“Just so,” Clio agreed, smiling. “You’re one of us, now—” She hesitated. “—as small as thatusmight be.”
“Bigger now,” Phoebe said.
“Bigger now.” Clio sounded like she liked that idea.
The two women sat after Clio crossed the room to ring for tea.
“Oh—I’m sorry, should I have let you do that?” she asked, her nose scrunching. “Old habits.”
Phoebe simply could not stand to tiptoe around one more person in her life, and Clio seemed far more approachable than her elder brother.
“How about this,” Phoebe proposed. “What if we decide to not stand on formality? Since we’re sisters now and all.”
She held her breath until Clio let out a blinding smile.
“I’ve always wanted a sister,” she said.
After that, everything went swimmingly. Phoebe and Clio ate a large plate of biscuits and sandwiches, provided by the cook who came up to deliver them to “dear Lady Clio” herself. They compared life on the Continent to recent fashions in London and indulged in a little bit of gossip.
“I have about a thousand new babies in the family to visit,” Clio said, sighing as though this was the greatest burden in the world, though the smile on her face told another story. “I’ve heard that all the men have become soft as butter in the summer over their children. I do look forward to seeing that.”
Phoebe, in turn, shared stories of how the legendary Duke of Wilds had given up his old ways in favor of spending all his time adoring his wife.
In short, they discussed everythingexceptAaron.
When they all sat down to dinner, however, Phoebe realized that Clio hadn’t done this because she didn’t want to talk about Aaron. No, she’d been strategic. She simply didn’t want to discuss her brother unless he was there to hear what she had to say.
Phoebe was reasonably certain that this was a gesture both designed to show her loyalty—she might be friendly with Phoebe, but she was Aaron’s sister first—and to drive her brother up the bloody wall.
They were eating the soup course when she started. Aaron had first come to the table with stiff shoulders, but he’d visibly relaxed as Clio had happily chattered with Phoebe about all the things that she had missed about English food and which things she would miss about Belgian dining.
Clio waited until Aaron looked almost entirely unbothered before she said, in utterly sweet tones, “Did you know, Phoebe, that Aaron did notalwaysseem as though he had a steel rod in the place of his spine?”
Aaron choked on his soup.
Phoebe grinned.
“I didn’t know that,” she said, delighted. “Please,pleasetell me more.”
“Clio,” Aaron said warningly.
Both women ignored him.
The interesting thing, Phoebe decided as she listened to Clio tell various anecdotes about her and Aaron’s shared childhood,wasn’t in the stories themselves. It was in the way that the two siblings interacted.
Aaron clearly itched to interrupt Clio a dozen times or more as she recounted stories, but each time, he merely clenched his jaw and let her keep going. He was fond of her, Phoebe realized. He loved her.
And maybe that shouldn’t surprise her—she wasn’t entirely sure that it did, actually—because she already knew that he was softer than he seemed at first glance. He wasn’t as cold as she’d initially suspected.
But hereallyloved his sister. And he was very bad at showing it.
“What else can I tell you?” Clio asked mischievously, tapping her fingers against her chin and shooting her brother a sidelong look. “Oh! How about the time that Aaron skipped out on his lessons to help me hunt for fairies?”
Phoebe was not entirely certain that she wanted to hear more of these stories. They were all charming—lovely, even. And Phoebe had enough confusing emotions about her husband without hearing them.
But even when Aaron looked as though he wanted to interrupt his sister, he looked so pleased to have the opportunity to do so that Phoebe didn’t dare interfere.
Even if it did cause her to feel… a lot of things to realize that she could understand her husband in this way.
