… you do have the right of it, dearest Kate. Men are so easy to manage. I cannot imagine ever losing an argument with one. Of course, had I accepted Lord Lacye’s proposal, I should not have had even the opportunity. He rarely speaks, which I do find most odd.
—from Eloise Bridgerton to her
sister-in-law Viscountess Bridgerton, upon refusing her fifth offer of marriage
Eloise remained in the greenhouse for nearly an hour, unable to do anything but stare off into space, wondering—
What had happened?
One minute they were talking—very well, they were arguing, but in a relatively reasonable and civilized manner—and the next he was out of his head, his face pinched with fury.
And then he’d left. Left. He actually walked away from her in the middle of an argument and left her standing there in his greenhouse, her mouth hanging open and her pride more than pricked.
He’d walked away. That was what really bothered her. How could someone walk away in the middle of an argument?
Granted, she’d been the one to instigate the discussion—oh, very well, argument—but still, nothing had transpired that warranted such a storming off on his part.
And the worst of it was, she didn’t know what to do.
All her life, she’d known what to do. She hadn’t always turned out to be right, but at least she’d felt sure of herself when she had made her decisions. And as she sat there on Phillip’s workbench, feeling utterly
confused and inept, she realized that for her, at least, it was a great deal better to act and be wrong than it was to feel helpless and impotent.
And as if all that weren’t enough, she couldn’t get her mother’s voice out of her head. Don’t push, Eloise. Don’t push.
And all she could think was— She hadn’t pushed. Good heavens, what had she done but come to him with a concern about his children? Was it so very wrong to actually want to speak rather than race off to the bedroom? She supposed it might be wrong, if the couple in question never spent any intimate time together, but they had . . . they were . . .
It had just been that morning!
No one could say that they had any problems in the bedroom. No one.
She sighed and slumped. She’d never felt so alone in all her life. Funny, that. Who’d have thought she’d have to go and get married—join her life for eternity with another person—in order to feel alone?
She wanted her mother.
No, she didn’t want her mother. She definitely didn’t want her mother. Her mother would be kind and understanding and everything a mother should be, but a talk with her mother would just leave her feeling like a small child, not like the adult she was supposed to be.
She wanted her sisters. Not Hyacinth, who was barely one and twenty and knew nothing of men, but one of her married sisters. She wanted Daphne, who always knew what to say, or Francesca, who never said what one wanted to hear but always managed to eke out a smile nonetheless.
But they were too far away, in London and Scotland respectively, and Eloise was not going to run off. She’d made her bed when she’d married, and she was quite contentedly lying in it every night with Phillip. It was just the days that were a bit off.
She wasn’t going to play the coward and leave, even if only for a few days.
But Sophie was near, just an hour away. And if they weren’t sisters by birth—well, they were sisters of the heart.
Eloise looked out the door. It was too cloudy to see the sun, but she was fairly sure it wasn’t much past noon. Even with the travel time, she could spend most of the day with Sophie and be back by supper.
Her pride didn’t want anyone to know she was miserable, but her heart wanted a shoulder to cry on.
Her heart won out.
Phillip spent the next several hours stomping across his fields, viciously yanking weeds from the ground.
Which kept him fairly busy, since he wasn’t in a cultivated area, which meant that pretty much every bit of growth could be classified as a weed, if one was so inclined.
And he was so inclined. He was more than inclined. If he had his way, he’d yank every damned plant from the earth.
And he, a botanist.
But he didn’t want to plant things right now, didn’t want to watch anything bloom or grow. He wanted to kick and maim and destroy. He was angry and frustrated and cross with himself and cross with Eloise and he was quite prepared to be upset with anyone who happened across his path.
But after an afternoon of this, of kicking and stomping, and yanking the heads off wildflowers and tearing blades of grass down the middle, he sat on a rock and let his head hang in his hands.
Hell.
What a muck.
What a bloody muck, and the really ironic bit of it was—he’d thought they were happy.
He’d thought his marriage perfect, and all this time—oh, very well, it had only been a week, but it had been a week of, in his opinion, perfection. And she’d been miserable.
Or if not miserable, then not happy.
Or maybe a little bit happy, but certainly not caught up in blissful rapture, as he had been.
