“Protecting my sister’s honor,” he shot back.

“As if I need protection from you. You’re not even twenty!”

Ah, thought Phillip, he must be the one whose name began with G. George? No, that wasn’t right. Gavin? No . . .

“I’m twenty-three,” the young one bit off, with all the irritability of a younger sibling.

“And I’m twenty-eight,” she snapped. “I didn’t need your help when you were in nappies, and I don’t need it now.”

Gregory. That’s right. Gregory. She’d said as much in one of her letters. Ah, damn. If he knew that, then he must have known about the flock of brothers. He really had no one to blame but himself.

“He wanted to come along,” said the one in the corner, the only one who hadn’t yet tried to kill Phillip. Phillip decided he liked this one best, especially when he wrapped his hand around Gregory’s forearm to prevent the younger man from launching himself at Eloise.

Which, Phillip thought, feeling rather ironically-minded there on the floor, was nothing more than she deserved. Nappies, indeed.

“Well, you should have stopped him,” Eloise said, oblivious to Phillip’s mental defection. “Do you have any idea how mortifying this is?”

Her brothers stared at her, quite rightly, in Phillip’s opinion, as if she’d gone mad.

“You lost the right,” Anthony bit off, “to feel mortified, embarrassed, chagrined, or in fact any emotion other than blindingly stupid when you ran off without a word.”

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Eloise looked a bit mollified but still muttered, “It’s not as if I would listen to anything he has to say.”

“As opposed to us,” the one who had to be Colin murmured, “with whom you are the soul of meekness and obeisance.”

“Oh, for the love of God,” Eloise said under her breath, sounding rather fetchingly unladylike to Phillip’s stinging ears.

Stinging? Had someone boxed his ears? It was difficult to recall. Four-to-one odds against did tend to muddle one’s memory.

“You,” snapped the one Phillip was almost certain was Anthony, with a finger jabbed in Phillip’s direction, “don’t go anywhere.”

As if that were even worth contemplating.

“And you,” Anthony said to Eloise, his voice even deadlier, although Phillip wouldn’t have thought it possible, “what the hell did you think you were doing?”

Eloise tried to sidestep the question with one of her own. “What are you doing here?”

And succeeded, because her brother actually answered her. “Saving you from ruin,” he yelled. “For the love of God, Eloise, do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?”

“And here I’d thought you hadn’t even noticed my departure,” she tried to joke.

“Eloise,” he said, “Mother is beside herself.”

That sobered her in an instant. “Oh, no,” she whispered. “I didn’t think.”

“No, you didn’t,” Anthony replied, his stern tone exactly what one would expect from a man who’d been the head of his family for twenty years. “I ought to take a whip to you.”

Phillip started to intervene, because, really, he couldn’t countenance a whipping, but then Anthony added, “Or at the very least, a muzzle,” and Phillip decided that brother knew sister very well, indeed.

“Where do you think you’re going?” demanded Benedict, and Phillip realized that he must have started to stand before plopping back to his rather impotent position on the floor.

Phillip looked to Eloise. “Perhaps introductions are in order?”

“Oh,” Eloise said, gulping. “Yes, of course. These are my brothers.”

“I’d gathered,” he said, his voice as dry as dust.

She shot him an apologetic look, which, Phillip thought, was really the least she could do after nearly getting him tortured and killed, then turned to her brothers and motioned to each in turn, saying, “Anthony, Benedict, Colin, Gregory. These three,” she added, motioning to A, B, and C, “are my elders. This one”—she waved dismissively at Gregory—“is an infant.”

Gregory looked near ready to throttle her, which suited Phillip just fine, since it deflected the murderous intentions off of him.

And then Eloise finally turned back to Phillip and said to her brothers, “Sir Phillip Crane, but I expect you know that already.”

“You left a letter in your desk,” said Colin.

Eloise closed her eyes in agony. Phillip thought he saw her lips form the words, Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Colin smiled grimly. “You ought to be more careful in the future, should you decide to run off again.”

“I’ll remember that,” Eloise shot back, but she was losing her fire.

“Would now be a good time to stand?” Phillip inquired, directing his question to no one in particular.

“No.”

It was difficult to discern which Bridgerton brother spoke the loudest.

Phillip remained on the floor. He didn’t tend to think himself a coward, and he was, if he did say so himself, quite proficient with his fists, but hell, there were four of them.

Boxer he might be. Suicidal fool he was not.

“How did you get that eye?” Colin asked quietly.

Eloise paused before answering, “It was an accident.”

He considered her words for a moment. “Would you care to expand upon that?”

Eloise swallowed uncomfortably and glanced down at Phillip, which he really wished she wouldn’t do. It only made them (as he was coming to think of the quartet) even more convinced that he was the one responsible for her injury.




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