Men like Hugo were destined for women like Vivi. Women like Eleanor were destined to be exactly what she was here in Groves House: staff. And that was all right, she told herself fiercely as she watched her sister show her dimples to Hugo. Some people were meant for the shadows and Eleanor had long since accepted that she was one of them. She didn’t know what had happened to her over the past nearly six weeks, stuck away in this rambling old house with only a seven-year-old to talk to. She’d started believing in the sort of fairy tales she read to Geraldine. Or she’d been tempted to, anyway.
She’d even let Hugo touch her.
When she knew—when everyone knew—that he was a man who toyed with others. And so what if he’d claimed the tabloids had lied about him? That was what he would say.
She didn’t understand how she’d allowed herself to feel so many impossible things inside and then lie to herself about it. Because if she’d been as unaffected by Hugo as she’d claimed she was—as she’d been so sure she was—nothing Vivi was saying or doing could possibly have bothered her.
And that was the trouble. It bothered her a lot.
“You must bring your sister to dinner, Miss Andrews,” Hugo said, snapping Eleanor back to the issue at hand, and she tried to stop noticing that his eyes looked like overpriced whiskey. Especially when she couldn’t read the expression in them, as he looked from Eleanor to Vivi and then back again. “In my private room. Tonight.”
“I would love to, Your Grace,” Vivi trilled—but Hugo was already walking away.
Eleanor pulled her arm away from Vivi’s then, and hated herself for it.
“There’s no need to respond,” she said matter-of-factly. “He is the Duke and this is his house. That was not a request or an invitation, it was an order.”
Eleanor set off again then, aware that her sister was following behind her. And that Vivi was laughing softly under her breath, which the tight, thickening thing inside of her knew could only bode ill. But she refused to look over her shoulder to see. She refused to give in to the dark things sloshing around in her gut.
She refused to be the person she’d apparently become.
Eleanor finally reached her rooms, and threw her door open, beckoning for Vivi to come inside.
And then had to ask herself why she was surprised that her sister entered the room very much the way she had, back when she’d arrived. Staring all around at the sheer luxury. Eleanor found herself standing there in the sitting room, rooted to the floor as Vivi gave herself a tour, feeling awkward and angry and deeply disappointed in herself.
“My, my, my. This just gets better and better.”
Vivi’s faintly accusing voice floating in from one of the other rooms struck Eleanor in the heart. Because the truth was, she felt guilty. Horribly guilty.
And she knew why.
Her sister would have been here like a shot if she’d had any idea the sort of opulence that was on display at every turn in Groves House. That alone would have encouraged her. But Hugo’s presence? Her sister would have done anything to meet the Duke of Grovesmoor. And Eleanor still couldn’t explain to herself, not reasonably anyway, why she hadn’t let Vivi know from the start that Hugo was in residence.
“You fancy him.”
Eleanor’s head shot up at that. She found Vivi leaning in the door that led from the sitting room to the bathroom, a considering look on her pretty face.
“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “He’s my employer.”
Vivi shook her head, and there was a sharp light in her eyes that Eleanor couldn’t say she cared for at all. “Why else would you have lied to me?”
“I’ve never lied to you, Vivi. And you still haven’t told me why you’re here. Not the real reason.”
“I missed you.”
Something pointed seem to lodge in Eleanor’s side, because she wanted that to be true. And she also knew it wasn’t.
“I don’t think so,” she said quietly. “You’ve had scandals and overdrawn bank accounts before without getting on a train. What makes this different?”
“I don’t want to talk about London. It’s so boring. What’s not boring is you holed up in this gorgeous house with Hugo Grovesmoor. Something you failed to mention to me, night after night after night. If that’s not a lie, Eleanor, I don’t believe I know what one is.”