And now he had to go and do something about it, which was the last thing he wanted to do. Talking with Eloise, actually asking questions and trying to deduce what was wrong, not to mention figuring out what to do to fix it—it was just the sort of thing he always bungled.
But he didn’t have much of a choice, did he? He’d married Eloise in part—well, more than in part; almost in whole, in truth—because he’d wanted her to take charge, to take over all the annoying little tasks in his
life, to free him up for the things that really mattered. The fact that he was growing to care for her had been an unexpected bonus.
He suspected, however, that one’s marriage didn’t count as an annoying little task, and he couldn’t just leave it to Eloise. And as painful as a heart- to-heart discussion was, he was going to have to bite the bullet and give it a go.
He was quite certain he’d botch it up but good, but at least he could say he’d tried.
He groaned. She was probably going to ask him about his feelings. Was there no woman alive who understood that men did not talk about feelings? Hell, half of them didn’t even have feelings.
Or maybe he could take the easy way out and simply apologize. He wasn’t certain what he’d be apologizing for, but it would appease her and make her happy, and that was all that mattered.
He didn’t want Eloise to be unhappy. He didn’t want her to regret her marriage, even for one moment. He wanted his marriage back to the way he’d thought it was—easy and comfortable by day, fiery and passionate by night.
He trudged up the hill back to Romney Hall, rehearsing what he’d say in his mind and scowling over how asinine it all sounded.
But his efforts were moot, anyway, because when he arrived at the house and found Gunning, all the butler had to say was, “She’s not here.”
“What do you mean, she’s not here?” Phillip demanded. “She’s not here, sir. She went to her brother’s house.” Phillip’s stomach clenched. “Which brother?”
“I believe the one who lives close by.” “You believe?”
“I’m rather certain,” Gunning corrected. “Did she say when she planned to return?” “No, sir.”
Phillip swore viciously under his breath. Surely Eloise hadn’t left him. She wasn’t the sort to bail out on a sinking ship, at least not without making sure every last passenger had left safely before her.
“She did not bring a bag, sir,” Gunning said.
Oh, now, that made him feel good. His butler felt the need to reassure him that he’d not been abandoned by his wife. “That will be all, Gunning,”
Phillip said through gritted teeth.
“Very good, sir,” Gunning said. He inclined his head, as he always did when he excused himself, and left the room.
He listened again.
It was a whimper.
His first inclination was to storm forward and burst through the nursery door, but he held himself back when he realized that the door was ajar by two inches, and so he crept forward instead, peeking through the crack as unobtrusively as he could.
It required only half a second to realize what was happening.
Oliver was curled up in a ball on the floor, shaking with silent sobs, and Amanda was standing in front of a wall, bracing herself with her tiny little hands, whimpering as her nurse beat her across the back with a large, heavy book.
Phillip slammed through the door with a force that nearly took it off its hinges. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he nearly roared.
Nurse Edwards turned around in surprise, but before she could open her mouth to speak, Phillip snatched the book away and hurled it behind him against the wall.
“Sir Phillip!” Nurse Edwards cried out in shock.
“How dare you strike these children,” he said, his voice shaking with fury. “And with a book.”
“I was told—”
“And you did it where no one would see.” He felt himself growing hot, agitated, itching to lash out. “How many children have you beaten, making sure to leave the bruises where no one would see?”
“They spoke disrespectfully,” Nurse Edwards said stiffly. “They had to be punished.”
Phillip stepped forward, close enough so that the nurse was forced to retreat. “I want you out of my house,” he said.
“You told me to discipline the children as I see fit,” Nurse Edwards protested.
“Is this how you see fit?” he hissed, using every ounce of his restraint to hold his arms at his sides. He wanted to swing them wildly, to lash out, to grab a book and beat this woman just as she had done to his children.
But he held on to his temper. He had no idea how, but he did it.
“You beat them with a book?” he continued furiously. He looked over at his children; they were cowering in a corner, presumably as scared of their father in such a mood as they were of their nurse. It sickened him that they
were seeing him this way, so close to a total loss of control, but there was nothing more he could do to rein himself in.
“There was no switch,” Nurse Edwards said haughtily.
Wrong thing to say. Phillip felt his skin grow even hotter, fought against the red haze that had begun to cloud his vision. There had been a switch in the nursery; the hook it had hung upon was still there, right by the window.
