God.God. Aaron had come here hoping to feel the pain that seemed like his due, butthis. Jacob’s words stabbed and burned like a bullet through the body. They struck him like a blow to the chest, the kind that left a man flat on his back, gasping and heaving for air, certain that this breath was going to be his last.
“I’ve ruined it,” he choked out, the tightness in his chest so violent that surely his ribs were about to crack under the pressure. “They shouldn’t look at me because—fuck, Jacob, I’ve ruined everything.”
And then, in hacking gasps and half-formed sentences, he got out the whole story—from the very beginning. He explained how he’d been engaged to Miss Hannah and how Phoebe had come into his life with more fury than the storm she’d ridden in on. Hetold Jacob of Hannah’s refusal, her flight, and of chasing Phoebe into the snow.
He kept some of the details to himself—there were some things that were between a man and his wife alone—but he told Jacob of the pull he felt toward his beautiful wife and how he kept pushing her away despite it.
He even, because he trusted his friend implicitly, told him, in a quiet voice, of Hannah’s pregnancy and of how he’d reacted to Phoebe’s revelation of this fact.
By the time he was done, his friend was leaning back in his chair, his hand cupped thoughtfully under his chin.
“Wow,” Jacob said after a long enough silence that it became clear that Aaron was really, truly finished this time. “Warson, I… You really fucked things.”
At some point in the narrative, Aaron had stood and started pacing. Now, he paused and looked down at his friend.
“What the hell? How does that help me?”
Jacob frowned. “It doesn’t. I don’t know how to help you with that.”
Aaron gaped. “Where’s the pithy advice full of quips about how I’m an idiot?”
Jacob shrugged. “Don’t have any. That’s really bad. She’ll probably never forgive you.”
Aaron clenched his fist at his side. He wouldnothit his friend, no matter how unhelpful Jacob was being.
“Youdon’tknow that,” he said through gritted teeth.
“It’s true that I don’tknowit,” Jacob agreed. “But she trusted you with a really dangerous secret, and you threw it back in her face. I don’t see you making up for that one. It’s no surprise she hasn’t come home.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m not going to bloody welltry,” Aaron seethed, downright furious at his friend’s fatalistic attitude. “For Christ’s sake, where would you be if I saw a challenge and said ‘ah, well, too late for that one?’ You’d be at the bottom of the ocean stitched up in sailcloth, that’s where!”
His fists still itched with the urge to wallop something, so he went back to pacing as this seemed like a better outlet for his energy.
“But I dragged your sorry arse back from being blasted by French muskets, and I’m not giving up now, either. I may have behaved badly—no, Idid—but I’m going to figure out a way to make it up to her. I’m going to do my best, my level goddamn best to make her come home.”
He whirled on his heel?—
And saw Jacob staring at him with a smug grin on his face.
“Bastard,” he muttered.
Jacob shrugged, this time in amusement rather than fatalism. “You always did like ideas better when you thought you came up with them yourself.”
“One of these days,” Aaron warned, though there wasn’t any real anger in the comment as he was already feeling lighter, “I’m going to beat you bloody.”
Jacob looked decidedly unthreatened. “Go home and apologize to your wife, man. That way, when I trounce you handily, you’ll have someone to fuss over your bloodied nose.”
Aaron shot his friend a rude gesture, but there was a new energy in his body that felt, for the first time in days, like something he could use. It feltgood.
Nothing was fixed, at least not yet, but he would try. Hehad totry.
CHAPTER 25
Aaron was not a man who faltered. When facing down imminent death, he did not falter. When his ship got stuck in ice for weeks and provisions ran low and tempers ran high, he did not falter. When he received a letter telling him that his brother was dead and the dukedom was his, he did not falter.
But when he returned to his house and found his wife, her face immovable and her posture rigid, directing a footman to transport a trunk of her things into the waiting carriage, he faltered. He balked. He froze.
A curious sensation overcame Aaron then. He became two men—one, the knowledgeable observer who knew that everything he was doing and saying was so bloody stupid that it frankly deserved an award for idiocy, and the second, who did the stupid thing anyway.
