But she didn’t do any of those things. She should have said something years ago. She’d bitten her tongue and she’d bitten her tongue—and it was funny, wasn’t it, that it took Hugo teaching her all the other, more fun things she could do with it to loosen it at last.
Eleanor waited to feel shamed by that, but it didn’t come.
“This is why they call him a monster,” Vivi said softly. “You know that, right? He ruins everything he touches. Even us.”
Abruptly, Eleanor was finished with this conversation. She’d had enough. She straightened herself up and reminded herself that she was a grown woman. Not a teen who’d been caught sneaking about after curfew. She didn’t have to stand here and offer explanations.
And she certainly didn’t need to listen to her sister’s malicious and uninformed thoughts about Hugo.
“I don’t need an interrogation, Vivi,” she said then. Not unkindly. Just matter-of-factly. “I really do have to work in a couple of hours.”
“You can’t possibly think—” Vivi began, a scornful sort of note in her voice that Eleanor didn’t like at all.
“I don’t ask you to account for yourself, do I?” she retorted, cutting Vivi off as she moved across the floor toward the doorway her sister stood in. “I choose to believe that everything you do, you do with both our best interests at heart. I don’t understand why you can’t extend me the same courtesy.”
She brushed past Vivi then, half expecting her sister to grab her arm and escalate things the way she’d been known to do in the past, but Vivi only watched her—closely—as she made her way into the bathroom. Eleanor turned on the taps, ran her fingers through the water as she fiddled with the temperature, and pretended everything was normal. That she was still a virgin. That she was still the same person she’d been yesterday.
That she hadn’t spent her night so full of Hugo in every possible way that she could barely breathe now.
The truth was, she didn’t want to breathe.
And love her sister as she might, she didn’t want to share what had happened with her. Eleanor wanted to keep it to herself. She wanted to hold it tight.
She wanted to hoard it, a bright, gleaming evening set against the rest of her practical life.
“He will chew you up and spit you out,” Vivi said darkly from the door. “That’s what he does, like it’s his job. Because he doesn’t have a real job.”
Eleanor shook the water off her hand as she straightened. There were so many things she could say to that. For example, she could point out that Vivi had dressed for dinner last night as if she was perfectly willing to risk a few tooth marks. But she didn’t. She only walked to the bathroom door and she smiled at her sister.
“Are you concerned for me?” she asked quietly. “Or is this something else?”
Vivi flushed at that. Her eyes narrowed. “Of course I’m concerned for you. What else would it be?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I’m not jealous of you, Eleanor, if that’s what you mean.”
“Perish the thought,” Eleanor said dryly.
“The truth is, I know what men like Hugo Grovesmoor are like. You don’t. I’ve spent years around his type while you’ve...”
“Yes.” Eleanor nodded. “While I’ve scuttled about in the shadows like the help.”
Vivi let out a breath, and if Eleanor wasn’t mistaken, the look in her new gold eyes then was pity.
Something in her froze solid.
“If you don’t like your life, you should change it,” Vivi said quietly. “I’ll help. But Hugo Grovesmoor isn’t a change, Eleanor. He’s an atom bomb. And I understand that you’re hopped up on hormones right now and feeling lavish, but I don’t think you’re prepared for the damage a man like him will do.”
“I love you, Vivi,” Eleanor managed to say past the sudden, sinking feeling inside of her, because who was she kidding? She knew nothing about men, much less men like Hugo. Why was she so certain she was right and Vivi was wrong? “You know I do. But I have to get ready for my day.”
“I love you, too,” Vivi retorted. “And don’t worry. I’m going to prove it. I’ll take care of you. I always said I would.”
Eleanor didn’t know what that meant and more, she was certain she didn’t want to know, especially once Vivi left.
She ran her bath and she sat in it for a long time, until the water grew cold and the clock in her living room told her it was time to move. Then she climbed out, toweled off, and got dressed for her usual day with Geraldine as if she was still the same old Eleanor in the same old body she’d had before.
