But when had she decided that she was so all right with being alone? Her goal had always been Vivi’s great marriage. She’d never thought about what she would do once that happened.
She shivered as she thought about the Duke’s mouth on hers, firm and commanding. And if the highlights of her circumscribed life were the potent, powerful dreams that shook through her every night, all featuring Hugo in searing detail, well. That was more than some people ever had. Maybe it was enough.
Eleanor took a deep breath and vowed it would be. It would have to be.
“Dare I hope that your unexpected appearance outside my private rooms is an invitation, Miss Andrews?”
Eleanor told herself she was hallucinating. Auditory hallucinations, which were really just another part of a regular old haunting, according to all the scary films she’d seen in her time.
She took her time turning to check. And it was worse than any run-of-the-mill haunting.
Hugo stood there at the other end of the long gallery. And this time, he looked exactly like a duke. Exactly like every fantasy Eleanor had ever had of a man that powerful, for that matter. He was dressed all in black and looked vaguely historical. It took her a shattering beat of her heart or two to realize it was because he wore a top hat that should have looked absurd over a long black cloak that did. Or anyway, should have. Would have, even, had another man worn it.
But Eleanor was very much afraid, as her throat went dry and her stomach twisted into something that wasn’t quite anxiety, that there was nothing Hugo could do that was truly absurd. Now when he looked the way he did.
And certainly not when he was looking at her.
“You appear to be dressed as if you’ve been off visiting Regency England,” she said dryly. And only she had to know that the dryness in her mouth was more physical response to him than any attempt on her part to sound indifferent.
“Naturally,” Hugo said, as if an agreement. “I’ve been out terrifying the tenants and topping barmaids in my stagecoach.” He raised a brow. “Or possibly I was attending a Halloween party, complete with fancy dress. You must be aware that it’s the end of October.”
She was aware of almost nothing but him. That was the terrifying truth that seared its way through her then, making her entire body feel...different. As if there was a fire in her bones, and it was changing her. Or had already done so, dream by dream, without her realizing it.
Hugo moved toward her in that graceful way of his, as if he was half liquid. When he drew too close, Eleanor desperately wanted to think of something appropriately boring and dampening to say—but instead found that she still couldn’t seem to think of anything at all but the sensation of his mouth on hers.
His gaze darkened, as if her thoughts were written all over her face, but if they were he didn’t say a word. He only kept moving, brushing past her and indicating that she should follow him with nothing more than a supremely arrogant tilt of his chin. And yet Eleanor found herself obeying.
As if this was as close to happy as she was likely to get.
Hugo stopped at the door at the far end of the gallery and looked back over his shoulder.
“Come,” he said, and Eleanor didn’t know if she was tempted or terrified. Or some far more potent combination of both.
All she knew was that she picked up her pace, on command.
And Hugo’s dangerous mouth curved. “Perhaps it’s time I conducted that interview, after all.”
* * *
Hugo felt like the big, bad wolf.
It was not exactly unpleasant. God knew he’d had nothing to do these past years save sharpen his fangs.
And the distance he’d put between him and this governess who shouldn’t have tempted him hadn’t dulled a thing. Not the impossible lushness of her curves or that tiny waist that mesmerized him. Not her apparent inability to cower before him like almost every other person he encountered in this house.
Above all, it had failed to dull his reaction to her.
He was hard and needy in an instant, and inviting her into his private library was only going to make it worse. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew better than to tempt himself—because when had he ever resisted temptation?
But when his hand was on the door, she stopped, and she looked at him as if she was fighting her way out of a magic spell.
“I can’t... Is that your bedroom?”
Hugo was merely a man. And not a good one. It took everything he had not to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to his actual bedroom.
“That tone of voice would be so much more effective if you were clutching a strand of pearls, I think,” he said instead, like a bloody saint. Maybe that was why he sounded so gruff. “As it is, the offended virgin act needs a little bit of work.”
Eleanor blinked, and straightened. “So I should take that as a yes, this is in fact your bedchamber.”
There was no earthly reason why Hugo should be baring his teeth in a poor semblance of a smile, far too much wolf and very, very little of him—even that less than stellar man he usually was.
“If you are so eager to take to my bed, you need only ask. These games are so unbecoming, Miss Andrews. Do you not think?”
“Your Grace...”
But she didn’t turn tail and run.
Hugo smirked at her, because it was that or touch her, and once he started he doubted he’d stop for at least a week. Maybe three. She’d haunted him across the planet, with her defiant gaze and her unimpressed mouth and all of her mouthwatering curves. He’d decided that if she was going to torture him, she might as well do it in person.
“Relax. This is my library. Not a den of iniquity.” His lips twitched. “Depending, I suppose, on what books you choose to read.”
He threw the door open and strode through. He did not look behind him to see if she followed because that, too, was tempting fate.
If she was walking away from him, he didn’t know what he’d do.
The very thought appalled him. Who hadn’t walked away from England’s most reviled man? He welcomed it. He thrived on it. He certainly shouldn’t care in the least what this governess did.
