She’d had ample time to fill him in the night before.
There was no reason he should have come into this situation completely unprepared.
“I suggest,” Audley said, his voice light but steady,
“that you speak to Miss Eversleigh with greater respect.”
Thomas froze. Who the hell did this man think he was? “I beg your pardon.”
Audley’s head tilted very slightly to the side, and he seemed to lick the inside of his teeth before saying,
“Not used to being spoken to like a man, are we?”
Something foreign seemed to invade Thomas’s body. It was furious and black, with rough edges and hot teeth, and before he knew it, he was leap-ing through the air, going for Audley’s throat. They went down with a crash, rolling across the carpet into an end table. With great satisfaction, Thomas found himself straddling his beloved new cousin, one hand pressed against his throat as the other squeezed itself into a deadly weapon.
“Stop!” Grace shrieked, but Thomas felt nothing as she grabbed at his arm. She seemed to fall away as he lifted his fist and slammed it into Audley’s jaw. But Audley was a formidable opponent. He’d had years to learn how to fight dirty, Thomas later realized, and with a vicious twist of his torso, he slammed his head into Thomas’s chin, stunning him for just enough time to reverse their positions.
“Don’t . . . you . . . ever . . . strike . . . me . . . again!”
Audley ground out, slamming his own fist into Thomas’s cheek as punctuation.
Thomas freed an elbow, jabbed it hard into Audley’s stomach, and was rewarded with a low grunt.
“Stop it! Both of you!” Grace managed to wedge herself between them, which was probably the only thing that would have stopped the fight. Thomas just barely had time to halt the progress of his fist before it clipped her in the face.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, and Thomas would have agreed with her, except he was still breathing too hard to speak. And then it became apparent that she was speaking to him. It was galling, and he was filled with a not very admirable urge to embarrass her, just as she had embarrassed him.
“You might want to remove yourself from my, er . . . ”
He looked down at his midsection, upon which she was now seated.
“Oh!” Grace yelped, jumping up. She did not let go of Audley’s arm, however, and she yanked him along with her, peeling the two men apart. Audley, for his part, seemed more than happy to go with her.
“Tend to my wounds?” he asked, gazing upon her with all the pitiable mournfulness of an ill-treated puppy.
“You have no wounds,” she snapped, then looked over at Thomas, who had risen to his feet as well. “And neither do you.”
Thomas rubbed his jaw, thinking that their faces would both prove her wrong by nightfall.
And then his grandmother—oh now there was a person who ought be giving lessons in kindness and civility—decided it was time to enter the conversation.
Unsurprisingly, her first statement was a hard shove to his shoulder.
“Apologize at once!” she snapped. “He is a guest in our house.”
“My house.”
Her face tightened at that. It was the one piece of leverage he held over her. She was there, as they all knew, at his pleasure and discretion.
“He is your first cousin,” she said. “One would think, given the lack of close relations in our family, that you would be eager to welcome him into the fold.”
One would, Thomas thought, looking warily over at Audley. Except that he had disliked him on sight, disliked that smirky smile, that carefully studied insolence. He knew this sort. This Audley knew nothing of duty, nothing of responsibility, and he had the gall to waltz in here and criticize?
And furthermore, who the hell was to say that Audley actually was his cousin? Thomas’s fingers clawed then straightened as he attempted to calm himself down.
“Would someone,” he said, his voice clipped and furious, “do me the service of explaining just how this man has come to be in my drawing room?”
The first reaction was silence, as everyone waited for someone else to jump into the breach. Then Audley shrugged, motioned with his head toward the dowager, and said, “She kidnapped me.”
Thomas turned slowly to his grandmother. “You kidnapped him,” he echoed, not because it was hard to believe but rather because it wasn’t.
“Indeed,” she said sharply. “And I would do it again.”
Thomas looked to Grace. “It’s true,” she said. And then—bloody hell—she turned to Audley and said,
“I’m sorry.”
“Accepted, of course,” he said, with enough charm and grace to pass muster in the most discerning of ball-rooms.
Thomas’s disgust must have shown on his face, because when Grace looked at him, she added, “She kidnapped him!”
Thomas just rolled his eyes. He did not care to discuss it.
“And forced me to take part,” Grace muttered.
“I recognized him last night,” the dowager announced.
“In the dark?” Thomas asked dubiously.
“Under his mask,” she answered with pride. “He is the very image of his father. His voice, his laugh, every bit of it.”
Everything made sense now, of course. The portrait, her distraction the night before. Thomas let out a breath and closed his eyes, somehow summoning the energy to treat her with gentle compassion. “Grandmother,” he said, which ought to have been recognized as the olive branch it was, given that he usually called her you, “I understand that you still mourn your son—”