Bridgerton Collection, Volume 2 - Julia Quinn Page 0,178

a man of his size, he took her hand in his and pulled it from her cheek.

The next words he said were not ones that were often uttered in Eloise’s presence.

“You need a piece of meat on that,” he said.

She looked up at him with watery eyes. “Am I bruised?”

He nodded grimly. “You may have a blackened eye. It’s still too soon to tell.”

She tried to smile, tried to put a game face on it, but she just couldn’t manage it.

“Does it hurt very badly?” he asked softly.

She nodded, wondering why the sound of his voice made her want to cry even more. It reminded her of when she was small and she’d fallen from a tree. She’d sprained her ankle, quite badly, but somehow she’d managed not to cry until she’d made it back home.

One look from her mother and she’d begun to sob.

Phillip touched her cheek gingerly, his features pulling into a scowl when she winced.

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. And she would. In a few days.

“What happened?”

And of course she knew exactly what had happened. Something had been strung across the hall, put in place to make her trip and fall. It didn’t require very much intelligence to guess who had done it.

But Eloise didn’t want to get the twins in trouble. At least not the sort of trouble they were likely to find themselves in once Sir Phillip got hold of them. She didn’t think they’d intended to cause quite so much harm.

But Phillip had already spied the thin length of twine, tightly drawn across the hall and tied around the legs of two tables, both of which had been tugged toward the center of the hall when Eloise had tripped.

Eloise watched as he knelt down, touching the string and twisting it around his fingers. He looked over at her, not with question in his eyes, but rather grim statement of fact.

“I didn’t see it,” she said, even though that was quite obvious.

Phillip didn’t take his eyes off of hers, but his fingers kept twisting the string until it tautened and snapped.

Eloise sucked in her breath. There was something almost terrifying in the moment. Phillip didn’t seem aware that he’d broken the string, barely cognizant of his strength.

Or the strength of his anger.

“Sir Phillip,” she whispered, but he never heard her.

“Oliver!” he bellowed. “Amanda!”

“I’m sure they didn’t mean to injure me,” Eloise began, not certain why she was defending them. They’d hurt her, that was true, but she had a feeling her punishment would be considerably less painful than anything coming from their father.

“I don’t care what they meant,” Phillip snapped. “Look how close you landed to the stairs. What if you’d fallen?”

Eloise eyed the stairs. They were close, but not close enough for her to have taken a tumble. “I don’t think . . .”

“They must answer for this,” he said, his voice deadly low and shaking with rage.

“I’ll be fine,” Eloise said. Already the stinging pain was giving way to a duller ache. But it still hurt, enough so that when Sir Phillip lifted her into his arms, she let out a little cry.

And his fury grew.

“I’m putting you in bed,” he said, his voice rough and curt.

Eloise offered no disagreement.

A maid appeared on the landing, gasping when she saw the darkening bruise on Eloise’s face.

“Get me something for this,” Sir Phillip ordered. “A piece of meat. Anything.”

The maid nodded and ran off as Phillip carried Eloise into her room. “Are you hurt anywhere else?” he asked.

“My hip,” Eloise admitted as he settled her on top of her covers. “And my elbow.”

He nodded grimly. “Do you think you’ve broken anything?”

“No!” she said quickly. “No, I—”

“I’ll need to check, anyway,” he said, brushing aside her protests as he lightly examined her arm.

“Sir Phillip, I—”

“My children just nearly killed you,” he said, without a trace of humor in his eyes. “I should think you could dispense with the sir.”

Eloise swallowed as she watched him cross the room to the door, his strides long and powerful. “Get me the twins immediately,” he said, presumably to some servant hovering outside in the hall. Eloise couldn’t imagine that the children hadn’t heard his earlier bellow, but she also couldn’t blame them for attempting to delay judgment day at the hands of their father.

“Phillip,” she said, trying to coax him back into the room with the sound of her voice, “leave them to me. I was the injured party, and—”

“They are my children,” he said, his voice harsh, “and