“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.
ELEANOR COULD ONLY stare at the Duke’s book collection for so long before it became awkward. Or rather, a little too obvious that she was going out of her way to avoid looking at him directly.
She told herself she was simply appreciating the amount of literature he kept on his shelves and at hand at all times, that was all. The truth was she’d never lived in a place where she could keep more than her absolute most favorite books on what little shelf space she could spare. She wouldn’t have minded spending a few hours getting lost in this place.
But, of course, her employer had not called her into his library to offer her the chance to browse.
Pull yourself together, Eleanor, she chided herself.
She sat on the edge of a buttery soft leather chair, afraid to let herself sink back into it. Afraid she’d never pull herself out again. But when she was finally sure that her expression was nothing but serene and dared to look at him again, everything had gotten much worse.
Much, much worse.
Because while Hugo had removed that top hat and cloak that made him look like something out of the sort of fantasies Eleanor had never had before coming to Groves House, Hugo in nothing but exquisitely fitted dark trousers and a white shirt that opened at the neck was infinitely more dangerous.
And tempting in all kinds of ways she’d never experienced before in her life.
She could feel each and every temptation as if it was a separate strand of heat, swirling around inside of her and making her feel like a stranger to herself.
Hugo moved from the great desk where he’d carelessly tossed his coat and hat, and stalked across the room toward her. Of course he wasn’t stalking, Eleanor told herself sharply. The man was simply walking from one end of the library to the other. The way people did when they wished to cross a space.
There was no reason at all that she should find herself holding her breath the way she was. Or clenching tight every single muscle in her body as she perched on the edge of that heavy chair, until she thought she might snap in half.
Hugo dropped himself down into the leather chair across from hers. He did not exactly sit nicely. Instead, of course, he sprawled. He was bigger every time she looked at him, it seemed, and his solidly built body covered more than simply the chair. His legs were long and he thrust them out before him, eating up the thick rug that was all that sat between their chairs.
He wasn’t simply sitting there, Eleanor thought, with a mounting sense of unease. He seemed to claim the entire room with that offhanded masculine grace of his. As if he was the hazard, not the fire, which crackled away beside them and yet seemed to dim everything that wasn’t Hugo.
It would be a lot easier, Eleanor reflected with no little hysteria, if the man was as seedy and dissolute as he’d always seemed in the tabloids. Instead of finely chiseled everywhere and exuding entirely too much sheer, powerful certainty the way other men reeked of cologne.
“How fares my ward?” Hugo asked.
So politely, so mildly, that Eleanor thought she must have been imagining the strange currents that seemed to fill the room—and her—with such an odd, electric sensation. It was clearly her, she told herself sternly. She was the one who was having some kind of allergic reaction to being in this man’s presence. Or perhaps it was all those centuries of Grovesmoor influence and authority that he wore so easily when he was meant to be nothing but a layabout. Eleanor supposed it could even be the broad span of his shoulders, entirely too sculpted and athletic for a man so famously devoted to his own leisure.
But when she met his gaze, she understood that she wasn’t suffering from some allergy to the aristocracy. Or if she was, he was too. Because his dark eyes burned with a bright, intent fire Eleanor didn’t recognize, but could feel. Everywhere.
“Geraldine is very well,” she said before she forgot to respond. Which wouldn’t do