Understanding clicked into place.
“You know, it doesn’t count as a gesture of goodwill if you do it to try to strongarm me. You do realize that, don’t you?” she asked.
“Were you?” he asked again.
He clearly would not be deterred.
“Maybe,” she said sullenly.
He leaned slowly forward, the movement causing a stripe of light from outside to illuminate his features just long enough for Phoebe to see the flash of jealousy in his eyes.
She… liked that.
She shouldn’t like it, but she did. There was something about that glint in his expression that soothed the part of her that had worried that she was undesirable, that Aaron had taken to avoiding her because she’d erred in some way that she couldn’t even comprehend.
She shouldn’t crave feeling desirable like this, but shedid.
“Phoebe,” he said, and there was a dangerous lilt to his voice that made her breath hitch slightly. Speaking of things she shouldn’t like…
“If you need someone to show you something—” He placed a hand on her knee, and even through all her layers—why were there always so many goddamn layers in the way? Why couldn’t they be doing all this in the summer?—Phoebe could feel the heat of it.
“—you come tome,” he said, low and insistent. Heat coiled in her belly. “I’m your husband. You come tome.”
“I—” She didn’t know how she planned to start that sentence, let alone how she planned to visit it. “You weren’t there.”
She was surprised to note that she, too, felt faintly jealous. Not of another woman, necessarily—she believed what he said about going out to a pub with his friend—but a foolish part of her was actually faintly jealous of Jacob himself, not because she suspected there was more than friendship between the men, though of course she’d seen such things in her adventures, but because Aaron had hidden from her, his wife, and not from his friend.
Indeed, he wasn’t hiding from Clio as much as he was from her, either.
So, perhaps Phoebe wanted to make him suffer. Just a little.
His fingers twitched against her knee.
“Did you want me here?” he asked, his voice a little less forceful, a little less stern than it had been.
“I… don’t know,” she said, laying her hand on top of his before he could remove it. He flipped his grip so that his palm was facing hers. “I just… I didn’t understand.”
His hand touching her felt like a spell. The carriage became like the gazebo had been—a private place, just for them, a sanctuary against the world outside.
“What didn’t you understand, Phoebe?” he asked, sliding his fingers higher, so he could wrap them around her wrist. That connection grounded her even further.
“We…” For all her daring when it came to exploring the risqué side of Society, Phoebe found herself unable to say the words out loud, not in his private space where the stakes felt so very, very high. “At the ball.”
“We did,” he agreed, turning her hand over and beginning to tug her glove off, one finger at a time. It was very distracting.
“And then we almost kissed again after you got scared that I was out in the snow,” she added.
“I wasn’t scared!” he protested. She arched a brow. “I was… reasonably concerned,” he allowed.
That was still prevaricating, but she would let it slide in favor of her greater point.
“And then,” she said, “you started avoiding me.”
He paused in the middle of pulling the glove loose on her middle finger.
“You thought it was because you… didn’t please me?” He sounded shocked by the very idea, and that also soothed Phoebe’s wounded pride.
“The idea occurred to me,” she said, trying to sound unaffected.