“You were certain I would never encounter him,” Eleanor replied, and she was aware of the fact that she was trying much too hard to keep her voice even. Though she allowed the slightest hint of impatience, as if this was one of Vivi’s flights of fancy that she was called upon to temper. Because it should have been. “And I saw no reason to tell you of his comings and goings, because I hardly know when or if I’ll lay eyes on him.”
“You met him before today.”
“Yes, I met him. If you consider being presented to him like any other member of staff ‘meeting’ him.” She made quote marks in the air with her index fingers, and shook her head at her sister. “I think when you meet men it’s a little more momentous than when I do.”
She expected Vivi to argue. But instead, her sister only smiled. Which did not make Eleanor easy in any way, because she knew Vivi. There was always a scheme. There was always the next plan. The smile was never acquiescence.
Or worse, that little voice chimed in, she agrees.
When had she become so awful about her own sister?
And anyway, Vivi was changing the subject. “Why have I been shuffling about London, forced to spend my nights in a grotty bedsit, when you’ve been living it up like the landed gentry?”
“These are the governess’s quarters,” Eleanor said. She made herself smile. “This is what passes for a grotty flat to a duke.”
“You are in terrible, terrible trouble, big sister,” Vivi said, but if there was a storm, it had passed.
Once again, Eleanor saw before her the sister she knew. With a mischievous look in her golden eyes and an infectious grin. She blinked, doubting herself. It was as if she’d made her sister into some kind of enemy the moment she’d dared walk into the house—which said nothing nice about Eleanor. It said a whole lot, however, about jealousy and envy and a whole host of other, vile things that Eleanor didn’t want to admit were sloshing around inside of her.
Congratulations, she thought. You’re a terrible person.
“I know you have to work,” Vivi continued merrily. “I’ll take you to task later. In the meantime, I think I’ll help myself to that glorious bath.”
Eleanor stood there for a long while after her sister disappeared. After she heard the water turn on in the bathroom, splashing into the huge tub. She stood there and she tried to collect herself. She tried to remember the person she’d been before she’d come to this far-off place, and more, before she’d let Hugo touch her. Change her.
Make her into that jealous, dark-minded creature who was selfish beyond measure.
She told herself that it was over. That whatever the spell was that had held her in its grip these last weeks, Vivi’s appearance had broken it. It was time to wake up and remember what she was doing here.
She made the money. Vivi was the one who reeled in men like Hugo. And for good reason. She was the sort of girl who caused scandals that ended up in tabloid newspapers. She was someone.
Eleanor had never been anybody.
She forced herself to leave, then. She closed the door to her own rooms quietly behind her and headed into the hall. She had to find Geraldine and get back to her job, which was the only reason she was here. The fact of the matter was that Vivi should never have come here, but she had. And worse, she’d run straight into the Duke within moments of her arrival, when he could have thrown them both out.
But he hadn’t done that. And Eleanor knew why.
And if something lodged in her heart, making it feel cracked straight through, she told herself it was nothing.
Nothing at all. Nothing new.
Nothing that mattered.
CHAPTER NINE
&n
bsp; HUGO COULDN’T SLEEP.
As he was not a man unduly plagued with the demands of conscience, this was not an issue he generally struggled with. But it wasn’t some newfound and unruly set of principles that kept him up tonight, roaming his own halls like his very own ghost story.
It was Eleanor.
Eleanor, who he’d come to depend upon over these last weeks. For her starchiness. Her prim disapproval. Every spicy, challenging word that fell from her notably disrespectful mouth—the very same mouth that Hugo had tasted and which haunted him more than he cared to admit to himself, even now.
He had the terrible suspicion she would haunt him forever, not that he allowed himself to think such things. Not when he refused to think about next week, much less the rest of his life. Or anything approaching forever.
But the Eleanor he rather thought he’d come to know had disappeared tonight.
She’d been noticeably absent when he’d run into her and her sister in the hall outside the summer salons, en route to the nursery wing. Gone was the fiercely capable Eleanor who’d been giving him hell and in her place was a far more quiet and distant version, as if she’d been trying to disappear where she stood.
