“It makes me anxious to have these confusing conversations. Surely you can understand that. I work for you.”
“Of course I can’t understand any such thing. I’ve never worked for anyone in all my days.”
Eleanor waved a hand at the stuffed shelves on all sides. “Thank goodness you have all these books, then, to allow you a different perspective than your own.”
“I think you’re lying again, Miss Andrews,” Hugo said, and his voice had gone silky. Dark. Something much worse than simply decadent.
And it shuddered through Eleanor. It made her ache. Everywhere.
Her pulse fluttered about weakly and she thought perhaps she shouldn’t have had those prawns for her tea. Then she wondered what had become of her that she was standing here, actively wishing she was ill. Instead of the alternative.
“You’ve lost me once again,” she told him. Faintly.
“What you’re feeling right now is not fear,” Hugo told her, and there was that certainty again. Pouring out of him as if he’d never suffered a moment’s doubt about anything in his charmed life. “Or anxiety about speaking to your employer. You can feel how quickly your heart beats, can you not? And that hot and restless yearning in the pit of your stomach?”
She flushed hot and, she feared, red. “No.”
“The funny thing about a man like me is that I cannot abide lies to my face. There are too many in print.” He smiled. “Try again.”
“I’m a bit overtired, actually. I’d like to be excused so I can take to my bed, please.”
“Bed is the cure, Miss Andrews, but I’m not talking about sleeping. And I think you know it.”
Eleanor found she was gaping at him. Again. And this time, she didn’t have it in her to do anything about it.
“Are you... You can’t...”
And Hugo laughed, stealing the heat from the fire and the air from the room.
Then, worse, he unfolded himself from his chair and rose to his feet. And suddenly, the library seemed like a closed fist—a vicious and unbreakable grip all around her. Forget breathing—Eleanor wasn’t sure she could stand. But she also couldn’t seem to move away the way everything in her screamed she should. It was as if she was frozen in place, though there wasn’t a single part of her that was cold.
Not one.
“You look very much like a woman who can think of nothing at all but the way I might kiss you,” Hugo said softly.
“That can’t happen,” Eleanor breathed.
“It already has. It will again. I’m afraid it is inevitable.”
He reached over and fit his hands to her cheeks. And as if that was not bad enough, he used one thumb to trace slowly, lazily over her mouth, as if he was learning the contours of her lips.
If he’d doused her in gasoline and lit a match, she could not have burned hotter. Or brighter. And god help her, it was all so wrong.
“See?” His voice was so low, so sure, it seemed to interfere with her ribs. “Not fear at all.”
He shifted, lifting her chin and her face toward his, and Eleanor panicked. Or anyway, that was what she thought that was, that blinding rush of sensation that was too electric and too impossible to be borne.
“I’m asexual,” she blurted out.
She expected that announcement to stop him. To stop everything. To make all of this stop pulsing and whirling and make a little sense again.
But Hugo made a noise, deep in his throat, that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a sort of growl. He didn’t let her go. If anything, his hands held her faster. And she felt them in even more places.
“Are you?” He didn’t sound particularly fussed.
“Well, yes.” This close, it was almost impossible to remember what she meant to say—it was those eyes of his. And worse, his mouth. His lush, wicked mouth, that hovered far too close to hers and made everything in her a molten sort of heat. “I always have been, I suppose.”
“Have you?”
“Yes,” she said, with a bit more asperity. She would have kicked herself if she could. And if she could remember how to operate her legs. “I don’t feel things, you see. I’m sorry if that makes things awkward.”
“It would,” Hugo agreed. He moved closer to her, making his impossibly well-formed chest part of the whole...problem. “But I think you feel quite a lot.”
“I most certainly do not,” Eleanor retorted, despite the fact that she did indeed feel entirely too much. Everywhere. And constantly. And she couldn’t tell if she was sick or panicked or something in between. But she was certain there was some other explanation than the heat she could see in his whiskey-colored eyes.
“I suspect that what you’ve been, little one,” Hugo murmured, his voice a low rumble that she could feel inside of her like a kind of earthquake, “is bored.”
And then he set his mouth to hers, and proved it.
THIS KISS WAS different from the last.
Eleanor would not have imagined in a million years that she would ever be in a position where she was noting the difference between kisses, having never expected to spend much time kissing anyone, but here she was. This one was different than the lazy way he’d taken her mouth in the hall outside the nursery.
Much different. Much...hotter.
There was urgency this time. Bright fire and driving need.
Or maybe, she thought with no little wonder, that was her.
Hugo dropped his hands from her face and slid them down her back. He pulled her up against him, and it was as if everything inside her head simply went white. Blank. She disappeared into the sound of her heart, clattering wildly against her ribs, and the impossible, wild beauty of his mouth on hers.
Over and over again.
In some distant part of her mind, Eleanor knew this was a mistake. She knew it. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. She didn’t want to stop herself. He angled his head and took the kiss deeper. Hotter. Wetter and wilder.
And she was content to let him guide her. Teach her. Take her over and burn her alive.
He kissed her again and again, bending her backward as he did. One of his hands found the small of her back and held her fast against him as he continued to use that mouth of his like some kind of slick weapon. Eleanor found her arms around his neck, but had no memory of putting them there. Maybe there was something inside of her that knew she needed to hold on. Or be lost forever in this storm she should have had the good sense to avoid.
But
