She blinked at the bare entryway in confusion. Then, a maid scurried through the space, saw Phoebe, and let out a little closed-mouth shriek as though she’d seen a ghost that she did not wish to provoke into ghostly acts.
And then she… ran away.
Phoebe was still thinking through this odd display when the housekeeper rushed into the front of the house, an expression of naked relief on her face.
“Your Grace,” she sighed. “Thank God.”
“Um,” said Phoebe, who had a rather positive view of herself but did not see her arrival as something meriting divine thanks.
“Mary,” the housekeeper said to the first maid, who was lurking nervously behind her, “go tell one of the footmen to notify His Grace.”
Phoebe still had no sense of what was happening here at all, but she did spare a thought for the housekeeper’s wisdom. If the little maid had been too afraid to speak to Phoebe, the poor girl had no chance against Aaron. Using a footman as an intermediary was a good decision, given that Aaron apparently needed to be involved in… whatever this was.
The maid left, still scurrying rather like a little mouse, and the housekeeper began fussing.
“Come, now, Your Grace, you must be chilled through. Let me take your cloak and let’s get you in front of a fire, yes? Come, come.”
Phoebe was helpless in the face of this relentless, cheerful bullying, and so she let herself be cajoled to stand in front of a fire despite the fact that she wasn’t actually that cold after all. The carriage was very well insulated, and her cloak was nice and warm.
She had just found herself with a blanket tucked firmly around her shoulder when Aaron stormed into the room, looking…
Well, looking downrightpanicked.
He hid it quickly, replacing the wide-eyed look of fear with his usual stern frown.
“Where were you?” he demanded. “What were you thinking? Are you hurt?”
He delivered these questions with all the rapid-fire cadence of a line of muskets, and Phoebe had to blink at him briefly. There had been an awful lot ofbustlingin the past few minutes, and all of it had been wholly unexpected.
Her admiral husband, however, seemed to take this delay, brief though it was, as some sign of clear loss of sense.
“What happened, Phoebe?” he demanded, taking another step forward and placing a hand on her blanket-covered shoulder.
“I… nothing,” she said. “I went to go see my sister.”
This time, it was Aaron’s turn to blink.
“In this weather?” he managed eventually.
Phoebe turned to look at the window where the world outside looked like the idyll that might appear in a print, suggesting the splendor of the Yuletide season.
“Yes?” she ventured.
His fingers tightened on her shoulder.
“What were you thinking?” he demanded. “Do you not remember the last time you went out in the snow? You are not to go out without informing me, not if you can’t be trusted to keep yourself safe!”
Phoebe found her confusion vanishing in a puff of anger.
She tried to take a step back out of Aaron’s grasp, but he reached out with his other hand and grasped her at her elbow. It wasn’t a harsh grasp, but it prevented her from stepping away, not unless she wanted to be forceful about it.
Strangely, she found that she did not want to be forceful about it. The way he was touching her now was… almost like a hug—if she squinted about it.
It probably said something about her that she found an almost hug to be so pleasant, but that was neither here nor there, not when Aaron was looking down at her with another flash of true alarm in his eyes.
“You promised me my freedom,” she reminded him, torn between being angry and feeling an odd sort of tenderness that he had noticed that she was gone and then worried about it.
Phoebe had been sneaking out foryearsbefore her father had noticed. Aaron had taken, what, two hours? And when her father had discovered her excursions, he had only worried about the way that it would harmhim.
