Bridgerton Collection, Volume 2 - Julia Quinn Page 0,198

. you . . . hit her?” he growled.

As if he could speak, Phillip thought woozily.

“No!” Eloise cried out, momentarily taking her attention off tearing Benedict’s hair out. “Of course he didn’t hit me.”

Anthony looked over at her with a sharp expression as she resumed pummeling Benedict. “There’s no of course about it.”

“It was an accident,” she insisted. “He had nothing to do with it.” And then, when none of her brothers made any indication that they believed her, she added, “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Do you really think that I would defend someone who’d struck me?”

That seemed to do the trick, and Anthony abruptly let go of Phillip, who promptly sagged to the floor, gasping for breath.

Four of them. Had she told him she had four brothers? Surely not. He would never have considered marriage to a woman with four brothers. Only a fool would shackle himself to such a family.

“What did you do to him?” Eloise demanded, jumping off Benedict and hurrying to Phillip’s side.

“What did he do to you?” one of the other brothers demanded. The one who, Phillip realized, had punched him in the chin right before the others had decided to strangle him instead.

She shot him a scathing look. “What are you doing here?”

“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.”

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