He tried to raise his newspaper again, but Phoebe cleared her throat meaningfully—then kept doing so when her first attempt failed to garner any reaction from him.
Nobody had ever said that Phoebe was anything less than pigheaded, and eventually, even stubborn Aaron couldn’t ignore her.
“Can I help you?” he asked dryly. “Or should I perhaps send for a physician for whatever you’ve got going on with your throat there?”
Phoebe shot him her most winsome smile.
“I was hoping,” she said again, this time in a saccharine tone, “that we might talk.”
The subtext was clear:I will continue annoying you until you talk to me.
He was stubborn, but he wasn’t stupid.
“Yes, Phoebe?” he asked. A navy man, having spent his life on the water, ought not be able to get a tone that dry, but Aaron was a man of many talents, it seemed.
She kept her chin raised high, even though she felt a blush start to rush over her cheeks.
“I thought we might discuss… the other night,” she said, trying not to quiver under his regard. “When I came home from visiting Hannah, and you were… scared.”
It was the wrong choice of words; she recognized it as soon as it left her lips.
“Is it unreasonable of me to not want to my wife to freeze to death?” he objected, his tone icy enough that it put her at more risk than the snow ever had.
“That’s not what I said,” Phoebe protested. “But you seemed?—”
“Must we do this, Phoebe?” he demanded.
“Talk?” she clarified. “Yes, I daresay wedoneed to do that, at least?—”
“No,” he corrected, and she was getting pretty damned tired of these interruptions. “We don’t. We are notfriends,Phoebe. You are my wife. We agreed to marriage out of a mutual benefit in regards to our social standing and lineage. That is all.”
Phoebe was pretty certain that he was trying to make her mad. Unfortunately for him, however, she had a deep well of pettiness in her heart, and so, she would do whatever she could to deny him the satisfaction of seeing her squirm.
“So,” she said, touching a finger to her chin like she was really straining the limits of her feeble female mind, “we shall ensure your legacy… silently?”
She blinked aggressively at him, just in case he missed her sarcasm.
“Let me frame it for you in very simple ways,” he said acidly. “We will produce an heir when it is time for such things, yes. And before you try to send another one of your sardonic little barbs in my direction—no, we shall not do so silently. But there is a vast difference between consummating a marriage and your persistent need to pry into things that are absolutely none of your business.”
He wasn’t raising his voice, but she couldn’t have felt the harshness of his words more if he’d been shouting. She felt as though he was wielding a knife and using it to hold her at bay.
“But—” she objected.
“No,” he said. “No. No arguments. No ‘buts.’ We will leave it here.” She felt as though she was facing down a judge about to make his verdict. “When the time comes to continue the line, I will let you know. Until then, we shall deal with one another as polite acquaintances and nothing else. Good day.
And then, before she could protest, he’d folded his newspaper and left the room.
Phoebe had been left blinking after him—blinking back tears at his hardness.
She was starting to understand Aaron in some small way. She knew enough to know that it wasn’t cruelty that motivated his actions, but some kind of… self-protection, maybe. It was like armor.
But punching against armor would still hurt her.
She pressed her hands against her closed eyelids until she no longer felt the threatening prickle of tears. She would find the chink in his armor. Shewould.
She would just give him a few minutes to cool off. She would talk to him again the next time she saw him.
Except…