Hugo hated it.
He’d never met Vivi Andrews before. But he knew her at a glance, because he knew her type intimately. It took him all of two seconds on his laptop to find entirely too much about the actual Vivi Andrews, and the sorts of shenanigans she got herself into with high-profile members of the aristocracy. The more he read about her, in fact, the less he understood about Eleanor. How was she so forthright and dependable when Vivi was anything but?
The truth was, the younger Andrews sister—who Eleanor was supporting, if he’d understood that right, which made no sense while Vivi pranced about decked out in the sorts of labels the heiresses of his acquaintance wore because their fortunes were so vast that a six-thousand-pound T-shirt was a “little treat”—was the sort of creature Hugo usually slummed around with. Vivi had showed him her true colors in their first meeting, all batting eyelashes and come-hither smiles as if they’d been in a club instead of a hallway in his ancestral home. And she’d kept it up throughout dinner while Eleanor sat beside her, subdued. Vivi had distinguished herself by being endlessly pouty, unkind at the slightest provocation, and obviously convinced that she was a great, rare beauty when the truth was, thousands of equally ambitious girls looked just like her. Her sister was the rare beauty, but he had no doubt Vivi wouldn’t see it that way.
She looked nothing like Isobel, and yet the resemblance was impossible to miss. Hugo felt Vivi’s attention the way he’d always felt anything that reeked a bit too much of Isobel’s sort—like an oily sort of shame inside him, as if the fact a person like her was so obviously interested in him made him somehow like them.
Because, after all, it had. Given enough time, he’d become exactly who Isobel had made him, hadn’t he?
He hadn’t cared much for that thought, either.
“It astonishes me that you are sisters,” he’d said during their excruciating dinner.
Eleanor appeared to have taken it upon herself to embody the very soul of the starchiest possible governess, with Victorian overtones. Her hair was more severe than he had ever seen it before, wrenched back from her poor face as if she was trying to pull it out, so that only her fringe offered any kind of relief. And he doubted it was a coincidence that she’d chosen to wear black. All black, save for a hint of gray in the shirt she wore beneath her cardigan, as if she was in mourning.
Or as if she was reacting to her sister’s earlier claim that it was her favorite color. A poke at Vivi, he wondered? Or a twisted sort of penance?
“Don’t be silly, Your Grace,” Vivi had simpered at him. She’d been in a slinky sort of red dress Hugo thought would have been more appropriate for a club in Central London than a country duke’s dining room. But the point was likely to draw his attention to all the skin the tiny dress left bare. “Everyone swears we are practically twins.”
He was apparently not supposed to realize that she was being cruel.
But before he could express his feelings on that—which, it turned out, were extensive and a bit overprotective—Eleanor had sighed. Mightily.
“No one has ever said that. Not one person, Vivi. Anywhere.” She’d aimed one of her chillier smiles at Hugo. “My sister and I are quite aware of our differences, Your Grace. We choose to revel in them.”
Vivi laughed then, long and loud. The way Hugo had then realized, belatedly, she would continue to do all night. Because she clearly imagined she was being lively and full of fun, or whatever it was women like her told themselves to justify their behavior. He should be better versed in it, he knew. He’d heard it all before.
Sometimes from his own mouth.
He’d settled himself in for an endurance event. But it had turned out that he was more than capable of blocking out the likes of Vivi Andrews. She’d brayed on about the guest suite she’d been given while she remained in Groves House and something about her feelings regarding the Amalfi Coast, and Hugo had watched Eleanor disappear. Right there in front of him. She’d simply...gone away.
It had made Hugo edgy. And something far darker and more dangerous than that.
And now he was wandering his own damned halls, scowling at the portraits of men who looked like him, wondering why the plight of a governess and her family were getting to him like this.
Well. He wasn’t wondering. He knew.