Because she was, damn it. No atom bombs. No damage.
She was exactly who she’d always been, despite her ill-considered words to Vivi. She castigated herself for each and every one of them as she took Geraldine through her lessons, the last she’d have for a few days now that Eleanor’s initial six weeks were up and Eleanor was due a brief holiday. They talked about what Geraldine would do over her break. They talked about the books Geraldine was reading and Geraldine’s many adventures with Pono, the rooster plush toy she liked best.
They did not see the Duke. Eleanor told herself she was grateful. Because she didn’t want to be that silly virgin—the one even her own sister seemed certain she already was—and that meant she’d needed the day to regain her equanimity.
“You’re fine now,” she told herself stoutly as she climbed the stairs from the nursery that led to her rooms. “Perfectly fine, as ever.”
But when she let herself into her rooms, Vivi was waiting. Again.
“You should have just had a cot brought in,” Eleanor said mildly.
“I think you’d better pack, love,” Vivi replied. “We’ll need to leave tonight.”
“No need for that, surely,” Eleanor said. She sank down on the nearest upright, Elizabethan chair. “We can leave in the morning. More chance of a train, I’d think.”
“You don’t understand,” Vivi said, and while her voice was patient, her gaze was not. Her eyes fairly danced, too bright and a bit too sharp, as if she’d been at the spirits again. “You’re not going to want to be here in the morning.”
Eleanor discovered that she was tired. Very, very tired. That was what happened when a person got all of about twelve minutes of sleep all night long. She couldn’t say she regretted it. But it had obviously dulled her brain, because she wasn’t following Vivi at all.
“Vivi,” she began, “I really don’t...”
“I told you I would take care of you and I meant it,” her sister said stoutly. “There are certain tabloids that are so desperate for a story about Hugo that they’d pay anything for a fake one. Which means they’d pay twice that for a real one.”
Eleanor was glad she was sitting down, because she thought that if she hadn’t been, she might have fallen.
“No,” she managed to say from a far distance, while her ears buzzed at her and her lunch threatened the back of her throat. “I signed a nondisclosure agreement. I can’t sell anything.”
“You can’t,” Vivi said with a hard sort of shrug. “But I can. There’s been nothing new on Hugo in ages. Everyone’s tired of speculating what horrors he’s visiting on that poor kid. A sex romp with the governess is exactly what they’d expect, isn’t it?”
“I forbid it,” Eleanor snapped, and she hardly recognized her own voice. Or the fact she’d surged to her feet and had balled her hands up into fists.
Vivi only eyed her from across the room, that pitying look on her face again.
“I thought you’d say something like that.”
“You thought correctly.”
“Which is why I didn’t consult you.” Vivi shook her head. “It’s done, Eleanor. We have five hundred thousand pounds in our account and you don’t have to say a word. Or do another thing. Our troubles are over. But the story is running tomorrow.” Vivi tilted her head, taking in the house all around them. This life Eleanor had known better than to get too attached to—hadn’t sh
e? And Hugo, whose name seemed to detonate inside of her, shaking through her. Shaking her. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be here when he reads it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ELEANOR HAD BETRAYED HIM.
What bothered Hugo most was that somehow, this entirely predictable turn of events surprised him.
“Off to catch the last train,” Mrs. Redding had said yesterday afternoon when Hugo had actually lowered himself to ask where Eleanor was, with her usual disapproving sniff. “A bit keen to celebrate her time off, if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Hugo had replied, with a smile. A cheeky one. Which had done absolutely nothing but make the old woman roll her eyes. Their love language, he’d told himself.
But that had been before the tabloids published their usual filth and innuendo in the morning. That had been when he was still looking forward to seeing her. Craving it, if he was honest. He’d woken yesterday morning to find her missing from his bed and it was as if he was missing a limb. As if they’d spent every night of a good five years sleeping wrapped around each other in the same bed, and her sudden absence hurt.
