Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8 - Heidi Rice, Annie West - Страница 13

CHAPTER FOUR

ELEANOR HAD NO idea what was happening.

He was kissing her.

Hugo was kissing her. The hated Duke of Grovesmoor himself had his mouth on hers.

And nothing about that was all right. It was dangerous and it was terrible and it was shocking—

But even worse, she liked it.

She more than liked it.

There were no words—and least none she knew—that could begin to describe how much she liked it.

It was like fire. It was an explosion, and only the fact that he was holding her against him kept her from shattering into a million pieces, she was sure of it.

What Eleanor knew about kissing could be summed up in two very short words: not much. But the single adolescent fumbling she’d subjected herself to at a mortifying school disco years and years ago bore no resemblance to this.

Hugo’s mouth on hers was untroubled, somehow. Unhurried. He sampled her lips as if he planned to keep on doing so for hours. Days, perhaps. He seemed entirely and wholly unrushed, teasing her and tasting her, then licking his way inside to do it all over again.

With a devastating thoroughness that made her tremble. Everywhere.

And she didn’t know what was worse, that mouth of his licking fire into her in ways she could hardly begin to process, or the heat of his hand as he held her face to his. Her cheek felt as if it had been branded, as if he was still pressing a red-hot iron to her skin, but for some reason she had no desire whatsoever to step away.

And still he kissed her.

As if a kiss was not a finite thing, a buss on the cheek or halfhearted peck, easily given and more easily forgotten. A real kiss—because Eleanor had no doubt that what Hugo was doing to her was the real thing, something she’d had no idea even existed all this time—was more of a slow burn.

It was longing made physical, then slowly kindled into an ache.

And oh, how Eleanor ached.

She didn’t know how she’d ended up standing so close to him in the first place. She’d told herself repeatedly to keep her distance from the man, because no good could possibly come of their proximity when she was so aware of him, and then there she was. Stood in the center of the hallway with her hands on her hips as if she’d half a mind to scold the man, or as if she’d forgotten herself completely and was dressing down the Duke. Eleanor had no idea what had come over her. It was like an out-of-body experience. As if she was being haunted by some stroppy, mouthy ghost that was taking her over and making her act as if she very much wanted to be fired on her very first day...

She hadn’t the slightest idea what she thought she was doing.

And now this.

Whatever this was, that was setting her on fire and tearing her apart at once.

But then it hit her, as his impossibly addictive mouth moved on hers, making her feel as if a lightning flash had been trapped between them. This was Hugo Grovesmoor. This was what he did. She hadn’t expected him to be as articulate as he was, it was true. She’d expected his dark good looks to seem seedy and tatty in person—and she’d imagined she’d barely see him. But it occurred to her that she should have expected this kind of thing from him.

Hugo was a man who was willing to use his body to get what he wanted. Anything he wanted. Particularly if it was harmful to others. How could Eleanor have let herself forget? The fact that his kiss felt like a revelation was something that should have filled her with shame.

It would, she was certain, just as soon as she had time to collect herself.

Somewhere that lightning wasn’t burning her alive.

Eleanor pushed at his chest, and that was problematic too, because he appeared to be made of more of that iron. Worse, he was much too hot beneath that soft T-shirt, and she had no desire whatsoever to let go.

No matter how she knew she should.

Lazily, taking his time, Hugo raised his head. His whiskey-colored eyes gleamed as he gazed down at her and Eleanor could feel that, too. She could feel so many things she thought she might collapse. Part of her wanted nothing more than to let all that emotion take her straight down to the floor, but she was made of sterner stuff. She’d had to be. She had Vivi to think about.

“Is this why all fourteen previous governesses left?” Eleanor demanded, and she was horrified to hear her voice shake. “Is this a test?” She swallowed, hard. “Geraldine is only just down the hall.”

Something flashed in those dark eyes of his, but he dropped his hand. And Eleanor told herself that what rushed in her then was relief. Triumph. Not something a great deal more like loss.

