all, it had failed to dull his reaction to her.
He was hard and needy in an instant, and inviting her into his private library was only going to make it worse. He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew better than to tempt himself—because when had he ever resisted temptation?
But when his hand was on the door, she stopped, and she looked at him as if she was fighting her way out of a magic spell.
“I can’t... Is that your bedroom?”
Hugo was merely a man. And not a good one. It took everything he had not to throw her over his shoulder and carry her off to his actual bedroom.
“That tone of voice would be so much more effective if you were clutching a strand of pearls, I think,” he said instead, like a bloody saint. Maybe that was why he sounded so gruff. “As it is, the offended virgin act needs a little bit of work.”
Eleanor blinked, and straightened. “So I should take that as a yes, this is in fact your bedchamber.”
There was no earthly reason why Hugo should be baring his teeth in a poor semblance of a smile, far too much wolf and very, very little of him—even that less than stellar man he usually was.
“If you are so eager to take to my bed, you need only ask. These games are so unbecoming, Miss Andrews. Do you not think?”
“Your Grace...”
But she didn’t turn tail and run.
Hugo smirked at her, because it was that or touch her, and once he started he doubted he’d stop for at least a week. Maybe three. She’d haunted him across the planet, with her defiant gaze and her unimpressed mouth and all of her mouthwatering curves. He’d decided that if she was going to torture him, she might as well do it in person.
“Relax. This is my library. Not a den of iniquity.” His lips twitched. “Depending, I suppose, on what books you choose to read.”
He threw the door open and strode through. He did not look behind him to see if she followed because that, too, was tempting fate.
If she was walking away from him, he didn’t know what he’d do.
The very thought appalled him. Who hadn’t walked away from England’s most reviled man? He welcomed it. He thrived on it. He certainly shouldn’t care in the least what this governess did.
But once again, she followed him, and he was forced to admit he liked it. And that there was something else simmering in him when she shut the door behind her. It felt a bit too much like relief, though Hugo knew that couldn’t be it. True villains felt nothing, through and through. They were made of stone and had no regrets.
Everybody said so.
He waved his hand at the comfortable leather chair before the crackling fire, and allowed himself a small, triumphant smile when she sat. Obediently. Despite that look in her dark eyes that suggested that at any moment, she might break for it.
Hugo told himself he wouldn’t chase her if she did. Of course he wouldn’t. But as he rid himself of the top hat and his great cloak, he wasn’t entirely sure.
“I’ve been in the grand library downstairs,” Eleanor said after the silence drew out. “This is built on a smaller scale, but is no less impressive.”
“I’m delighted you think so. I did wonder.”
She was looking at his books, not him, but he was sure he saw her lips move as if she was biting back a smile.
“Fat mysteries next to battered paperbacks,” she murmured, gazing around the room. “Ruminations on astral physics and—is that philosophy?—next to the entire series of Harry Potter books.”
“Signed first editions, obviously.”
“Careful,” Eleanor said softly, still not looking at him. “Books tell a whole lot more about a person than the things they say. Or the things others say. Well-worn books tell all manner of inconvenient truths about their owners.”
Something rushed through Hugo then, almost as if he was lightheaded. Or drunk.
Foreboding, he thought grimly.
As if, were she to look too closely at the truths his books told about him, she’d know what was real and what wasn’t. And everything would change. He would change.
And Hugo was perfectly content to stay exactly as he was. Hated and all the more powerful for it. The more they made him into the bogeyman, the happier he was.
Because all those people who had bought Isobel’s act deserved to imagine that the love child she’d made with that idiot Torquil was forced to pay for her parents’ sins in the grip of a monster like him. They deserved to worry themselves sick about it, torturing themselves as they imagined scenes of neglect and abuse, because that was the least that could be expected from the villain Isobel had created.
“Every good story needs a villain, darling,” she’d told him archly that first time.
That being the first time Hugo had woken to find a version of himself he didn’t recognize in the papers. The first time he’d had the sickening realization that the fake version was more believable. That even when he tried to clear his name or at least tell a different side to the story, no one wanted to hear it. Terrible Hugo was far more compelling than the real one ever could have been.
He remembered the time he’d tracked her down across the planet in Santa Barbara, California, to demand that she stop the insanity, years into her game. That she stop telling those lies. That she leave him out of the sick games she liked to play with people’s lives—and not because it bothered him. He’d long passed the point where anything she did could bother him. But his father had still been alive then, and it had wrecked the old man.
“Hurting your lovely old father isn’t my goal, of course,” Isobel had murmured, out by one of those impossibly still and blue California pools, all hipbones and malice in a tiny bikini. She’d smiled at him over her oversized sunglasses. “It’s a happy bonus, that’s all.”
“There is nothing you can do to me, Isobel,” he’d told her fiercely then. “You cannot take my heritage from me. You cannot siphon off a single penny of my fortune. Whether I am liked or I am hated, I will still become the Duke in due course. Grovesmoor will carry on. Don’t you understand? I’m bulletproof.”
But she’d only laughed at him.
“And I’m a better storyteller,” she’d said.
Hugo had borne the brunt of that damned story of hers for years. He still did. But now he had his own weapon in the form of a child everyone assumed he hated and the world’s endless censure.
And he had no intention of giving it up.
Certainly not to a governess with the body of a screen idol and too much uncertain temper in her dark eyes. A woman who looked for truth in his books and didn’t know when to back down from a fight she couldn’t win.
No matter how much he wanted her.
