“Not the time?” Daniel echoed. “Not the time? When the bloody hell else would be the time?”

“Watch your language,” Hugh snapped.

“She’s my cousin.”

“She’s a lady.”

“She’s right here,” Sarah said weakly, lifting a hand.

Daniel whipped around to face her. “Have I offended you?”

“Ever?” Sarah asked, desperate to break the tension in the room.

Daniel scowled at her pathetic attempt at humor and turned back to Hugh. “Will you tell her?” he asked. “Or shall I?”

No one said a word.

Several seconds went by, then Daniel snapped toward Sarah with a suddenness that almost made her dizzy. “Do you recall,” he said in an awful tone of voice, “how furious Lord Hugh’s father was after the duel?”

Sarah nodded, even though she was not sure he expected an answer. She had not been out in society at the time of the duel, but she’d heard her mother whispering about it with her aunts. Lord Ramsgate had gone mad, they’d said. He was positively unhinged.

“Did you ever wonder,” Daniel continued, still in that terrible tone she now realized was for Hugh even as his words were directed toward her, “how Lord Hugh managed to convince his father to leave me alone?”

“No,” Sarah said slowly, and it was the truth. Or at least it had been until a few weeks ago. “I assumed . . . I don’t know. You came back, and that was all that mattered.”

She felt like an idiot. Why hadn’t she wondered what Hugh had done to retrieve Daniel? Should she have done?

“Have you ever met Lord Ramsgate?” Daniel asked her.

“I’m sure I have, at some point,” Sarah said, her eyes flicking nervously from Hugh to Daniel. “But I—”

“He’s a rat bastard,” Daniel snarled.

“Daniel!” Sarah had never heard him use such words. Or such a tone. She looked to Hugh, but he only shrugged and said, “I have no objection to such a characterization.”

“But . . .” Sarah fought for words. She didn’t see her own father very often; he rarely left Devon, and more often than not Sarah found herself toted around the south of England by her mother, in the endless pursuit of a suitable husband. But he was her father, and she loved him, and she couldn’t imagine standing by while someone called him such awful names.

“We don’t all have genial and benign fifty-three-hound fathers,” Hugh said.

Sarah hoped she was misinterpreting the note of condescension that sat upon his words.

“What does that have to do with anything?” she asked testily.