“I told you not to move your hands.” Hugo’s voice was dark, demanding.
And it wasn’t until he spoke that Eleanor realized she’d brought her hands down toward his shoulders. To push him away? To draw him closer? She had no idea. But she did as he asked, because she couldn’t think of what else to do, and she raised her arms back up over her head again.
And Hugo simply pulled the fastening of her trousers open, then dipped his hand inside, as if it was inevitable.
It felt as if it was.
There was no sound in the library. There was the snap and rustle of the fire, and then a harsh sort of noise that it took Eleanor long moments to realize was her own breathing. Panting, more like, that she could barely hear over the noise in her head that she thought was her heart. Beating madly.
But if Hugo heard any of it, he liked it. That was what that hard smile on his beautiful face told her. She could feel it wash over her like its own sort of glare, making her feel exposed. As if he could see things she wasn’t even aware she was showing.
“I’m pleased that you’re allowing this experiment, little one,” he said, a certain satisfaction in his voice that should have alarmed her. She knew it should have, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to react to it. “Given how well you know your own desires.”
“I don’t know what you...”
“Hush.”
Once again, Eleanor obeyed him. Because he was sliding his fingers down, down, all the way into her panties, and that made everything in her...constrict. Shudder.
And then he curved his fingers around to cup her where no one else had ever touched her.
Eleanor realized as her legs went to jelly that she lacked the ability to stand.
But Hugo was holding her up with that big body of his and one hard hand at her hip. Even when he let out the sort of laugh that should have been outlawed as a public safety hazard, he kept her upright.
“I must tell you, Miss Andrews, you are remarkably wet for one who claims she is asexual.”
“Wet?” she asked. On a choppy little breath.
“Very, very wet,” Hugo amended, his voice little more than a dark growl.
And then he began to stroke her.
Sensation buffeted her from all sides. He was all around her. He loomed above her, and his shoulders blocked out the rest of the house, and more, the world she could hardly recall outside it. She could smell him, an intriguing male scent that put her in mind of the fire behind them and soft, buttery leather, only much warmer. She could taste him in her mouth, like the kind of spirits she only dared sip at Christmastime, and then only in minuscule quantities.
And she could feel him. Good god, could she feel him.
He moved the hand at her hip back to her jaw, smoothing his palm around to hold her where he wanted her. And there was a smile on his face when he lowered his head to take her mouth once more.
Eleanor could taste that, too. And god help her, he was like a bottle of the good stuff, with every demanding slide of his tongue against hers.
And all the while, he stroked her. He slipped in and around her folds, slippery and hot when she’d never felt anything like it before. When surely it should mean something was wrong, but nothing felt wrong.
Eleanor couldn’t think. She couldn’t control herself. She was lost between his mouth and his hand, and she simply followed the rhythm he set as he built that storm in her.
Higher and higher. Darker and wilder.
And she didn’t know when it dawned on her that it was going to break. That the tightness in her belly and the need and the hunger could only go one way, and it was going to happen whether she wanted it or not. That the wall that seemed to bear down on her was entirely unavoidable, and coming much too fast—
“Don’t fight it, little one,” Hugo murmured. He lifted his mouth from hers the slightest little bit, so Eleanor could taste his words on her lips.
“I’m not fighting anything,” Eleanor gasped out. Crossly.
But then it was happening.
It was like a golden sort of crash, fast and slow at once. A shower of fire and sparks, magic and longing, as debilitating as it was delicious. It roared through her, from the top of her head straight down to the tips of her toes that she dug into the floor beneath her feet as if that could keep her holding on.
She bumped against his marvelous, wicked hand and she threw her head back, and still his mouth was there against her neck, urging her on. Taking her wherever he wanted to take her, and all she could do was let him.
He was even laughing slightly, she noticed with something like panic, as she fell and fell and fell.
And hoped like hell that Hugo would catch her on the other side.
* * *
Making his starchy little governess come apart beneath his hands was the hottest thing Hugo could remember doing.
Ever.
The little sounds she made. The dazed wonder in her wide eyes. Even that frown at the end, and her sharp little voice before she broke to pieces.
He didn’t understand how it was possible when he should have no further to sink, but Eleanor Andrews was ruining him.
But Hugo shoved that aside. For any number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that he had already been ruined. A long, long time ago. There was no lower place for Hugo Grovesmoor to go. He should know. He’d tried to find it over and over again.
And no innocent woman deserved a man that self-destructive. Especially not a woman like this one, who had confused her own inexperience for disinterest. That was how little she knew of men.
He would eat her alive.
And it said something about him, didn’t it, that he rather liked that idea.
She was limp and dazed and breathing heavily, so he shifted her off the bookcase and swept her up into his arms, entirely too aware of the way she melted against him. He carried her over to the wide sofa and settled her on it, more than a little concerned about how uncharacteristically gentle he was with this woman. Automatically. When he was not exactly known for his sweet bedside manner. He did not lounge around, shyly reading verses of poetry from slim volumes and softly asking permission to touch a lover’s ankle.