But once again, she followed him, and he was forced to admit he liked it. And that there was something else simmering in him when she shut the door behind her. It felt a bit too much like relief, though Hugo knew that couldn’t be it. True villains felt nothing, through and through. They were made of stone and had no regrets.
Everybody said so.
He waved his hand at the comfortable leather chair before the crackling fire, and allowed himself a small, triumphant smile when she sat. Obediently. Despite that look in her dark eyes that suggested that at any moment, she might break for it.
Hugo told himself he wouldn’t chase her if she did. Of course he wouldn’t. But as he rid himself of the top hat and his great cloak, he wasn’t entirely sure.
“I’ve been in the grand library downstairs,” Eleanor said after the silence drew out. “This is built on a smaller scale, but is no less impressive.”
“I’m delighted you think so. I did wonder.”
She was looking at his books, not him, but he was sure he saw her lips move as if she was biting back a smile.
“Fat mysteries next to battered paperbacks,” she murmured, gazing around the room. “Ruminations on astral physics and—is that philosophy?—next to the entire series of Harry Potter books.”
“Signed first editions, obviously.”
“Careful,” Eleanor said softly, still not looking at him. “Books tell a whole lot more about a person than the things they say. Or the things others say. Well-worn books tell all manner of inconvenient truths about their owners.”
Something rushed through Hugo then, almost as if he was lightheaded. Or drunk.
Foreboding, he thought grimly.
As if, were she to look too closely at the truths his books told about him, she’d know what was real and what wasn’t. And everything would change. He would change.
<
br /> And Hugo was perfectly content to stay exactly as he was. Hated and all the more powerful for it. The more they made him into the bogeyman, the happier he was.
Because all those people who had bought Isobel’s act deserved to imagine that the love child she’d made with that idiot Torquil was forced to pay for her parents’ sins in the grip of a monster like him. They deserved to worry themselves sick about it, torturing themselves as they imagined scenes of neglect and abuse, because that was the least that could be expected from the villain Isobel had created.
“Every good story needs a villain, darling,” she’d told him archly that first time.
That being the first time Hugo had woken to find a version of himself he didn’t recognize in the papers. The first time he’d had the sickening realization that the fake version was more believable. That even when he tried to clear his name or at least tell a different side to the story, no one wanted to hear it. Terrible Hugo was far more compelling than the real one ever could have been.
He remembered the time he’d tracked her down across the planet in Santa Barbara, California, to demand that she stop the insanity, years into her game. That she stop telling those lies. That she leave him out of the sick games she liked to play with people’s lives—and not because it bothered him. He’d long passed the point where anything she did could bother him. But his father had still been alive then, and it had wrecked the old man.
“Hurting your lovely old father isn’t my goal, of course,” Isobel had murmured, out by one of those impossibly still and blue California pools, all hipbones and malice in a tiny bikini. She’d smiled at him over her oversized sunglasses. “It’s a happy bonus, that’s all.”
“There is nothing you can do to me, Isobel,” he’d told her fiercely then. “You cannot take my heritage from me. You cannot siphon off a single penny of my fortune. Whether I am liked or I am hated, I will still become the Duke in due course. Grovesmoor will carry on. Don’t you understand? I’m bulletproof.”
But she’d only laughed at him.
“And I’m a better storyteller,” she’d said.
Hugo had borne the brunt of that damned story of hers for years. He still did. But now he had his own weapon in the form of a child everyone assumed he hated and the world’s endless censure.
And he had no intention of giving it up.
Certainly not to a governess with the body of a screen idol and too much uncertain temper in her dark eyes. A woman who looked for truth in his books and didn’t know when to back down from a fight she couldn’t win.
No matter how much he wanted her.
CHAPTER SIX
ELEANOR COULD ONLY stare at the Duke’s book collection for so long before it became awkward. Or rather, a little too obvious that she was going out of her way to avoid looking at him directly.
She told herself she was simply appreciating the amount of literature he kept on his shelves and at hand at all times, that was all. The truth was she’d never lived in a place where she could keep more than her absolute most favorite books on what little shelf space she could spare. She wouldn’t have minded spending a few hours getting lost in this place.
But, of course, her employer had not called her into his library to offer her the chance to browse.
Pull yourself together, Eleanor, she chided herself.
She sat on the edge of a buttery soft leather chair, afraid to let herself sink back into it. Afraid she’d never pull herself out again. But when she was finally sure that her expression was nothing but serene and dared to look at him again, everything had gotten much worse.
Much, much worse.
Because while Hugo had removed that top hat and cloak that made him look like something out of the sort of fantasies Eleanor had never had before coming to Groves House, Hugo in nothing but exquisitely fitted dark trousers and a white shirt that opened at the neck was infinitely more dangerous.
And tempting in all kinds of ways she’d never experienced before in her life.
She could feel each and every temptation as if it was a separate strand of heat, swirling around inside of her and making her feel like a stranger to herself.