Hurt.
He didn’t understand it. Or perhaps he didn’t want to understand it. Yesterday, all he’d wanted was to lose himself in her innocence. Her sweetness. And all that intoxicating heat.
Somehow he’d forgotten to be cynical where Eleanor was concerned.
An unforgivable oversight.
Because sometime yesterday, when he’d still been lying in his bed surrounded by her scent and marveling at the notion that innocence could be so addictive—transformative, even, which should have appalled someone as calcified in his own bitterness as Hugo had been for years—Eleanor had not been doing the same. Instead, she had been sharing what had happened between them with her sister. Reporting back, perhaps, that their plan had worked? And sometimes after that, Vivi had sold an extraordinarily salacious and sordid tale to the most shrill and suggestive of the tabloids about Horrible Hugo, the Most Hated Duke in England, and his Sexcapades with his Governesses.
Really, Hugo could have written it himself.
What astonished him was that he hadn’t. He’d let his guard down for the first time since Isobel had gotten her hooks in him—hell, he’d even told Eleanor the truth. As if she was someone he could trust. As if, when she’d sounded so appalled at the very notion that anyone could sell him out to the tabloids, she’d meant it.
Hugo couldn’t trust anyone. Ever. How many times did he need to learn it?
The truth was, he’d handed Eleanor and her sister all the ammunition they’d need. Fourteen previous governesses, all unceremoniously sacked. When the suspiciously unknown sister of a periodic tabloid bit of arm candy, the overly ambitious Vivi—whose desperation repeatedly led her to all sorts of entanglements that found their way into tawdry little tell-alls—had turned up, Hugo should have seen this coming.
Why hadn’t he seen this coming?
Hugo treats his governesses like his own private harem!
That was what the paper screeched, in that awful tone they used when they were putting words into people’s mouths. Then again, he imagined a woman who could giggle aggressively the way Vivi Andrews had could turn a pointed phrase or two when she had a mind to.
He doesn’t give a toss about poor Isobel’s baby, preferring depraved sex romps in his country estate to changing nappies.
It was nothing he hadn’t read before a thousand times. It wasn’t even particularly well done, in his opinion, given he was now a kind of connoisseur of tabloid hit pieces. A giant spread with vague accusations about unsavory sexual practices, a glamour shot of Vivi as if she was the governess in question next to a picture of what might have been Eleanor in a hooded something or other, and an excuse to fling pictures of lost, sainted Isobel and Torquil all over the place. Along with everyone’s favorite picture of toddler Geraldine—all gap teeth and copper curls, looking lost and in need of nappy-changing—as if she’d been preserved forever at an age when Hugo’s neglect could have resulted in her toddling about in her own filth.
He was tempted to ring up Vivi Andrews himself and demand a cut of what must have been a very tidy profit. But he couldn’t do that, could he, because that would mean very coldly and calculatedly discussing when and how Vivi and her sister had decided to set him up so beautifully.
And then asking the question he wanted to know the answer to but was afraid to ask: How had they known that Eleanor’s brand of stroppy innocence would send him crashing to his knees? He’d had women throwing themselves at him his entire life. Some were desperate for the title. Others only wanted a little turn in the tabloids. He’d have said that there was no possible approach he hadn’t grown tired of years ago.
But somehow they’d picked the one that worked.
He had a lot of questions for Eleanor. He was even tempted to question whether her virginity had been real—but no. He knew better. He’d been there. The betrayal was real, but so was that night. So was what had passed between them.
Hugo might not know much, but he knew that.
Not that it helped. He still found himself stalking around his damned house in the gloomy twilight, like a sepulchral poet or something equally tragic.
Hugo couldn’t remember the last time he’d surrendered so completely to self-pity. He made his lonely, nauseatingly melancholic way into his library, broodingly eyeing the shelves he’d once told Eleanor she’d nearly knocked down. Tonight he was tempted to knock them down himself. With a bottle of whiskey and his own hard head.