She could feel the way he kissed her everywhere, in ways that made no sense. There was a twisting, melting ball of sensation deep in her belly. There was a rawness in her chest. Her breasts felt weighted, heavy. And there was a dampness behind her eyes that she knew perfectly well was too complicated to be simple tears.

“I enjoy nothing more than living down to each and every one of a person’s low expectations of me, of course,” Hugo said in that mocking, cut-glass way of his. “Do you not find me entertaining, Miss Andrews? Could there be anything more delightful than to discover I am exactly as you imagined I’d be? Depraved and indifferent and thoroughly spoiled, inside and out?”

Eleanor had been thinking along those lines herself, but somehow, hearing him say it all out loud like that—with such bitterness, and something she could have sworn bordered despair—made something inside of her turn over.

But she shoved it aside, because none of this should have happened. Not with her. She wasn’t the sort of woman men grabbed and kissed in spontaneous bursts of passion. That was Vivi’s life. Her sister was forever fending off male attention wherever she went. That was how Eleanor knew that there was no reason for a man like Hugo to put his hands on her unless that was just something he did as a matter of course, the way the tabloids had always claimed—or if he was making fun of her, somehow.

She’d never heard of mockery by kiss, but what did she know? She’d spent her life working rather than socializing, and she’d never bloomed into a needy curiosity of the opposite sex the way everyone had claimed she would. Something that made her profoundly grateful, as what she didn’t need or even wonder about, she couldn’t miss.

“I think it’s best if we pretend this never happened,” she said, as evenly as she could, pleased to find she’d managed to strip the tremor from her voice.

Hugo regarded her from the near foot of height he had on her, and the fact he was dressed so casually, she realized, did nothing to take away from that matter-of-fact power he seemed to exude even so. How had she not noticed that before?

Because he hides it, a voice from deep inside of her replied with far too much authority. In the same way you lie to yourself about the things you need.

Eleanor didn’t like that at all. She ignored it.

“That will make it difficult, you understand, to sell your salacious story to the tabloids,” Hugo was saying in a cold sort of tone, as if he was discussing something that wouldn’t affect him one way or the other.

“I couldn’t do that if I wanted to, which I don’t.” Eleanor thought her voice softened at the end there, so she tried to even it out again. She put her spine into it. “I signed an extremely comprehensive nondisclosure agreement, Your Grace. Surely you must be aware of it.”

“What I am aware of is that the penalty for breaking that nondisclosure agreement is a certain amount of pounds sterling. Should the tabloids offer, say, twice that amount, it might well be worth it to break the agreement. To a certain type of person, of course.”

“I...” Eleanor very rarely found herself a loss for words. She didn’t understand the sensation warring inside of her. That strange longing, or the fact she had to curl her hands into fists at her side to keep them to herself. She, who was not the sort of person who liked to touch others or even to be touched herself. She, who had never had to fight not to touch someone in her life. She was baffled. “I would never do that.”

“Because you are such a good person, naturally. My mistake.”

His sardonic tone could have stripped the paint from the walls and Eleanor nearly checked to see if it had. But didn’t, because she could feel her reaction in the flush that heated her cheeks, and she thought that was more than enough of a response.

“Because who would do that?” she asked, almost helplessly.

The expression on the Duke’s face was all razor-sharp amusement, but all Eleanor could feel in the space between them was more of that same bitterness that cut a little too close to despair. Dark and thick and everywhere.

Hopeless, she thought, and didn’t know why that made her ache again, the way she had when he’d kissed her. Only sharper.

“Everyone has their price, I assure you,” Hugo said quietly.

As if he was making a prediction. A terrible one.

“Do you?” Eleanor dared to ask.

The expression on his face then made her heart kick at her, then sink into that same sharp ache. But his laugh was worse, dark enough to fill the hall, if not the grand house arrayed all around them, too.

“Especially me, Miss Andrews,” he told her, almost gently. Though his dark eyes blazed, and were anything but gentle. Anything but soft. “Me most of all.”

* * *

Eleanor woke in a room fit for a princess and told herself that the unsettling scene in the hallway that had kept her awake and that kiss that had invaded her dreams hadn’t happened.

