t have particularly fond memories of that locale, given the unrelenting cannon fire from the French and whatnot. But Clio seemed to like it, at least judging from the letters that Aaron perpetually failed to answer.
“Oh, that’s right,” Jacob said sardonically. “They don’t have post on the Continent.”
“Don’t be daft,” Aaron snapped, hoping his friend wouldn’t probe too deeply into why Aaron had severely limited contact with his sister. There were some things that a man simply didn’t speak about, not even to a friend and former military man. “She’s just busy. And the betrothal happened rather quickly.”
It was either the precise right thing to say or the precise wrong thing to say. Jacob always had possessed a nose for gossip, though he didn’t spread it with anything resembling malicious intent.
“You don’t say? Rather quickly. My dear admiral, have you fallen inlove?”
Aaron couldn’t stop the derisive sound that came out of him.
“Christ. No.”
But Jacob’s delight only grew. “Oh, Lord, were you discovered ina compromising position?”
He sounded almost proud of Aaron at the thought.
Again, Aaron scoffed.
