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
