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