Because surely she could not possibly have been so stupid as to go full Jane Eyre on the very first day of her new job, within hours of meeting the Duke and his ward. Before she’d even unpacked her case or figured out what her new job actually entailed. Eleanor had never been that kind of silly. She’d never had the time or, if she was honest, the inclination to fling herself headlong into the sort of mad passions and silly entanglements the bright young things all around her seemed to flock to so mindlessly, like moths to a wholly avoidable flame.

Until last night, Eleanor would have confidently asserted that she simply didn’t have those sorts of feelings or bodily reactions. That she wasn’t wired that way.

She decided she would treat that kiss as if it hadn’t happened, because it shouldn’t have. And because she had no idea how to handle all the things she felt. As if she was a moth battering itself against a light after all.

But she soon found that it didn’t matter how she handled what should never have happened, because the Duke was nowhere to be found over the next few weeks.

Eleanor told herself that was a good thing.

Geraldine was a bright, often funny kid, and even on her less than stellar days, it was far more interesting to work with her than it was to answer ringing phones and take the odd bit of abuse from walk-ins and disgruntled clients and snarky deliverymen. Far better Geraldine than her last immediate supervisor, Eleanor thought more than once.

“I feel terrible that I pushed you into taking this strange job,” Vivi told her a few days into her time at Groves House.

“It’s actually a good fit, believe it or not. I like it.”

Vivi plowed right on, her voice merry and sharp. “I bullied you into it and now you’re trapped in the bowels of Yorkshire in some moldering old stack of stones.”

Eleanor was sunk deep into her luxurious bathtub, bubbles high and the hot water silky against her skin. She had a book on her little bath tray, a glass of wine and some fine cheese she’d never tasted before, and a fire crackling in the other room. She and Geraldine had spent the day investigating the sciences and giggling uproariously for no particular reason, until Eleanor had delivered her to the nannies who supervised the little girl’s tea and bedtime.

“The poor tyke can’t go to a proper school, can she?” the slightly friendlier of the two notably unfriendly nannies had said out in the hall after Geraldine had run into her rooms, as if Eleanor had argued otherwise. “Those worthless journos won’t leave her alone for a minute. If I knew who sold them stories about the Duke I’d give them a piece of my mind, believe me.”

As if Hugo was a good man who merited that kind of defense.

The other woman had huffed off after Geraldine. Leaving Eleanor finished with lessons—and thus finished with her work for the day—at four-thirty. Which was late, as they were usually finished hours sooner unless they’d taken a little trip further afield.

Eleanor had never had such easy, comfortable hours.

But for some reason, she didn’t tell Vivi any of that, and not only because that sharp merriment in her voice suggested her sister had been tossing back spirits.

“I’m fine, really,” Eleanor said instead, like a proper martyr.

And felt terrible about herself as Vivi mouthed a few more drunken apologies, then rang off.

But not terrible enough to correct her sister’s impression that she was muddling through dire circumstances in their next conversation. Or the next. Or, for that matter, let Vivi know that she had in fact met the disgraced Duke himself. More than “met” him.

She told herself that because that kiss had been such an egregious misstep, and because the Duke had disappeared thereafter, it hadn’t happened. So there was no need to tell Vivi about it, as her sister would only leap to the wrong conclusions.

But something deep inside her whispered a different, darker reason.

Eleanor ignored that, too.

The truth was that Eleanor had wanted to become a teacher years ago, but hadn’t thought she could make enough money at it to serve Vivi’s purposes and hers—and certainly not without heading back to school to get the proper certification. There had obviously been no time for that. I can only be dazzling for a few years, after all, Vivi would say. Working with Geraldine was a lot like fulfilling an old dream. It was like a little glance down the road not taken, which, Eleanor found, she liked as much—if not more—than the one she’d been on all this time.

And with her focus on Geraldine and the new lessons she plotted out every night on her laptop, she hardly noticed the absence of the Duke.

Until she fell asleep, that was, when that kiss haunted her dreams.

And Eleanor woke each morning flustered and red-faced, and entirely too warm. Because in her dreams, vivid and wild, they didn’t stop at a single kiss.