“Apologize at once!” she snapped. “He is a guest in our house.”

“My house.”

Her face tightened at that. It was the one piece of leverage he held over her. She was there, as they all knew, at his pleasure and discretion.

“He is your first cousin,” she said. “One would think, given the lack of close relations in our family, that you would be eager to welcome him into the fold.”

One would, Thomas thought, looking warily over at Audley. Except that he had disliked him on sight, disliked that smirky smile, that carefully studied insolence. He knew this sort. This Audley knew nothing of duty, nothing of responsibility, and he had the gall to waltz in here and criticize?

And furthermore, who the hell was to say that Audley actually was his cousin? Thomas’s fingers clawed then straightened as he attempted to calm himself down. “Would someone,” he said, his voice clipped and furious, “do me the service of explaining just how this man has come to be in my drawing room?”

The first reaction was silence, as everyone waited for someone else to jump into the breach. Then Audley shrugged, motioned with his head toward the dowager, and said, “She kidnapped me.”

Thomas turned slowly to his grandmother. “You kidnapped him,” he echoed, not because it was hard to believe but rather because it wasn’t.

“Indeed,” she said sharply. “And I would do it again.”

Thomas looked to Grace. “It’s true,” she said. And then—bloody hell—she turned to Audley and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Accepted, of course,” he said, with enough charm and grace to pass muster in the most discerning of ballrooms.

Thomas’s disgust must have shown on his face, because when Grace looked at him, she added, “She kidnapped him!”

Thomas just rolled his eyes. He did not care to discuss it.

“And forced me to take part,” Grace muttered.

“I recognized him last night,” the dowager announced.

“In the dark?” Thomas asked dubiously.

“Under his mask,” she answered with pride. “He is the very image of his father. His voice, his laugh, every bit of it.”

Everything made sense now, of course. The portrait, her distraction the night before. Thomas let out a breath and closed his eyes, somehow summoning the energy to treat her with gentle compassion. “Grandmother,” he said, which ought to have been recognized as the olive branch it was, given that he usually called her you, “I understand that you still mourn your son—”

“Your uncle,” she cut in.

“My uncle,” he corrected, although it was difficult to think of him as such, given that they had never met. “But it has been thirty years since his death.”

“Twenty-nine,” she corrected sharply.

Thomas looked to Grace for he wasn’t sure what. Support? Sympathy? Her lips stretched into an apologetic line, but she remained silent.

He turned back to his grandmother. “It has been a long time,” he said. “Memories fade.”