Because he never learned.
He was the monster of all of England’s most fervent fantasies, paying out his penance in his rambling out house, alone. Forever.
Nothing could change that. Not his own disinterest in the narrative. Not the fact his ward was, despite all wailing to the contrary, a healthy and relatively happy child. Not a scowling, insufficiently respectful governess who’d treated him as an irritant to be borne, much like the sulky moors all around.
He might have imagined that things had changed that night and that wildly optimistic morning after, but that was only more proof that he was an idiot of epic proportions.
“Nothing new in that,” he muttered to himself, not even bothering to scowl at the fire. “It’s the bloody story of my life.”
As was the certainty that somehow, he would pay for this, too.
The door to the library opened then. Hugo watched, bemused, as it scraped its way inward across the thick rug on the floor. Almost as if the person entering the room wasn’t strong enough to move it.
He blinked when he saw the figure standing in the door then. It was Geraldine, who never sought him out of her own accord, and never here. She usually suffered warily through her dinners with him, eyeing him suspiciously from her place down the table. Tonight she looked less like the celebrated daughter of a world-renowned beauty and more...like a kid. Her copper-colored plaits stood out at odd angles from her head, she was dressed in a jumper and jeans like any random child might have been, and her little face was drawn into a frown.
She looked sturdy. And surly, Hugo couldn’t help but notice.
“Yes, my ward?” he drawled. He lounged back in his chair before the fire and raised his brows at her, doing his best, as ever, to sound like a proper guardian instead of the world’s favorite scandal.
The little girl screwed up her nose while the corners of her pudgy mouth turned down, but she kept her scowl aimed right at him.
Evidence of Eleanor’s teaching, clearly, he thought, and hated the lancing sensation of something that couldn’t be pain—because he refused to accept pain—straight through him.
“Nanny Marie says Miss Andrews is never coming back.”
Hugo waited for her to continue, but Geraldine only stared at him. Rather challengingly, actually.
“I am at a loss as to where Nanny Marie,” and he utterly failed to keep the sardonic inflection from his tone at that name, “would get the impression that s
he has access to staffing decisions.”
“I like her.”
“Nanny Marie? I couldn’t identify her in a lineup, I’m afraid. Much less determine whether or not I cared for her one way or another.”
“Miss Andrews.”
Geraldine sounded testy, but definitive. And that was the trouble. Hugo liked Miss Andrews, too. Definitively.
Even now.
He’d told Eleanor things he’d never told anyone. He’d expected her to understand him when no one else had, ever. And then sure enough, she had. Meanwhile, she’d held on to her innocence far, far longer than most women her age, and she’d gifted it to him. Him. As if it had never occurred to her that Hugo the Horrible wasn’t a suitable recipient for such a gift.
As if she’d felt completely safe with him, which should have been impossible.
And as if that wasn’t enough, Hugo wasn’t entirely sure that she was the one who had been rendered fragile by what had happened that night. There were parts of him that no longer fit the way they had before. Parts of him that scraped at all the walls he’d built inside, as if he didn’t fit anymore.
He had been perfectly content here. Happy enough to live out the consequences of Isobel’s decisions far away from prying eyes and telescopic lenses. Perfectly willing to let the country shake in horror at the notion of what he might be doing to their lost saint’s precious little girl. No small part of him had thrilled to the idea that he was literally some people’s nightmare. Every single night.
He’d taken pleasure in that. They deserved it.
Hugo couldn’t understand where all that had gone. How it had disappeared in the course of one very long, very thorough exploration of a prim governess’s astonishingly curvy body.
What was it in him that couldn’t shrug her off the way he had all the others? Why was it so impossible to draw a line under the latest tabloid scandal and move on? When his past mistakes had aired out his laundry in front of whole nations, Hugo had been unbothered.
Undone by the Billionaire Duke Page 13
