Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8 - Heidi Rice, Annie West - Страница 20

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS VERY early the next morning when Eleanor finally slipped from Hugo’s bed, placing her unsteady feet on the floor beside the massive bed where she’d slept in snatches and learned a whole lot of things about pleasure.

Dark, delirious, wondrous things that still moved in her, making her flush hot and red all over again, just remembering.

She ached everywhere, she realized as she stood. Places she’d had no idea could ache were half on fire, making her feel as if she’d woken up in someone else’s body. There were tugs here and vague abrasions there, and she could remember something wild and carnal and inexpressibly beautiful to explain each one.

Eleanor thought she ought to be ashamed. Maybe she would be, later. When the reality of last night had time to settle. But right here, right now, she didn’t regret a thing.

She found the nightclothes she’d worn last night and pulled them back on, trying hard not to remember exactly how Hugo had pulled each of them off her. Trying hard not to slip off into that same red haze again, all flushed and needy.

She peeked over her shoulder at the bed again, some part of her still unable to believe that any of this had happened. One red-hot image after the next chased itself through her head, in case her body couldn’t tell her what had happened, inside and out. But if she’d had any lingering doubt, the sight of Hugo sprawled out there across the better part of his bed got rid of it.

She had tasted every inch of him. She’d taken that enormous length of his deep into her mouth, and had learned how to taste him and tease him the way he’d done to her. He’d taught her how to kneel up over him, and had taken her that way. He’d taught her all the wicked things he could do with his hands, and she’d tried to do the same to him. Over and over again.

She had no idea there were so many different ways—an infinite number of ways, apparently—to do the same thing. Crack apart like that and fall together, sleep entangled, then wake to do it again.

And the greedy part of her wanted to experience all of them. Every last possible way to explode like that. Here and now, though she was a little bit stiff and still achey. Eleanor didn’t care, as long she got to experience it all with Hugo.

Hugo, who lay on his back with his arms splayed wide, as commanding in his bed as he was out of it. Hugo, who looked more approachable when she slept. No smirking. No mocking tone of voice. No reminders that he considered himself the biggest monster in England, because everyone else did.

Everyone except Eleanor, that was.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and forced herself to turn around. To walk toward the bedroom door, and then, harder still, to walk out and leave Hugo there behind her when that was the last thing she wanted to do.

Because whatever else happened, she had a job to do. A little girl who had enough of people in her life abandoning her in one way or another, and didn’t need more of that from Eleanor.

And if there was a part of her that didn’t want to be there when Hugo woke, well. She told herself that was nothing but her inbred practicality. The man might not have had the relationship everyone thought he’d had with Isobel Vanderhaven, but that didn’t mean he been a saint.

Eleanor refused to be that silly virgin she’d certainly read enough about and seen too many times on-screen. The one who fell head over heels at the first hint of a man’s interest and made a complete fool of herself.

There wasn’t much she could do about the first part of that, but she’d be damned if she’d make a fool of herself. Not if she could avoid it.

Once outside of Hugo’s rooms, she ducked her head down and moved as quickly as she could through the house without actually breaking into a run. It was still early, so she thought it was likely that no one would be up and around yet. Even so, she took the back stairs whenever possible, the better to be sure no one saw her wandering around, so far from her own rooms, in her revealing sleepwear.

“Better safe than sorry,” she muttered to herself.

And then she let out a huge sigh of relief when she made it to her door. All she could think about, then, was that enormous tub in her bathroom and slipping her whole, sweetly aching body into the deep embrace of it. She pushed her way through the door, already piling her hair on the top of her head in anticipation.

“Where have you been?”

Eleanor flinched at the sound of that voice. It startled her so badly that it took her longer than it should have to realize that it was Vivi, of course. Because who else could it be?

She dropped her arms, the hair she hadn’t quite managed to put into a knot tumbling down around her shoulders, and she told herself she had no reason whatsoever to feel guilty. About anything.

And yet that was exactly what she felt as she found her sister standing there in the doorway to the bedroom, her arms crossed and a flat sort of look on her face.

For a moment, they stared at each other across the stillness of the early morning.

“Sometimes when I can’t sleep,” Eleanor said with as much quiet dignity as she could manage, “I walk in the halls. It gets the blood moving, at the very least.”

Vivi let out a small sort of laugh that suggested she didn’t find anything funny at all.

“You can’t possibly expect me to believe that, can you? I’m your sister, not your seven-year-old student.”

“What are you doing here, Vivi?” Eleanor asked softly. “The guest suites are clear across the house.”

Vivi’s mouth was a taut line, and that flat look was still making her new gold eyes look a bit more tarnished than usual. “I went looking for you. I was after a little bit of sister time. And guess what? You haven’t been here for hours.”

“You wanted sister time in the middle of the night?” Eleanor asked, and she didn’t try too hard to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “Did you imagine that I would be awake? Or did you think you would wake me up, even though I have to get up and work in the morning?”

Neither one, she was well aware, said great things about how her sister saw her. Hugo’s words swirled around in her head, and it seemed she couldn’t banish them the way she wished she could. And something sour was sloshing around in her belly, making it worse.

Because Eleanor didn’t know that it would really be all that out of line if Vivi had assumed that Eleanor would be perfectly all right with being woken up at all hours. Wasn’t that what her role had always been? And there was only one person who had demanded Eleanor stay in that role. Eleanor herself.

She had always been so desperate to be needed, because love was tricky and people died and took their love with them. Need was better. Need made her indispensable.

But it had never made her feel as alive as Hugo had. As if she’d been sleepwalking for years.

“Do you think I can’t tell what you’ve been up to?” Vivi asked. Her voice was strange. As flat as her gaze, and yet there was that sharp undercurrent. “How could you do this?”

“I don’t know what you think I’ve done.” Eleanor squared her shoulders and forced herself to ignore the part of her that had always been afraid to square off with Vivi. Because if she lost Vivi on top of everything else she’d lost, what would she have? She clarified. “To you.”

Vivi shook her head. “All the things I’ve done, all the trouble I’ve gone to for us, Eleanor. And you can’t even tell me the truth.”

“I think that’s unfair.”

“If you had something going on with the Duke, you should have told me, so I wouldn’t have bothered making a fool of myself at that dinner last night.” Vivi shook her head. “Am I just a party trick you like to trot out to amuse yourself and your aristocratic friend?”

The sweeping injustice of that was almost enough to knock Eleanor back a step or two.

“I don’t have any ‘aristocratic friends,’ Vivi,” Eleanor managed to say, her voice on the verge of trembling. It felt a lot like anger, something she’d always swallowed down before. Something she’d always pretended she didn’t feel, no matter what. “I think we both know that’s you, not me. I work at Groves House. You’re on holiday. It’s been years since we decided it would make sense for you to make like a socialite and land a rich husband, and all you’ve done since is go to parties and spend the money I make. Which one of us is the party trick?”

She heard her own words hanging there in the quiet of the room, and could feel them shaking around inside of her, like a new kind of shivering. And she didn’t know if she needed to lie down. Or possibly get sick. Or apologize, instantly.

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 she? 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.”