Please.
Hugo had always assumed that what poetry was in him was rough and raw and best expressed with his hands. And his body.
And the dark things he could do with both. And did, again and again.
He’d never had any complaints. In person, that was. The tabloids were a different story, but even those fabricated fantasies never claimed he was a bad lover. Simply that he was a very, very bad man.
But still. Untried innocence was not his thing. No matter how sweet the taste, still there on his tongue. Driving him that much closer to madness.
He made himself stand, something furious in his chest and all that leftover heat and hardness making his trousers feel too tight, and waited for her to come back to him.
It took her a long time. And it occurred to him that a woman who fancied herself asexual and was so obviously a stranger to her own body was perhaps significantly less experienced than he’d been thinking. Almost as if she was something more than “inexperienced.” Almost as if...
But that was impossible, of course. This wasn’t the dark ages.
“Are you a virgin?” he asked, perhaps a bit too abruptly.
On the deep leather couch, Eleanor stirred. She looked around as if she didn’t know where she was, and didn’t recognize the library either way. Or him. She sat a little bit straighter as she took him in. Her hands went first to her head and she smoothed back the one or two strands that had dared to come loose from that ruthless bun she always wore. Only then, when she’d secured her dark hair in its cage, did she shift against the seat, look down, and note that her trousers were still wide open.
And Hugo found he was captivated by the red flush that took her over, staining her cheeks and making her brown eyes gleam from beneath her fringe with that hint of honey that he thought might be his undoi
ng.
Eleanor swallowed, hard, and he saw a frown etch itself between her eyes again. But she didn’t say anything. She only fastened her trousers and sat a bit straighter. Only then did she look up at him, and something about the steady way she did it made him feel like the monster he knew he was. More so than usual, that was.
She looked breakable.
It should have made him hate himself all the more, that he should so effortlessly stain whatever he touched. But that was not his primary reaction to the mounting evidence that no one had touched Eleanor but him.
Indeed, what he was feeling—in every part of him, like a thread of wild heat—was significantly more primitive.
“Whether I am or am not a virgin, I can’t imagine how that’s any of your business at all,” she said coolly. Her brows rose slightly. Arrogantly, he would have said, had anyone ever managed to outdo him in that arena. “Your Grace.”
And Hugo stopped feeling badly about the whole thing.
“That is not a very nice tone to take with a man who just made you come,” he pointed out, all silk and threat. “So hard you nearly broke off the shelf of an ancient bookcase.”
“The bookcase appears to be holding up just fine.”
“Given that you had your back arched and your eyes closed while you rode my hand, I rather doubt you have the slightest idea how close you came to bringing down the whole of my collection on your head.”
“I wish it had,” she said, and while her gaze grew darker, her tone only chilled further. “Everything that’s happened here is almost too inappropriate to bear. I will tender my resignation in the morning, of course.”
Hugo lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “If you wish. But it will be a wasted effort. I won’t accept it.”
She scowled at him. “Of course you will.”
He didn’t know why she amused him. She shouldn’t have. He’d fired many of her predecessors for far less than this. The one who’d tracked him down in the gardens to let him know she was without her undergarments. The one who’d pouted prettily at him over Geraldine’s head when the child had needed a doctor. The alarming one who’d left lavender-scented unmentionables all over the house, for servants and Hugo alike to find in the most curious of places. He hadn’t thought twice about sacking any of them.
He should have welcomed Eleanor’s resignation. Hell, he should have demanded it himself the moment he’d seen her outside the nursery, divested of that awful coat and obviously a problem. With killer curves.
Hugo had no idea what the hell was wrong with him.
“I fear I must remind you—and not for the first time—that I am the Duke of Grovesmoor.”
“I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are.”
“Then you should know how pointless it is to argue with me.” He watched as she rose to her feet, and didn’t bother to hide his satisfaction when she had to reach out a hand to steady herself. “Instead of discussing resignations that will never come to pass, why don’t you tell me why you insist on scraping your hair back into that painful-looking bun?”
“Because it’s professional,” she snapped. “And also none of your business.”
Hugo kept his gaze trained on hers. Very slowly, very deliberately, he lifted his hand and put the fingers he’d sunk deep inside of her softness into his own mouth. Then licked them clean.
Her mouth fell open. Her pretty face went pale, then red.
“I can still taste you, Eleanor,” he said, a bit more roughly than planned, because she affected him too damned much. “It’s a bit too late for boundaries, don’t you think?”
Eleanor flinched. And he wasn’t at all surprised when she turned around, then fled the library and his presence, coming as close to running from the room as a person could without actually breaking into a sprint.
Hugo didn’t blame her at all.
He blamed himself. And the fact he really could taste her, sweet and sharp and intoxicating, was his own cross to bear as the night wore on. As he sat in his library and brooded into his fire and contemplated just how destroyed he was. How much of a monster was he, really, if he’d become the disreputable, distasteful Old Duke locked away in his ancient house, terrifying virgins? Why not simply start belching out flames and singeing the livestock, while he was at it?
