Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8 - Heidi Rice, Annie West - Страница 18

CHAPTER NINE

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.”

“Isobel,” Eleanor whispered.

Hugo didn’t like her name in Eleanor’s mouth. As if that alone could poison the woman who stood before him against him. Just the mention of her.

“Isobel and I dated, if that is what it can be called, for two weeks.” He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his tone. The truth was, he didn’t really try. Because what was there now besides that bitterness? What was left? Only the stories Isobel had told about him, his inability to refute any of them, and the long game of revenge he was playing against all those who’d chosen to believe it. “Two weeks, that is all. There was no on-and-off nonsense, stretching on for years. There was barely any affair to speak of. There were two entirely physical weeks when I was too young to know better, and then I cut it off.”

Eleanor’s gaze searched his. “I don’t understand.”

“Of course you don’t understand. I assure you, I do not understand it myself. Isobel didn’t like the fact that while she wanted our relationship to be something more than it was, I did not.” He felt his mouth flatten. “And she didn’t see why she should have to accept any reality that she didn’t like. So she made her own.”

“You can’t mean...” Eleanor took a deep breath that made her hair move about on her shoulders. And Hugo couldn’t keep himself from reaching out then. If he was honest, he didn’t try too hard.

He reached over and ran his fingers through the fall of her hair, dark and enticing. It felt warm against his fingers, as if she was giving off heat like some kind of sun, and as soft as he’d imagined. And when he was finished running his fingers through it—at least for now—he didn’t let go. He held on to a hank of her hair, as if he needed it. As if it was some kind of talisman.

Or she was.

“At first it was just sad.” He didn’t like talking about any of this. It only occurred to him then that he never had before. Because who could he have told? Everyone had already come to their own conclusions. “She would contrive to be somewhere I was and the next thing I knew there was a photograph in a tabloid, and breathless speculation about whether or not we were back on. At first I didn’t even realize that she was the one calling the paparazzi herself. But as time went on, of course, the coverage took a distinctly darker turn.”

He didn’t know what he expected from Eleanor. An instant refusal, perhaps. After all, Isobel had been a sunny ambassador of goodwill. Everyone said so. She had been all that was light and good and the only strange thing she ever done in her life, according to the coverage of her that she’d manipulated constantly, was try to date a monster like Hugo. It wouldn’t have surprised him if Eleanor had argued with him. If she’d tried to deny the story that he was telling.

But she didn’t say a word. Her solemn gaze was fixed to his, and she seemed ready enough to hear him out.

No one else had ever given him that courtesy. Hugo felt something sharp, wedged there in the vicinity of his heart, but he had no name for it.

“As time went on Isobel became more and more unhinged. She got together with Torquil, of course, but that wasn’t enough for her. Because the truth was, she knew that wouldn’t hurt me. If he wanted to be with her that meant nothing to me either way, and that was what she couldn’t stand. It was right about the time she convinced my friend, who’d known me all his life, that I’d treated her abusively in private that it occurred to me her only real goal was to hurt me. However possible.”

“If you didn’t care for her at all,” Eleanor said softly, “and you weren’t even involved with her in the ways she claimed, how could she ever have hurt you?” She seemed to think better of that as she said it. “Your friend’s betrayal must have hurt, of course.”

Hugo shrugged. “Sometimes a woman comes between friends. To be honest, I wasn’t worried. I thought that he’d come out of it with continued exposure to her.”

“I can’t pretend to know how it feels to have lies about myself splashed all over the paper,” Eleanor began.

“It was my father.”

It sat there so starkly. That ugly little truth that Hugo had never dared utter out loud before to anyone but Isobel, and only that once. And not only because there was no one else to hear it. But because naming it gave it power and he had never wanted to do that. He had never wanted to give Isobel the satisfaction—not even in death.

“I was all the old man had,” Hugo managed to say, aware there was a kind of earthquake in him, tearing through him and reducing him to rubble. And yet he stood. “And I was a terrible disappointment to him.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” Eleanor breathed, that honey in her dark eyes gleaming with sympathy. “Maybe you only thought he felt that way.”

“I know he felt that way, little one.” Hugo’s voice was soft. “He told me so.”

And he stopped trying to fight that feeling inside of him then. That sharp thing in his chest only seemed to bleed out more at that stricken look on Eleanor’s lovely face. As if she couldn’t imagine such a thing, that an old man could think so little of his only son.

But Hugo knew he had.

“My father was prepared to put up with a certain amount of foolishness, because he was old-school and he’d had what he called his ‘day in the sun.’ He very much believed that boys were indeed boys.” Hugo felt his mouth curve, though it was no smile. “But his expectation was that such conduct unbecoming in a Duke of Grovesmoor would end. If not during my university years, then shortly thereafter. Except I met Isobel two years after I left Cambridge, when I was still committed to every wild oat a man could sow. And that was when she started her campaign.”

“Surely your father didn’t believe the tabloids.”

“Of course not. My father would never sully his eyes with such trash. The trouble wasn’t the tabloids themselves. It was that everyone who did read the tabloids accepted everything they read in them as fact. And it wasn’t only the scandal rags. There were cleverly disguised hit pieces in more reputable magazines that made me seem seedy and vaguely disgusting. And soon enough, that was how I was discussed. Not just in salacious news programs, but right here, in my father’s own home. To his face.”

“Who would do something like that?” Eleanor asked, and if he hadn’t been looking right at her, with her eyes wide and filled with distress, he might have imagined she was faking. “And why would your father believe the kind of person who would slander his own son directly to him?”