Hugo moved from the great desk where he’d carelessly tossed his coat and hat, and stalked across the room toward her. Of course he wasn’t stalking, Eleanor told herself sharply. The man was simply walking from one end of the library to the other. The way people did when they wished to cross a space.
There was no reason at all that she should find herself holding her breath the way she was. Or clenching tight every single muscle in her body as she perched on the edge of that heavy chair, until she thought she might snap in half.
Hugo dropped himself down into the leather chair across from hers. He did not exactly sit nicely. Instead, of course, he sprawled. He was bigger every time she looked at him, it seemed, and his solidly built body covered more than simply the chair. His legs were long and he thrust them out before him, eating up the thick rug that was all that sat between their chairs.
He wasn’t simply sitting there, Eleanor thought, with a mounting sense of unease. He seemed to claim the entire room with that offhanded masculine grace of his. As if he was the hazard, not the fire, which crackled away beside them and yet seemed to dim everything that wasn’t Hugo.
It would be a lot easier, Eleanor reflected with no little hysteria, if the man was as seedy and dissolute as he’d always seemed in the tabloids. Instead of finely chiseled everywhere and exuding entirely too much sheer, powerful certainty the way other men reeked of cologne.
“How fares my ward?” Hugo asked.
So politely, so mildly, that Eleanor thought she must have been imagining the strange currents that seemed to fill the room—and her—with such an odd, electric sensation. It was clearly her, she told herself sternly. She was the one who was having some kind of allergic reaction to being in this man’s presence. Or perhaps it was all those centuries of Grovesmoor influence and authority that he wore so easily when he was meant to be nothing but a layabout. Eleanor supposed it could even be the broad span of his shoulders, entirely too sculpted and athletic for a man so famously devoted to his own leisure.
But when she met his gaze, she understood that she wasn’t suffering from some allergy to the aristocracy. Or if she was, he was too. Because his dark eyes burned with a bright, intent fire Eleanor didn’t recognize, but could feel. Everywhere.
“Geraldine is very well,” she said before she forgot to respond. Which wouldn’t do at all.
Thinking about the little girl was the way to survive this, clearly. Eleanor made her spine as much of a straight line she could bear without actually hurting herself, and folded her hands neatly in her lap. She found that if she gazed at Hugo’s chin instead of directly into his overwhelming, challenging gaze, she could pretend to be looking at him without actually risking too much direct eye contact.
And that little disconnection made it possible for her to catch her breath. To keep her heart from beating entirely too fast. Or anyway, pretend that she had herself under control, which would have to be enough.
“She’s quite intelligent. And funny, it turns out. Not all little girls are funny, of course.” Eleanor felt herself flush slightly, because she sounded a great deal as if she was babbling. And she never babbled. “Not that I have vast experience with seven-year-old girls, but I was one.”
Hugo looked boneless and hungry, and the combination made Eleanor’s pulse dance.
“Some time ago, if I’m not mistaken,” he said.
“A lady does not discuss her age, Your Grace.”
“You’re a governess, are you not? Not a lady in the classic sense, if you will excuse the pedantry. But more to the point, you’re entirely too young to become missish and coy about your age. Surely that is the province of women significantly longer in the tooth than you.”
Eleanor found she was meeting his gaze, and had no idea when she’d given up the chin offensive. It was a mistake. She felt as if she’d sat out in
the sun too long and was now a miserable prickle everywhere she had skin.
“I’m twenty-seven, if that’s what you’re asking. And I hope that you’re not asking that. Because that would be unpardonably rude.”
Hugo’s lips twitched. “The horror.”
“And I’m surprised that a duke of England should bother himself to pull rank. Surely in the absence of a Windsor lurking about, that’s a bit redundant.”
“You cannot be surprised, Miss Andrews.” The corner of Hugo’s mouth tipped up, but if that was a smile, it was entirely too dark. “I have yet to encounter a single story ever told about me that did not make it clear I am the worst kind of person. A stain upon the nation.”
“Are you suggesting that I believe everything I’ve read about you? My understanding—” culled entirely from books and television and supermarket checkout queues, which she did not plan to share with him “—was that most celebrities claim that the things that are written about them in places like the tabloids are lies.”
Something in his expression shifted. Eleanor couldn’t put her finger on it. It was as if he turned quietly to stone, everywhere, even as his gaze changed. Melted, she would have said, if she were the fanciful sort. Into a far more powerful spirit, more intense than his usual whiskey.
“And if I were to tell you that, indeed, nearly everything that has ever been written about me in the press is a lie, you would believe that?”
Hugo wasn’t exactly smirking, but there was no mistaking the challenge he’d thrown at her or the way he lounged there in the chair opposite her while he did it. His oddly intent gaze was taut on hers while one long finger tapped the side of his jaw, rough now instead of clean-shaven.
He looked decadent. Sinful.
Eleanor had absolutely no trouble believing every wicked thing she’d ever heard about him. Ever.
And it did absolutely nothing to diminish his appeal.
Undone by the Billionaire Duke Page 6
