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From the way Oackley darted a glance at Caleb, one that suggested that this welcome was coming a bit late, was also a criticism, but one that didn’t feel as though it was intended to prick Caleb in a way beyond what was friendly.

It was almost…brotherly, that look. Caleb struggled not to let his breath catch. He hadn’t felt that kind of connection in a long, long time.

Caleb might have appreciated the sidelong glance, but it was clear that Graham did not appreciate the idea that anyone beside himself might be in control of this dinner.

The duke’s voice grew noticeably frosty.

“No, no,” he said, steely and straight-backed. “Since you have seen fit to grace us with your presence, for once, we might as well make good use of the time.”

At his side, the duchess looked like she was prepared to shrink in on herself, as if she was melting from the force of her husband’s displeasure.

Grace looked annoyed in a bored sort of way, as if she’d expected the evening to go precisely this way. Somehow this was the part that Caleb hated the most—the idea that this casual, everyday cruelty was, indeed, part of everyday life in Graham House.

“Very well,” Evan said tersely. His arm moved slightly, and Caleb thought he was gripping his wife’s hand under the table. The flush faded from Frances’ cheeks.

Graham settled back into his seat, smug in his victory.

“Well,” he said, magnanimous now that he’d won. “Things have been rather slower this year than I might have liked. Why, I’ve been compelled to sell of property, of all things.”

Evan’s expression betrayed a quick flicker of surprise, though he looked suspicious. Caleb felt similarly on edge. He did not think Graham the kind of man to admit to any failure, no matter how minor, unless it set him up for some greater position of success.

“Are we offloading the country seat onto some wealthy Americans?” Evan asked, a hint of edge in his tone. “I’ve heard that’s all the rage these days for aristocrats who find they’ve spent beyond their means.”

It was an arrow aimed at Graham’s pride. Caleb watched with satisfaction as it landed. Graham’s composure even flickered.

“That isnot,” he hissed while his wife shrunk back even further into her seat, “why I am forced to sell the property in the north, Evan. If youmustknow—” The duke’s eye gleamed with vindictiveness and Caleb realized that this was why he’d admitted to slow business, this poison barb he was loading as they all watched. “—it is because your sister was sorecklesswith her reputation that I have suffered such losses. So if you wonder why your inheritance is diminished, I encourage you to askher.”

Later, Caleb would be able to think logically through why this claim was absurd. Grace hadn’t kissed someone she oughtn’t or gotten too drunk at a Society event. She’d beenabducted,for Christ’s sake. And if the fuckingtonthen turned around and blamed her for it, as if she should have managed to secure a suitable chaperone while she’d been dragged away from her life and family by a vile criminal, then Caleb felt the entire lot of them could go to hell.

This, however, came later. At the moment, at that dinner, all he registered was that his wife’s cheeks pinkened at the accusation.

And Caleb’s world went red.

It was only years of military precision that kept him steady as he rose to his feet, kept his movements controlled. Lunging at his father by marriage would do him no good, no matter how much Caleb found the man to be an utter arse.

Besides, he thought with grim satisfaction, controlled violence so often seemed the more effective threat, when one confronted a bully.

Indeed, he thought he saw a flicker of alarm in the duke’s eyes as he drew himself up to his full height, even if Graham did quickly cover it up with his usual superciliousness.

“I will not,” he said, tone like ice, “stand here and allow ye to speak poorly ofmy wife—” He paused to let the reminder that Grace was his, now, not Graham’s, to oversee and safeguard and protect. “—and I find myself twice as disinclined to do so when ye foolishly attempt to blame her for something that ye and I both know is nae her fault in the least.”

“I beg your?—”

Caleb cut the other man off.

“Nae, I’ll not be repeating myself. Ye heard me perfectly well. And if I hear ye ever again breathe so much as a word that implies that my wife was responsible for the mistreatment that she suffered—if ye so much as indicate that she should be criticized because yon nattering hens of thetoncannot keep their tongues from wagging over things that don’t concern them—I will consider it a personal affront and will respond accordingly.”

The duke was like any other bully; he only wanted to scrap with those less powerful than him. Caleb was not that. Caleb was physically bigger, was stronger. He’d killed on battlefields. He’dsurvived a childhood that had felt more like hell than anything he’d seen at Waterloo.

And he, too, was a duke in his own right. The Duke of Graham had nothing to hold over him, nothing at all.

The man thus took the sole tactic remaining to him, the one beloved by lily-livered English milksops everywhere: he feigned outrage.

Or, Caleb allowed, maybe he was actually outraged. Caleb didn’t actually give a damn either way.

“I willnot,” Graham hissed in low, furious tones, “be threatened in my own home. I absolutely will not stand for such behavior.”

Caleb’s next lines were obvious. He was meant to apologize, to bow and scrape. Blame his actions on his Scottish ancestry, perhaps—didn’t all good Englishmen know that Scots were naught by brutes, driven by their tempers and their appetites?