“Someone you know?” Phillip asked, quite mildly for someone who was about to face his demise.
She nodded, and somehow managed to eke out the words: “My brothers.”
It occurred to Phillip (as he was pinned up against the wall with two sets of hands around his throat) that Eloise might have given him a bit more warning.
He didn’t need days, although that would have been nice, if still insufficient against the collective strength of four very large, very angry, and, from the looks of them, rather closely related men.
Brothers. He should have considered that. It was probably best to avoid courting a woman with brothers.
Four of them, to be precise.
Four. It was a wonder he wasn’t dead already.
“Anthony!” Eloise shrieked. “Stop!”
Anthony, or at least Phillip presumed he was Anthony—they hadn’t exactly bothered to go through the necessary introductions—tightened his grip on Phillip’s neck.
“Benedict,” Eloise pleaded, turning her attention to the largest of the lot. “Be reasonable.”
The other one—well, the other one squeezing his throat; there were two others, but they were just standing around glowering—loosened his grip slightly to turn around and look at Eloise.
Which was a huge mistake, since, in their haste to rip every limb from his body, none of them had yet looked at her long enough to see that she sported a nasty blackened eye.
Which of course they would think he was responsible for.
Benedict let out an unholy growl and jammed Phillip against the wall so tightly that his feet came off the ground.
Wonderful,Phillip thought. Now I really am going to die. The first squeeze was merely uncomfortable, but this . . .
“Stop!” Eloise yelled, hurling herself onto Benedict’s back and yanking his hair. Benedict howled as his head jerked backward, but unfortunately Anthony’s strangulatory grip held firm, even as Benedict was forced to let go to fight off Eloise.
Who was, Phillip noted as well as he could, given his lack of oxygen, fighting like a fury crossed with a banshee, crossed with Medusa herself. Her right hand was still pulling out Benedict’s hair, even as her left arm wrapped around his throat, with her forearm lodged quite neatly up under his chin.
“Good Christ,” Benedict cursed, whirling around as he tried to dislodge his sister. “Someone get her off of me!”
Not surprisingly, none of the other Bridgertons rushed to his aid. In fact, the one back against the wall looked rather amused by the whole thing.
Phillip’s vision began to curl and turn black at the edges, but he couldn’t help but admire Eloise’s fortitude. It was a rare woman who knew how to fight to win.
Anthony’s face suddenly appeared very close to his. “Did . . . 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 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.
A misapprehension that could only lead to his death and dismemberment. They didn’t seem the sorts to allow anyone to lay a hand on their sisters, much less blacken an eye.
“Just tell them the truth, Eloise,” Phillip said wearily.
“It was his children,” she said, wincing on the words. But Phillip didn’t worry. As close as they’d come to strangling him, they didn’t seem the sort to harm innocent children. And certainly Eloise would not have said anything if she’d thought it might place Oliver and Amanda in peril.
“He has children?” Anthony asked, eyeing him with a slightly less derogatory expression.
Anthony, Phillip decided, must be a father as well.
“Two,” Eloise replied. “Twins, actually. A boy and a girl. They’re eight.”
“My felicitations,” Anthony murmured.
“Thank you,” Phillip answered, feeling rather old and weary in that moment. “Sympathies are probably more to the point.”
Anthony looked at him curiously, almost—but not quite—smiling.
“They weren’t especially keen on my presence here,” Eloise said.
“Smart children,” Anthony said.