“Stop it! Both of you!”
Jack managed to nudge Wyndham’s upper arm just in time to stop his fist from reaching her cheek. It would have been an accident, of course, but then he’d have had to kill him, and that would have been a hanging offense.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” Miss Eversleigh scolded, looking straight at the duke.
He merely raised a brow and said, “You might want to remove yourself from my, er…” He looked down at his midsection, upon which she was now seated.
“Oh!” She jumped up, and Jack would have defended her honor except that he had to admit he’d have said the same thing were he seated under her. Not to mention that she was still holding his arm.
“Tend to my wounds?” he asked, making his eyes big and green and brimming with the world’s most effective expression of seduction. Which was, of course, I need you. I need you and if you would only care for me I will forswear all other women and melt at your feet and quite possibly become filthy rich and if you’d like even royal all in one dreamy swoop.
It never failed.
Except, apparently, now. “You have no wounds,” she snapped, thrusting him away. She looked over at Wyndham, who had risen to his feet beside her. “And neither do you.”
Jack was about to make a comment about the milk of human kindness, but just then the dowager stepped forward and smacked her grandson-that would be the grandson of whose lineage they were quite certain-in the shoulder.
“Apologize at once!” she snapped. “He is a guest in our house.”
A guest. Jack was touched.
“My house,” the duke snapped back.
Jack watched the old lady with interest. She wouldn’t take well to that.
“He is your first cousin,” she said tightly. “One would think, given the lack of close relations in our family, that you would be eager to welcome him into the fold.”
Oh, right. The duke was just brimming with joy. “Would someone,” Wyndham bit off, “do me the service of explaining just how this man has come to be in my drawing room?”
Jack waited for someone to offer an explanation, and then, when none was forthcoming, offered his own version. “She kidnapped me,” he said with shrug, motioning toward the dowager.
Wyndham turned slowly to his grandmother. “You kidnapped him,” he said, his voice flat and strangely devoid of disbelief.
“Indeed,” she replied, her chin butting up in the air. “And I would do it again.”
“It’s true,” Miss Eversleigh said. And then she delighted him by turning in his direction and saying, “I’m sorry.”
“Accepted, of course,” Jack said graciously.
The duke, however, was not amused. To the extent that poor Miss Eversleigh felt the need to defend her actions with, “She kidnapped him!”
Wyndham ignored her. Jack was really starting to dislike him.
“And forced me to take part,” Miss Eversleigh muttered. She, on the other hand, was quickly becoming one of his favorite people.
“I recognized him last night,” the dowager announced.
Wyndham looked at her disbelievingly. “In the dark?”
“Under his mask,” she answered with pride. “He is the very image of his father. His voice, his laugh, every bit of it.”
Jack hadn’t thought this a particularly convincing argument himself, so he was curious to see how the duke responded.
“Grandmother,” he said, with what Jack had to allow was remarkable patience, “I understand that you still mourn your son-”
“Your uncle,” she cut in.
“My uncle.” He cleared his throat. “But it has been thirty years since his death.”
“Twenty-nine,” she corrected sharply.
“It has been a long time,” Wyndham said. “Memories fade.”
“Not mine,” she replied haughtily, “and certainly not the ones I have of John. Your father I have been more than pleased to forget entirely-”
“In that we are agreed,” Wyndham interrupted, leaving Jack to wonder at that story. And then, looking as if he very much still wished to strangle someone (Jack would have put his money on the dowager, since he’d already had the pleasure), Wyndham turned and bellowed, “Cecil!”
“Your grace!” came a voice from the hall. Jack watched as two footmen struggled to bring a massive painting around the corner and into the room.
“Set it down anywhere,” the duke ordered.
With a bit of grunting and one precarious moment during which it seemed the painting would topple what was, to Jack’s eye, an extremely expensive Chinese vase, the footmen managed to find a clear spot and set the painting down on the floor, leaning it gently against the wall.
Jack stepped forward. They all stepped forward. And Miss Eversleigh was the first to say it.
“Oh my God.”
It was him. Of course it wasn’t him, because it was John Cavendish, who had perished nearly three decades earlier, but by God, it looked exactly like the man standing next to her.
Grace’s eyes grew so wide they hurt, and she looked back and forth and back and forth and-
“I see no one is disagreeing with me now,” the dowager said smugly.
Thomas turned to Mr. Audley as if he’d seen a ghost. “Who are you?” he whispered.
But even Mr. Audley was without words. He was just staring at the portrait, staring and staring and staring, his face white, his lips parted, his entire body slack.
Grace held her breath. Eventually he’d find his voice, and when he did, surely he’d tell them all what he’d told her the night before.