Читать книгу Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8 - Heidi Rice, Annie West - Страница 21

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 she 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.

He had the sinking, lowering notion that all this time, he’d never known real ruin at all.

“You didn’t fire her, did you?” Geraldine demanded, reminding him he was not alone with his brooding.

Hugo eyed her. The little girl had moved further into the room. Now she stood near the fireplace, her hands on her little hips, glaring at her guardian without a seeming care in the world. As if she thought, should there be an altercation, she could take him.

He had tried so hard these past three years, since the accident that had taken Isobel and Torquil. He’d kept his distance from this child. He had tended to Geraldine’s needs, but not in a way that could ever hurt her. Or compromise her. He’d been certain—as certain as his critics, if not more so—that left to his own devices, he could only do harm.

That was what he did, he knew. Harm.

He certainly hadn’t allowed himself to like Gerladine. Or anyone.

But all he could see was Eleanor, then. Her face, so lovely and so fierce, as she’d stood up for Geraldine. It’s not her fault, she’d told him.

And Hugo knew that. He’d gone out of his way to make sure he never brought his feelings about Isobel into any interaction he had with Geraldine. But it hadn’t occurred to him until today—until Eleanor—that he hadn’t let his feelings enter into anything in a very long time.

Because the fact of the matter was, he rather liked this little girl. He liked how unafraid she was. He liked the fact that she was seven years old and yet had no apparent second thoughts about walking straight into her guardian’s library and confronting him. And the more he stared at her, the less she seemed to care. Her little chin tilted up. She even sniffed, as if impatient.

She was a fighter. How could he not adore her for it?

Especially when he’d stopped fighting so long ago.

“If I did fire her, that would be my decision as your guardian and would not require a consultation, Geraldine,” Hugo said reprovingly. But when her face looked stormy, he relented. “But I didn’t let her go.”

He crooked his finger and then pointed to the leather chair across from him. Geraldine made a huffing sound that did not bode well for her teen years, but she obeyed him. With perhaps a little too much stomping, and more attitude than he would have thought possible from a sweet little child, she moved from the fireplace to climb up into the big leather chair. The big piece of furniture seemed to swallow her whole, but that didn’t bother Geraldine. She slid back, stuck her feet out straight in front of her, and crossed her arms over her chest.

Mutinously.

“Where is she if you didn’t get rid of her?” Geraldine asked as if she’d caught Hugo out in a dirty lie.

“I feel certain Miss Andrews told you that she was taking a few days’ break. She does get one, you know. We can’t lock her away in a cage and force her to stay here all the time.”

Though the idea held some appeal.

The little girl’s chin jutted out. “Why not?”

“Excellent question.”

“We should go get her back, then,” Geraldine said, with a wide gesture of one hand, as if Hugo really was an idiot and she was leading him to the right answer because he was taking too long to get there himself.

And the damnedest thing was, Hugo admired that, too.

Geraldine was not yet ten and yet she was showing more fight than he had in the past fifteen years.

Why had he allowed Isobel to paint him the way she had? Of course there was no fighting a slanted story or a nasty rumor, but he hadn’t tried and he hadn’t done anything else, either. He hadn’t pointedly lived a life completely opposed to the one Isobel claimed he did. He’d never even defended himself. He’d told himself it was because he was too proud to dignify her claims with a response, but was that truly it? Or was it the same sort of martyrdom he’d always abhorred when Isobel faked it?

Had he been waiting all this time for someone to look at him and see him and believe that he wasn’t the things that had been said about him?

Maybe there was some virtue in that. Or there could have been—had his father not died believing the very worst of him.

The fact of the matter was, Hugo had never seen the point of fighting battles he’d decided in advance that he couldn’t win. He’d never righted a single wrong. He’d simply sat here and taken it. And to what end?

Whether the public loved him or hated him, he was the only parental influence in this child’s life. And despite that handicap, Geraldine appeared to be thriving. She was flushed with indignation, and if he wasn’t mistaken, love.

Love.

It thudded into him. Then again. Like another fight he was destined to lose. But this time, he didn’t intend to go down alone.

Was it virtue to act as if he was a punching bag for all these years or was it an especially noxious version of self-pity?

Hugo didn’t know. But he did know this. He was a creature of temper and mood, unable to control himself at any time, the tabloids said.

So he saw no reason to start now.

“Yes,” he said slowly, smiling at Geraldine. Until she smiled back, as if they were together in this. Because they were. “We really should get her back. What an excellent idea.”