that was just something he did as a matter of course, the way the tabloids had always claimed—or if he was making fun of her, somehow.
She’d never heard of mockery by kiss, but what did she know? She’d spent her life working rather than socializing, and she’d never bloomed into a needy curiosity of the opposite sex the way everyone had claimed she would. Something that made her profoundly grateful, as what she didn’t need or even wonder about, she couldn’t miss.
“I think it’s best if we pretend this never happened,” she said, as evenly as she could, pleased to find she’d managed to strip the tremor from her voice.
Hugo regarded her from the near foot of height he had on her, and the fact he was dressed so casually, she realized, did nothing to take away from that matter-of-fact power he seemed to exude even so. How had she not noticed that before?
Because he hides it, a voice from deep inside of her replied with far too much authority. In the same way you lie to yourself about the things you need.
Eleanor didn’t like that at all. She ignored it.
“That will make it difficult, you understand, to sell your salacious story to the tabloids,” Hugo was saying in a cold sort of tone, as if he was discussing something that wouldn’t affect him one way or the other.
“I couldn’t do that if I wanted to, which I don’t.” Eleanor thought her voice softened at the end there, so she tried to even it out again. She put her spine into it. “I signed an extremely comprehensive nondisclosure agreement, Your Grace. Surely you must be aware of it.”
“What I am aware of is that the penalty for breaking that nondisclosure agreement is a certain amount of pounds sterling. Should the tabloids offer, say, twice that amount, it might well be worth it to break the agreement. To a certain type of person, of course.”
“I...” Eleanor very rarely found herself a loss for words. She didn’t understand the sensation warring inside of her. That strange longing, or the fact she had to curl her hands into fists at her side to keep them to herself. She, who was not the sort of person who liked to touch others or even to be touched herself. She, who had never had to fight not to touch someone in her life. She was baffled. “I would never do that.”
“Because you are such a good person, naturally. My mistake.”
His sardonic tone could have stripped the paint from the walls and Eleanor nearly checked to see if it had. But didn’t, because she could feel her reaction in the flush that heated her cheeks, and she thought that was more than enough of a response.
“Because who would do that?” she asked, almost helplessly.
The expression on the Duke’s face was all razor-sharp amusement, but all Eleanor could feel in the space between them was more of that same bitterness that cut a little too close to despair. Dark and thick and everywhere.
Hopeless, she thought, and didn’t know why that made her ache again, the way she had when he’d kissed her. Only sharper.
“Everyone has their price, I assure you,” Hugo said quietly.
As if he was making a prediction. A terrible one.
“Do you?” Eleanor dared to ask.
The expression on his face then made her heart kick at her, then sink into that same sharp ache. But his laugh was worse, dark enough to fill the hall, if not the grand house arrayed all around them, too.
“Especially me, Miss Andrews,” he told her, almost gently. Though his dark eyes blazed, and were anything but gentle. Anything but soft. “Me most of all.”
* * *
Eleanor woke in a room fit for a princess and told herself that the unsettling scene in the hallway that had kept her awake and that kiss that had invaded her dreams hadn’t happened.
Because surely she could not possibly have been so stupid as to go full Jane Eyre on the very first day of her new job, within hours of meeting the Duke and his ward. Before she’d even unpacked her case or figured out what her new job actually entailed. Eleanor had never been that kind of silly. She’d never had the time or, if she was honest, the inclination to fling herself headlong into the sort of mad passions and silly entanglements the bright young things all around her seemed to flock to so mindlessly, like moths to a wholly avoidable flame.
Until last night, Eleanor would have confidently asserted that she simply didn’t have those sorts of feelings or bodily reactions. That she wasn’t wired that way.
She decided she would treat that kiss as if it hadn’t happened, because it shouldn’t have. And because she had no idea how to handle all the things she felt. As if she was a moth battering itself against a light after all.
But she soon found that it didn’t matter how she handled what should never have happened, because the Duke was nowhere to be found over the next few weeks.
Eleanor told herself that was a good thing.
Geraldine was a bright, often funny kid, and even on her less than stellar days, it was far more interesting to work with her than it was to answer ringing phones and take the odd bit of abuse from walk-ins and disgruntled clients and snarky deliverymen. Far better Geraldine than her last immediate supervisor, Eleanor thought more than once.
“I feel terrible that I pushed you into taking this strange job,” Vivi told her a few days into her time at Groves House.
“It’s actually a good fit, believe it or not. I like it.”
Vivi plowed right on, her voice merry and sharp. “I bullied you into it and now you’re trapped in the bowels of Yorkshire in some moldering old stack of stones.”
Eleanor was sunk deep into her luxurious bathtub, bubbles high and the hot water silky against her skin. She had a book on her little bath tray, a glass of wine and some fine cheese she’d never tasted before, and a fire crackling in the other room. She and Geraldine had spent the day investigating the sciences and giggling uproariously for no particular reason, until Eleanor had delivered her to the nannies who supervised the little girl’s tea and bedtime.
“The poor tyke can’t go to a proper school, can she?” the slightly friendlier of the two notably unfriendly nannies had said out in the hall after Geraldine had run into her rooms, as if Eleanor had argued otherwise. “Those worthless journos won’t leave her alone for a minute. If I knew who sold them stories about the Duke I’d give them a piece of my mind, believe me.”
As if Hugo was a good man who merited that kind of defense.
The other woman had huffed off after Geraldine. Leaving Eleanor finished with lessons—and thus finished with her work for the day—at four-thirty. Which was late, as they were usually finished hours sooner unless they’d taken a little trip further afield.
Eleanor had never had such easy, comfortable hours.
But for some reason, she didn’t tell Vivi any of that, and not only because that sharp merriment in her voice suggested her sister had been tossing back spirits.
“I’m fine, really,” Eleanor said instead, like a proper martyr.
And felt terrible about herself as Vivi mouthed a few more drunken apologies, then rang off.