It was an excellent question, and one Hugo wished he could ask the old man.

“Sometimes a rumor is far worse than a fact,” he said instead. “Facts can be proven or disproven, most of the time. But rumor can live on forever. It commands a life of its own and dignified silence doesn’t refute it. And sooner or later, whether you mean to or not, you find that you’re living in it. Against your will.”

“There was nothing you could do?” She shook her head as if to clear it. “No way you could tell the truth?”

“That’s the thing about rumors like that, little one,” Hugo murmured. “They’re more believable than the truth. My father was a man of the world. He’d flirted with his own share of potential scandals in his day. It made no sense to him that a pretty girl like Isobel, who could have anyone, would waste her time pretending to have a relationship with the one man who didn’t want her. And I think you’ll find that it didn’t make sense to anyone else, either.”

“But surely you could prove it.”

“How?” Hugo wasn’t surprised when Eleanor didn’t have an answer. “Where there’s smoke, people always look for a fire. And the more that fire burns, the more everyone believes that you must have had a hand in setting it, or you’d put it out. But Isobel had no intention of ever letting it die down.”

He thought of that endless blue afternoon in all that Santa Barbara sunshine. The way Isobel had smiled at him.

You’ll always be mine, Hugo. Always. No matter where you go or what you do, no one will ever see you without thinking of me.

“I’m surprised you didn’t date her just to keep her quiet,” Eleanor said then, scowling furiously—but not, for once, at him. “Just to make her stop.”

Hugo let out a low noise. “I thought about it, of course. But I didn’t want to be anywhere near her. And then, of course, came Geraldine.”

“None of this is her fault,” Eleanor said at once. Fiercely.

“Of course not,” Hugo said shortly. “I don’t bear the child any ill will.”

“But—”

“But I don’t mind if the world thinks I do,” he finished for her. He shook his head. “Before there was Geraldine, there was Isobel and her pregnancy. And believe me, she used it like a hammer.” He dropped that piece of Eleanor’s hair then, because his hands were curling into fists and he thought he’d better keep them to himself. “She told my father the child was mine.”

“She left you. She married your friend. How could it be yours?”

“She didn’t leave me.” Hugo realized he’d growled that out like a savage, and fought for calm. “We were never together. But she told my father that we had been. And then she told him that I refused to do my duty. That I told her to get rid of it. That I was, in short, every bit the callous and unfeeling character she’d painted me in the tabloids. And in those rumors.”

“You must have insisted on a blood test to prove that you’re not the father.”

“I did,” Hugo bit out. “But he died before I could show him that proof. He had heart failure and never recovered, and doctors can use any terms they wish to explain what happened. But I think the shock killed him.”

He’d forgotten that they were standing in the middle of the ballroom. Because all he could see was Eleanor, and that terrible look on her face. As if there was nothing in the world but the two of them and the way they stood so close together, as if what he was telling her here was far more important than a mere story. As if it was something infinitely more critical than the past he was still paying for.

It was, he understood. He was telling her the truth about the most hated man in England, and she believed him.

She believed him.

Eleanor moved then, tipping herself up on her toes and fitting her palms to his chest. One of them right there where his heart still hurt.

As if she knew.

“I’m so sorry, Hugo,” she whispered, her voice intense and low. “I’m ashamed to say I believed the stories, too.”

Hugo felt a kind of bitterness twist through him then, though there was a warmth in it this time, as if it was something a little more complicated. He reached up and covered the hand over his heart with his.

“Do you know,” he said quietly, “that you are the only person I have ever met who’s apologized? When you are the one who’s done the least damage.”

She bit her lip, and electricity pounded through him, reminding him of all the ways this woman got to him. All the ways she was clearly the death of him.

“I’ve spoken to you as if I knew you. As if the stories I read were the truth, when of course they couldn’t be. The truth is never so black and white, is it? No heroes, no villains, just people.”

“Perhaps. But there are also Isobels in this world. They prey on others because they can. It gives them pleasure. And Eleanor, your sister is one of them.”

She tried to pull her hand away, but Hugo held her fast.

“You don’t understand,” she said, her voice fierce again.

“But I do.” Hugo moved closer then, until there was only the scantest bit of air between the two of them. “Tonight you’re barefoot, your hair is down, every inch of you is feminine and soft.”

“I didn’t expect to run into anyone in what I wear to bed.”

He took his free hand and placed it over her lips. He smiled down into the crease between her eyes. He felt things he’d never thought were real, before tonight.

“Eleanor. Who told you feminine and soft is bad?”

“Not bad,” Eleanor said against his finger, sending delicious little licks of heat spiraling through him. “But not me.” Her frown intensified. “It’s cruel of you to pretend that you can’t see it, now that you’ve met Vivi. I’m not the pretty one. I never was.”

“Your sister is pretty, yes,” Hugo said, dismissively. “In a very particular way that would, I imagine, appeal to a very particular man. But you?” He shifted his hands, smoothing them over her cheeks and then down to curl into the nape of her neck. “Little one. How can you not realize that you are beautiful? Stunning? There is no comparison.”

Her marvelous eyes filled with emotion. Her perfect mouth trembled.

“You don’t have to lie to me, Your Grace,” she whispered.

And Hugo didn’t know what to do with a woman who’d believed that he was a better man than anyone had believed him to be in years—making everything inside him shift and change—but not that she was the most beautiful creature he thought he’d ever beheld.

So he did the only thing he could. He kissed her.