Watching Vivi create an entire character she called Eleanor—stiff and humorless and faintly doltish and unattractive—while Eleanor sat right there and was not only none of those things, but offered no defense against the brush that was being used to paint her, was maddening. But it was also familiar.
It was what Isobel had done to him.
He was in the grand ballroom, glaring out at the rain that lashed at what was left of the garden this far into fall, when he heard a faint noise from behind him. Hugo turned, and for a moment he couldn’t tell if he’d conjured up the sight before him or if she was real.
But god, how he wanted her to be real.
Eleanor moved across the floor, light on her bare feet. She wore some sort of soft wrapper that showed him the better part of her legs and made Hugo wonder what was beneath it. But the thing that made his chest hurt was that finally, her hair was down. It wasn’t ruthlessly scraped back and forced to lie flat and obedient against her skull. It was glossy and dark and swirled around her shoulders, making her look softer. Sweeter. Even that razor-sharp fringe seemed blurred.
Mine, he thought instantly.
And he wanted her so badly that he assumed this was a dream.
Until she stopped walking, jerked a little bit, and stared directly at him as if she hadn’t seen him until that very moment.
“Are you hiding in the shadows deliberately?” she asked him, and even her voice was different this long after midnight. Softer. Less like a challenge and more like a caress.
“My ballroom, my shadows,” Hugo said, and he hardly recognized his own voice, come to that. He sounded tight. Greedy. As if the need that pounded in him was taking over the whole of him, and the truth was, he wasn’t sure he had it in him to care. “By definition, I think, I cannot be hiding. You should expect to see me anywhere you go in these halls.”
Eleanor didn’t respond to that. Her lovely face seemed to tense, as if it was on the verge of crumpling, and he couldn’t bear that. He couldn’t stand the idea of it. He’d told her that tears were anathema to him. He’d told her he put distance between himself and the faintest hint of them.
And yet he found himself moving toward her, his gaze trained on her as if he expected her to be the one who turned and ran.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, her voice a small little rasp against the thick, soft air in the old ballroom. The chandeliers were dim high above and it made the room feel close. Somehow intimate.
“You should not allow your sister
to treat you like that,” he told her, his voice much darker than it should have been. Much more severe. But he couldn’t seem to do anything about that when it was taking everything he had to keep his hands to himself.
But Eleanor only shrugged. “You don’t know Vivi. She doesn’t mean anything by the things she says. Some people don’t think before they open their mouths.”
“You are mistaken,” Hugo said, stopping when he was only a foot or so away from her, and still managing not to touch her. He expected her to move away from him. To bolt. Or square off her shoulders and face him with that defiance of hers that he’d come to look forward to in ways he couldn’t explain to himself. Not to his own satisfaction. And not tonight, when neither one of them should have been here in this room where no one ventured by day. “Poison drips from every word she hurls at you. And you believe it. Sooner or later, you believe all of it.”
Eleanor shook her head, though her gaze was troubled. “Vivi’s young. She’ll grow out of it.”
“She’s what? A year or so younger than you?”
“You don’t understand the sorts of people she knows. Viciousness is a sport. When she’s not trying to imitate them, she’s really quite sweet.”
But Eleanor’s voice sounded so tired then.
“I know exactly how this story goes,” Hugo told her quietly. “I’ve heard all these excuses before. I used to believe them all myself.”
“You don’t have a sister. And you don’t understand. I almost lost her when we lost our parents. Who cares about a few thoughtless words?”
But Hugo cared. And the undercurrent in Eleanor’s voice suggested she might, too, whether she wanted to admit it or not.
“I had a best friend,” Hugo said softly. “And despite the fact we knew each other in the cradle, I eventually lost Torquil to the same poison that made me a villain in the eyes of the world. That’s the trouble with the sort of hatefulness your sister seems so comfortable with. It doesn’t go away. It doesn’t fade. It corrodes.”
Undone by the Billionaire Duke Page 10