But when the next day came and went with no resignation letter on his desk and Eleanor still in residence, his commitment to his self-flagellation...shifted.
Because it was one thing to lure an unwilling virgin into his dragon’s lair.
It was something else again when she knew who he was, and what he might do...and stayed anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“YOU HAVE A VISITOR.”
Eleanor looked up from the textbook she and Geraldine were poring over in the grand library to see Mrs. Redding standing over them, looking more crisp and disapproving than usual. Which was quite a feat.
“A visitor?” she echoed, trying to work out from the other woman’s expression what that could possibly mean. Eleanor didn’t know anyone in the area. Aside from a few rambles about the village with Geraldine, she hadn’t spent much time off Hugo’s estate in the five and a half weeks she’d been here.
“It is not encouraged for staff to invite friends and family to the estate,” the housekeeper said coldly, as if she’d caught Eleanor throwing a party like an errant teen. “We are not guests of His Grace. We are members of his staff. I’m certain this was covered extensively in the interview with the placement agency.”
“I haven’t invited anyone,” Eleanor protested, but it was no use. Having rendered her judgment, Mrs. Redding had already turned and was making her brisk way to the door, every line of her body showing her offense at Eleanor’s transgression.
Eleanor gave Geraldine a reading assignment to keep her occupied, then followed Mrs. Redding’s crisp footsteps toward the front of the house.
There was only one person who knew where she was, but there was no way Vivi would be here, surely. Vivi preferred to stay in the bright lights of London, or in the posh homes of friends abroad. She certainly didn’t venture into the north of England. Under any circumstances.
That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? she chastised herself as she walked.
Something was the matter with her. It had been growing inside of her since that terrible night in the Duke’s private library a week ago. As if he’d infected her with his touch. With the things he’d made her feel. She found herself tense and strange. Snappish with Vivi on the phone and even less able to sleep than she had been before.
It was her horror with her own behavior, she told herself stoutly as she made her way toward the great foyer. She’d allowed herself to be compromised and worse, she kept letting it happen.
The Duke hadn’t touched her again, which meant it was all she thought about.
But what he was doing was worse. Dropping by Geraldine’s lessons as the mood took him, for example, when Eleanor had assumed he was off somewhere else being Hugo on his usual international stage.
“This does not sound like the Latin I was forced to learn,” Hugo had said from behind her, out in the back gardens one unexpectedly fine morning, making Eleanor jump as she walked and then instantly try to conceal her reaction from Geraldine.
“It’s French,” Eleanor had said sternly.
“I am aware of that, thank you,” Hugo had replied as he’d moved to walk beside her. In French, which had made Geraldine giggle.
And Eleanor had wanted nothing more than to ask him to leave them to their walk and French conversation, but, of course, she couldn’t. It was his property. And his ward, for that matter. But she’d been psyching herself up to demand he respect Geraldine’s lesson time when he started talking to the little girl directly.
In perfect French, unlike Eleanor’s, which had been cobbled together from her time in school and the job she’d had for a year when she was barely twenty at a French company based in England.
And he kept it up for the better par
t of the next twenty minutes, as if Eleanor wasn’t there.
It had made her heart beat a little too fast in her chest. And it had made Geraldine glow, which was worse—because Eleanor had no defense against her scrappy charge.
And when he took his leave he bowed to Geraldine and only pinned Eleanor briefly with an unreadable look in his dark whiskey eyes. That had haunted her long after.
“Come have dinner with me,” he’d said another afternoon, appearing in the library when Eleanor had thought she and Geraldine were on their own.
Eleanor had instantly checked to see where the little girl was, but she was still at one of the tables in the center of the huge library, poring over a dictionary as she picked ten vocabulary words to use in the new story she was writing in the journal Eleanor had her keep.
“I appreciate the offer, Your Grace,” she’d said as frostily as possible. “But I’m afraid that’s impossible.”
“For all you know I intended to whisk you off to Rome for the evening.”
Eleanor scowled at the book in front of her, though she’d stopped seeing the words on the page in front of her the moment he’d materialized at her side. “That would be almost incomprehensibly inappropriate.”
“I would hate to be incomprehensible,” Hugo had murmured in that sardonic tone of his that made her think of his body pressed against hers and his clever hands between her legs. “My private dining room will have to do.”
“That is equally inappropriate,” she’d said sharply.
“But more comprehensible.”
“Your Grace—”
“It’s a bit late for that, Eleanor,” he’d said quietly. “Don’t you think?”
“I do not think,” she’d retorted, struggling to keep her voice in a whisper. She’d glanced at Geraldine, then back at Hugo again. “This is a game to you. But it’s a job to me. And more people than just me depend on it.”
Hugo’s impossible mouth had shifted into one of those half smiles that haunted Eleanor when she slept. And when she wasn’t sleeping, too.
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