Here we go. Haul me to my feet while I’m still groggy, swing me round and one hard shove against the edge of the fireplace and there goes my skull. A terrible accident while we were fighting over a woman. You only meant to hit me, never to kill me, but…
‘Get up, for God’s sake.’ Ralph bent, clasped Cal’s uninjured arm and heaved. Cal came up, apparently off-balance, the knife still by his side, waiting, waiting… as his cousin gave him an ungentle shove into the big chair behind the desk. ‘I didn’t hit you that hard.’
‘Hard enough.’ Cal slid the knife back into his boot and cradled his right arm against his side. ‘Hit my bad shoulder on the door.’
‘Well you should not have been out driving a lady with it if it is that bad,’ Ralph snapped. ‘You should be resting.’
‘I have spent too much of my life in bed, resting.’
His cousin shot him a look, as though not certain whether there was a double entendre in the statement. ‘What are your intentions towards Miss Wilmott?’
Cal sat up straighter and put both hands on the desk. Ralph, on the far side, shifted uncomfortably, put into the subordinate position. ‘Are you betrothed to Miss Wilmott or have any kind of understanding with her?’
‘No.’ His cousin set his jaw, the embarrassed, angry colour coming up in unflattering blotches over his cheeks.
‘Nor are you any relative of the lady. As far as I am aware, and I took pains to find out, Miss Wilmott is unattached. So, by what right are you asking my intentions? Or punching me in the jaw in my own house, come to that.’
‘I am courting her. I have been for weeks.’
‘Not according to Miss Wilmott who is, it seems, rather confused by your intentions, given your lack of ardour.’
‘My what?’ Both of Ralph’s fists thudded down on the desk and three pens fell off the standish with a clatter. ‘What the devil has she been saying?’
‘Nothing at all to the matter. However, if you have been courting her for weeks and she is unaware of the fact, then I would suggest that a certain passion might be lacking.’
This is the point where he goes for my throat.
Ralph slumped into the chair on the other side of the desk and dragged his fingers through his hair. ‘I thought we were friends. I have never come across a woman I can talk to like that. It’s not that I’m in love with her, but I ought to marry and I was wondering if we would suit.’ He looked far more fraught about it than his words suggested. ‘And then you came along.’
‘And you got an attack of dog-in-the-manger?’ Hell, now he was feeling sympathetic. He should be goading Ralph and yet he could not do it. Damn it, this was the man who had helped him through his first blundering, confusing encounters with girls with cheerfully frank good advice from his own hard-won experience.
‘It doesn’t occur to you that you never had any trouble before with thinking about beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed women in all manner of ways that do not involve friendship and that therefore a friend must be just what Sophie is to you?’
‘Sophie?’ It came out as a growl.
‘In my thoughts,’ Cal said smoothly. Sympathy would only stretch so far. He had no intention of discussing his exact relationship with Sophie Wilmott. Especially when he hadn’t worked it out for himself. Other than to find himself permanently aroused when he was around her. Or thought about her, come to that. ‘Have a drink.’ Either Ralph was the world’s most inept murderer or he had lost the ability to improvise. Or he is innocent.
‘Thanks.’ His cousin stayed slumped in the chair.
‘You can pour. The decanters are over there. I am going to stay here nursing my dislocated shoulder, broken jaw, cracked skull and bruised arse, three of which you are responsible for.’
Ralph heaved himself to his feet, a spark of his old spirit in his eyes as he narrowed them at Cal. ‘If your jaw was broken you couldn’t speak, your head is too hard to crack and I am not even going to contemplate your bruised backside.’
He poured brandy into two glasses with a heavy hand and dumped them on the desk before he sank back into the chair again. ‘Are you going to marry her?’
‘Can’t tell you, not yet. I don’t know what I want to do, let alone what she does. But she is eligible and I need a wife, someone to be a mother to Isobel. Someone to do all the things a duchess does.’
‘Like give you an heir.’
‘I have heirs. Two of them.’ This was getting too close to the knuckle. Suddenly he didn’t want to confront this, not yet and not now with Ralph slumped in the chair opposite looking tired and depressed and with his own head aching and apparently incapable of rational thought.
‘Two heirs presumptive, not an heir apparent,’ Ralph said. He took a deep swallow of the spirit then slammed down the glass, suddenly angry. ‘I don’t want your bloody title and you have years to get an heir in.’ Had there been an emphasis on the I? ‘Marry Sophie Wilmott, why don’t you? Raise a brood of sons, trail about in ermine and a coronet. The sooner the better. I am sick of living in the shadow of your bloody dukedom, of it being all my father ever thinks about.’
He was on his feet and out of the door before Cal could stand. There was the sound of voices in the hall, then the front door closing.
Jared came in without troubling to knock. ‘What in Hades was that about? And what has happened to you now?’ He clenched his fist and tapped it against the side of his own chin.
‘My dear cousin landed me a particularly fine right hook for interesting myself in the lady he has been courting. Or not courting. He doesn’t seem too sure which it is. However, he passed up a perfect opportunity to beat my brains out and make it look like an accident and has informed me that I should marry and sire an heir because he is, and I quote, sick of living in the shadow of my bloody dukedom.’