“No. God forbid. No, I just decided it was time to be married, and once that choice was made, there was no reason to delay. The ceremony is the day after tomorrow.”
Jacob choked on nothing.
“I—I beg your pardon. Theday after tomorrow? As in, two days from now?”
“Have you finally mastered calendars, then? Well done, you.”
Jacob shot him a rude gesture.
“Who is the lucky lady, then?” he asked.
Aaron hesitated.
“In all likelihood, it will be Miss Phoebe Turner, daughter of the Viscount, Lord Turner.”
He tried to say this with confidence, as if there was nothing amiss at all. And he tried to say it as though he were completely and utterly unaffected by Miss Turner’s offer.
In reality, he had been anything but unaffected. Oh, there was the reasonable, ducal part of him that had managed to examine the offer at arm’s length. Clearly, there was some kind of scandal brewing in the Turner household, though, at this point, Aaron’s money was on the younger sister being the one embroiled in something or other.
He suspected the elder was mostly acting out of a sense of sisterly duty—which was something he could understand, evenif he still felt certain he understood nothing else about Phoebe Turner.
But there was another part to Aaron, too, a part of him that he almost never let rise to the surface, not anymore. He’d only loosened the leash on that part of himself once in recent memory—when he had kissed Miss Turner, despite every good reason to do absolutelyanythingelse.
That was the part of him that had battled with the enemy, sometimes from behind the relative safety of a musket, often with the bloody intimacy of hand-to-hand combat.
That was the part of him that had looked at the kind of violence that would make other men turn heel and flee, and had led Aaron to forge ahead.
That was the part of him that had taken a piece of red-hot shrapnel to the shoulder and still carried his friend, broken and bleeding, back to safety because when Aaron’s blood got hot enough, he didn’t feel the pain.
Of course, there was one other way to get his blood hot enough to avoid feeling pain, but that particular strategy, rehearsed with various women in various ports over the years, had never been quite as effective as the consuming chaos of battle.
But if he tried to summon the memories of any of those encounters, he found that he could scarcely recall any of the women, let alone any release he’d gotten from his time spent with them. It wasn’t an honorable thought to have, and he heldno disrespect for these women, no matter their profession. They had done him a service, even if that service had had nothing to do with his heart.
He hadn’t been the same version of himself when he’d kissed Phoebe—Miss Turner. He had been… less or maybe more.
Not a duke.
Not even a soldier.
Not even a goddamn customer in a dockside brothel, seeking the kind, soft embrace of a woman who was willing to trade a bit of sweetness for a bit of coin, who was often distressingly relieved he turned out not to be a brute or a villain.
He’d listened only to the basest, most central part of himself.
That part of him was just a man, stripped of all the polite constraints of title and Society and law.
Thatpart of him had listened to Phoebe’s offer and growled back in return.
Yes. Take. Keep.
Mine.
But that was a part of Aaron that had grown up on war, on battle, and blood and brutality. That part of him had no place in Society—that was the root of all of his problems, really.
So, he had forced himself to walk away without giving her an answer, forced himself to take the evening to think it over. Forced himself to have one modicum of bloody rationality where Phoebe was concerned.
He hadn’t managed it so far, but perhaps a conversation with Jacob would be an acceptable stand-in. Jacob always had been a reasonable man, that irrepressible good cheer aside.
His friend looked at him for a long, long moment.
