She moaned something incoherent, the sort of noise one makes when one hurts so badly that one simply cannot keep it all inside. And she kept waiting for the pain to subside, thinking that this would be like a stubbed toe, which throbs mercilessly for a few seconds and then, once the surprise of it is over, slides into nothing more than a dull ache.

But the pain kept burning. On her chin, on the side of her head, on her knee, and on her hip.

She felt beaten.

Slowly, with great effort, she forced herself up onto her hands and knees, and then into a sitting position. She allowed herself to lean against the wall and lifted her hand to cradle her cheek, taking quick bursts of breath through her nose to try to control the pain.

"Eloise!"

Phillip. She didn't bother to look up, didn't want to move from her curled-up position.

"Eloise, my God," he said, triple-stepping the last few stairs as he rushed to her side. "What happened?"

"I fell." She hadn't meant to whimper, but it came out that way, anyway.

With a tenderness that seemed out of place on 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, Ia""

"I'll need to check, anyway," he said, brushing aside her protests as he lightly examined her arm.

"Sir Phillip, Ia""

"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, anda""

"They are my children," he said, his voice harsh, "and I will punish them. God knows it's long past due."

Eloise stared at him with growing horror. He was nearly shaking with rage, and while she could have happily swatted the children on their bottoms herself, she didn't think he ought to be meting out punishment in his state.

"They hurt you," Phillip said in a low voice. "That is not acceptable."

"I'll be fine," she assured him again. "In a few days I won't evena""

"That is not the point," he said sharply. "If I had..." He stopped, tried again with, "If I hadn't..." He stopped, beyond words, and leaned against the wall, his head hanging back as his eyes searched the ceilinga"for what, she didn't know. Answers, she supposed. As if one could find answers with the simple upward sweep of the eyes.

He turned, looked at her, his eyes grim, and Eloise saw something on his face she hadn't expected to see there.

And that was when she realized ita"all that rage in his voice, in the shaking of his bodya"it wasn't directed at the children.

Not really, and certainly not entirely.

The look on his face, the bleakness in his eyesa"it was self-loathing.

He didn't blame his children.

He blamed himself.

CHAPTER 6.

... should not have let him kiss you.

Who knows what liberties he will attempt to take the next time you meet?

But what's done is done, I suppose, so all there is left is to ask: Was it lovely?

a"-from Eloise Bridgerton to her sister Francesca, slid under the door of her bedroom the night Francesca met the Earl of Kilmartin, whom she would marry two months later When the children entered the room, half dragged and half pushed by their nursemaid, Phillip forced himself to remain rigidly in his position against the wall, afraid that if he went to them he'd beat them both within an inch of their lives.

And even more afraid that when he was through, he wouldn't regret his actions.

So instead he just crossed his arms and stared, letting them squirm under the heat of his fury, while he tried to figure out what the hell he meant to say.

Finally, Oliver spoke up, his voice trembling as he said, "Father?"

Phillip said the only thing that came to mind, the only thing that seemed to matter. "Do you see Miss Bridgerton?"

The twins nodded, but they didn't quite look at her. At least not at her face, which was beginning to purple around the eye.

"Do you notice anything amiss about her?"

They said nothing, forcing a silence until a maid appeared in the doorway with a "Sir?"

Phillip acknowledged her arrival with a nod, then strode to take hold of the piece of meat she'd brought for Eloise's eye.

"Hungry?" he snapped at his children. When they didn't reply, he said, "Good. Because sadly, none of us will be eating this, will we?"

He crossed the room to the bed, then sat down gently at Eloise's side. "Here," he said, still too angry for his voice to be anything but gruff. Brushing aside her efforts to help, he set the meat against her eye, then arranged a piece of cloth over it so that she would not have to dirty her fingers while keeping it in place.

Then, when he was done, he walked over to where the twins were cowering, and stood in front of them, arms crossed. And waited.

"Look at me," he ordered, when neither removed their gaze from the floor.

When they did, he saw terror in their eyes, and it sickened him, but he didn't know how else he was supposed to act.

"We didn't mean to hurt her," Amanda whispered.

"Oh, you didn't?" he bit off, turning on them both with palpable fury. His voice was icy, but his face clearly showed his anger, and even Eloise shrank back in her bed.

"You didn't think she might possibly be hurt when she tripped over the string?" Phillip continued, his sarcasm lending him a controlled air that was even more frightening. "Or perhaps you realized correctly that the string itself wasn't likely to cause injury, but it didn't occur to you that she might be hurt when she actually fell."

They said nothing.

He looked at Eloise, who had lifted the meat from her face and was gingerly touching her cheekbone. The bruise under her eye seemed to be worsening by the minute.

The twins had to learn that they couldn't continue like this. They needed to learn that they had to treat people with more respect. They needed to learn...

Phillip swore under his breath. They needed to learn something.

He jerked his head toward the door. "You will come with me." He walked into the hall, turned back at them, and snapped, "Now."

And as he led them from the room, he prayed that he could control himself.

Eloise tried not to listen, but she couldn't seem to stop herself from straining her ears. She didn't know where Phillip was taking the childrena"it could be the next room, it could be the nursery, it could be outside. But one thing was certain. They were going to be punished.

And while she thought they should be punisheda" what they had done was inexcusable and they were certainly old enough to have realized thata"she still found herself oddly worried for them. They had looked terrified when Phillip had led them away, and there was that niggling memory from the day before, when Oliver had blurted out the question, "Are you going to hit us?"

He had recoiled when he'd said it, as if he were expecting to be hit.

Surely Sir Phillip didn't... No, that was impossible, Eloise thought. It was one thing to give children a spanking at a time like this, but surely he didn't strike his children habitually.

She couldn't have made such a misjudgment about a person. She had let the man kiss her the night before, kissed him in return, even. Surely she would have felt that something was wrong, sensed an inner cruelty if Phillip were the sort who beat his children.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Oliver and Amanda filed in, looking somber and red-eyed, followed by a grim-faced Sir Phillip, whose job at the rear was clearly to keep the children walking at a pace that exceeded that of a snail.

The children shuffled over to her bedside, and Eloise turned her head so that she could see them. She couldn't see out of her left eye with the meat covering it, and of course that was the side the children had chosen.

"We're sorry, Miss Bridgerton," they mumbled.

"Louder," came their father's sharply worded directive.

"We're sorry."