“No one takes this job for the child. One way or another, they always take it for me. The fact that you do not wish to admit this only makes you more curious. And I should not have to tell you that making yourself the focus of my attention...has consequences.”
Eleanor was clenching her hands together entirely too tightly, something she only noticed when they went numb. She forced herself to unlace her fingers and sensation came back in a rush. She ignored it when they began to sting.
“I would prefer not to be crass, Your Grace, but you give me no choice.”
“I am all ears, of course. I enjoy crassness very much. You must realize this.”
“I’m sure you’re a very nice man. Deep down,” she added at his snort. “But of course you must realize that the position’s salary is what’s attractive. While you have a certain charm, I suppose, that really isn’t why I came. I told you before. I was assured—repeatedly—that I would never see you.”
“I have a very large and extraordinarily healthy ego, Miss Andrews, and yet it withers before you. Most women would scramble up the Cliffs of Dover if they imagined they might catch a glimpse of me.”
“I suspect your ego is quite robust and will survive handily. And I am not most women.”
“You most certainly are not.”
Eleanor caught herself before she flung something back at him. There was no call to come over all caustic and acerbic, which seemed to be her happy place where the Duke was concerned. It wouldn’t help her in any way to actively antagonize him. Hugo might have been eyeing her in very much the same way a large, indolent house cat might an extremely foolish mouse. But that didn’t mean she should scamper out there of her own volition and show him her belly.
Think of the money, she told herself sternly. Think of Vivi.
She surged up and onto her feet at that. “It’s late, Your Grace.”
“It is not yet midnight.” He didn’t bother to glance at the watch on his wrist, which Eleanor could tell must have cost a fortune or two, since it looked like it belonged on the side of an old town hall in Prague. “It is scarcely ten.”
“Which is late for those of us who rise with small children in the morning.”
“There it is,” he said softly and, if she was not mistaken, with some satisfaction. “There is that fear of me I recognize.”
“It’s not fear, it’s anxiety,” she corrected him. “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.