“Yesterday, you said I was afraid.” She paused and pressed her face a little more tightly against his shoulder, and as much as he disliked her dismay, a deeply masculine part of him was extremely satisfied that she was turning to him for comfort. “And I think you were right.”
He frowned. “And this has to do with Christmas?”
She heaved another heavy sigh. “It just makes me think of my mother. When she died, it was Christmas. And right before she died—the last things she ever said to me in fact—was that I should always be true to myself. That I shouldn’t let the fear of way others perceive me hold me back from living the life thatIwant for myself.”
“It isn’t bad advice,” he said cautiously. Having this conversation felt more precarious than most of the battles he’d fought in. At least then, all he risked was getting blown to bits by enemy fire. Here, he worried that he might hurt his wife, which felt far, far more frightening.
“No,” she agreed. “But I think that I may have taken the advice andmadeit into the life I supposedly wanted for myself. And Ithink that maybe means that I’m living the life she wanted and not the one that I chose for myself.”
“And Christmas reminds you of that?”
She laughed a little, but it was more sad than amused.
“Well, Christmas doesn’t remind me of precisely that since I didn’t realizethatuntil about twenty seconds ago,” she admitted. “But it reminds me of losing my mother. And it reminds me that she died with regrets about her life. And that’s—it’s just darned heartbreaking, isn’t it?”
He clutched her close to him. His arms couldn’t protect her from the pain of her past, but that didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth trying.
“It is,” he agreed.
He felt a hot drip against his shoulder and realized, to his utter horror, that his wife was crying.
Aaron was a man who accomplished things. He encountered problems and then solved them. But this, he did not know how to fix. She was sad, and he couldn’t fight it for her.
So he held her even tighter, and after a few agonizing moments, she let out a little sniffle.
“Thank you,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything,” he argued, and there was only the faintest note of bitterness in his tone at the admission.
Even so, it made Phoebe laugh, and this time the laugh wasn’t overly tainted with sadness. That was something, he supposed.
“Yes, you did,” she corrected. “You didn’t try to fix it. You just let it be bad.”
“And that was… good?” he clarified doubtfully.
She laughed again, and perhaps there was some merit to ignorance if it could make her laugh like that.
“Yes,” she told him, pushing up to her elbow to look down at him. She looked lovely in the morning light, all sleep mussed and with a crease from the bedsheets pressed into her cheek. “That was good. You are a good man, Aaron.”
Her eyes were earnest when she said it, her expression open and sweet as sugar.
Possibly for the first time in his life, Aaron feltbashful.
“I don’t know about that,” he demurred.
She gave him that pert look that was all Phoebe.
“Well, I know enough for the both of us,” she said, and then she kissed him right on his mouth.
There was little for Aaron to do but respond in kind, and thusly they lost several intensely enjoyable minutes.
They pulled apart from one another only when Phoebe’s stomach let out an audible grumble. She cringed adorably and pressed a hand to her belly.
“I missed supper last night,” she confessed. “Which is your fault, given that you distracted me so thoroughly with all your—” She waved a hand up and down his form, which was still tangled in the bedsheets. She was trying to be teasing, but she blushed faintly as she did so, and Aaron felt his chest swell with masculine pride.
His wife was doing a wonderful job of flattering him this morning. It was a rare experience for him to feel so damnably lucky.
“Well,” he said, letting his eyes trace over her blush where it faded down her neck and came to kiss the tops of her breasts, “you may recall that one of my stipulations when we wed was that we share our meals.”
