Beside her, Aaron grimaced.
“Yes, it’s ostentatious, isn’t it?” He didn’t even bother to hide his disdain for the opulent décor and countless dripping candles, which made all the jewels around the necks of Society’s who’s who glitter and gleam.
One such bejeweled lady sniffed in affront at Aaron’s words.
He ignored her.
“I just thought this was for charity,” Phoebe said. “But it seems just like any other Society ball.”
They’d come this evening to support a charity for soldiers wounded in the course of their service. Not officers nor men withsomething to fall back on like Aaron’s cheerful friend from their wedding breakfast—a friendship that still fascinated her and about which she hoped to learn more at the first chance.
These were men who had joined the military because it was the only viable career path available to support their families. Several of them were in attendance, most missing limbs and looking far less comfortable than any of the members of the ton.
Any of them except, perhaps, for Phoebe’s husband, who was still looking around with poorly disguised distaste, though this sour expression faded into something stonier when he looked at the soldiers. It wasn’t anger. It was… Phoebe thought it might be suppressed grief. She only recognized it because she knew it well.
“Hm,” Aaron said.
Phoebe didn’t roll her eyesonlybecause she had promised to do her best not to embarrass him. But goodness, could he be any more unhelpful?
But still, she’d made a promise, so she entertained herself by thinking of the stunned expression on her husband’s face when she’d left him alone in bed the night before.
That made it easy for her to smile pleasantly. It was so nice to win.
For a while, she hung around at Aaron’s side, playing dutiful wife, but she was inevitably swept up in the tide of curiosity around the woman who had mysteriously ensnared the dangerous duke.
Phoebe kept her responses vague—her family had a country estate that wasn’t far from where the Duke’s family historically resided, but she and Aaron hadn’t met until recently. This was all true, and the use of her husband’s given name had the added benefit of distracting the questioners with giddy giggling.
She’d underestimated the power of her husband’s legend, apparently.
Phoebe wasn’t particularly keen on Society events—she much preferred the scandalous side of London, where the laughter was less polite but more heartfelt, where the jewels were all paste but the very atmosphere seemed richer with joie de vivre if nothing else—but she wasn’t having aterribletime.
At least, not until she heard a gaggle of gossipers spouting poison.
“I suppose the décor is pleasant enough, but it is so verydrearythat they insist on reminding us of all those sad men,” one woman lamented loudly.
“Are they men any longer?” one gentleman said with a malicious laugh. “I would rather be dead than be so useless.”
Phoebe was trying to be good. She’d told herself that she would come to this event, not draw any attention to herself, and then go home. It was a promise she’d made to herself more than to her husband, and those were the promises she intended to keep the most.
But listening to that man, who wore finery that had no doubt been bought by money that he’d gotten from nothing more than being born to the right family, she snapped.
“And yet,” she told him, raising her voice enough that he could not pretend not to hear—and enough that everyone in their immediate vicinity turned to look at her, too—“here you are.”
He turned, blinked, and sneered.
“Excuse me?” he asked. The words were a threat. She was meant to cower, to say she hadn’t meant anything, to turn and flee like a startled fawn.
Unfortunately, Phoebe never had been all that good at doing what she was meant to do.
She smiled broadly at him.
“You said,” she told him pertly, “that you would rather be dead than useless. But you’re still here. So, do you have a profession, sir?”
“It’sMy Lord,” the man snapped at her. “And of course, I don’tworkfor a living. What do you take me for?”
The great thing about gentlemen—perhaps the only great thing about gentlemen by Phoebe’s estimation—was that she could count on them to be reliably prideful. Usually, to the point of absurdity.
Thus, she was ready.