Phillip had burned it the day of his father’s funeral, had stood in front of the fire and watched it turn to ash. He hadn’t been satisfied with just tossing it in; he’d needed to see it destroyed, completely and forever.
And he thought of that switch, thought of the hundreds of times it had been used upon him, thought of the pain, of the indignity, of all the effort he had used, trying to keep himself from crying out.
His father had hated crybabies. Tears only resulted in another round with the switch. Or with the belt. Or the riding crop. Or, when there was nothing else available, his father’s hand.
But never, Phillip thought with a strange sort of detachment, a book.
Probably his father had never thought of it.
“Get out,” Phillip said, his voice barely audible. And then, when Nurse Edwards did not immediately respond, he roared it. “Get out! Get out of this house!”
“Sir Phillip,” she protested, scooting away from him, out of reach of his long, strong arms.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!”
He didn’t know where it was all coming from anymore. From somewhere deep inside, never tamed, but held down by sheer force of will.
“I need to gather my things!” she cried out.
“You have one half hour,” Phillip said, his voice low but still quavering with the exertion of his outburst. “Thirty minutes. If you have not departed by then, I will throw you out myself.”
Nurse Edwards hesitated at the door, started to walk through, then turned around. “You are ruining those children,” she hissed.
“They are mine to ruin.”
“Have it your way, then. They are nothing but little monsters, anyway, ill-tempered, misbehaved—”
Had she no care for her own safety? Phillip’s control was dangling by one very thin thread, and he was this close to grabbing the damned woman
by the arm and hurling her out the door himself.
“Get out,” he growled, for what he prayed was the last time. He couldn’t hold on much longer. He stepped forward, punctuating his words with movement, and finally—finally—she ran from the room.
For a moment Phillip simply held still, trying to calm himself, to calm his breathing and wait for his rushing blood to settle down. His back was to the twins, and he dreaded turning around. He was dying inside, ravaged by guilt that he’d hired that woman, that monster, to care for his children. And he’d been too busy trying avoid them to see that they were suffering.
Suffering in the same way he had.
Slowly, he turned around, terrified of what he’d see in their eyes.
But when he raised his gaze off the floor and looked into their faces, they hurled into motion, launching themselves at him with almost enough force to knock him over.
“Oh, Daddy!” Amanda cried out, using an endearment she hadn’t uttered for ages. He’d been “Father” for years now, and he’d forgotten how sweet the other sounded.
And Oliver—he was hugging him, too, his small, thin arms wrapped tightly around Phillip’s waist, his face buried against his shirt so that his father would not see him cry.
But Phillip could feel it. The tears soaked through his shirt, and every sniffle rumbled against his belly.
His arms went around his children, tightly, protectively. “Shhhh,” he crooned. “It’s all right. I’m here now.” They were words he’d never said, words he’d never imagined saying; he’d never thought that his presence might be the one to make everything all right. “I’m sorry,” he choked out. “I’m so sorry.”
They had told him they didn’t like their nurse; he hadn’t listened. “It’s not your fault, Father,” Amanda said.
It was, but there seemed little point in belaboring the fact. Not now, not when the time was ripe for a fresh start.
“We’ll find you a new nurse,” he assured them.
“Someone like Nurse Millsby?” Oliver asked, sniffling as his tears finally subsided.
Phillip nodded. “Someone just like her.”
Oliver looked at him with great sincerity. “Can Miss—Mother help to choose?”
“Of course,” Phillip replied, tousling his hair. “I expect she’ll want a say. She is a woman of a great many opinions, after all.”
The children giggled.
Phillip allowed himself a smile. “I see you two know her well.” “She does like to talk,” Oliver said hesitantly.
“But she is terribly clever!” Amanda put in. “Indeed she is,” Phillip murmured.
“I rather like her,” Oliver said. “As do I,” his sister added.
“I’m glad to hear that,” Phillip told them. “Because I do believe she is here to stay.”
And so am I, he added silently. He’d spent years avoiding his children, fearing that he’d make a mistake, terrified that he’d lose his temper. He’d thought he was doing the best thing for them, keeping them at arm’s length, but he’d been wrong. So very wrong.
“I love you,” he said to them, hoarsely, with great emotion. “You know that, don’t you?”
They nodded, their eyes bright.
“I will always love you,” he whispered, crouching down until they were all of a level. He drew them close, savoring their warmth. “I will always love you.”
