“Given that you had your back arched and your eyes closed while you rode my hand, I rather doubt you have the slightest idea how close you came to bringing down the whole of my collection on your head.”
“I wish it had,” she said, and while her gaze grew darker, her tone only chilled further. “Everything that’s happened here is almost too inappropriate to bear. I will tender my resignation in the morning, of course.”
Hugo lifted one shoulder, then dropped it. “If you wish. But it will be a wasted effort. I won’t accept it.”
She scowled at him. “Of course you will.”
He didn’t know why she amused him. She shouldn’t have. He’d fired many of her predecessors for far less than this. The one who’d tracked him down in the gardens to let him know she was without her undergarments. The one who’d pouted prettily at him over Geraldine’s head when the child had needed a doctor. The alarming one who’d left lavender-scented unmentionables all over the house, for servants and Hugo alike to find in the most curious of places. He hadn’t thought twice about sacking any of them.
He should have welcomed Eleanor’s resignation. Hell, he should have demanded it himself the moment he’d seen her outside the nursery, divested of that awful coat and obviously a problem. With killer curves.
Hugo had no idea what the hell was wrong with him.
“I fear I must remind you—and not for the first time—that I am the Duke of Grovesmoor.”
“I know who you are. Everybody knows who you are.”
“Then you should know how pointless it is to argue with me.” He watched as she rose to her feet, and didn’t bother to hide his satisfaction when she had to reach out a hand to steady herself. “Instead of discussing resignations that will never come to pass, why don’t you tell me why you insist on scraping your hair back into that painful-looking bun?”
“Because it’s professional,” she snapped. “And also none of your business.”
Hugo kept his gaze trained on hers. Very slowly, very deliberately, he lifted his hand and put the fingers he’d sunk deep inside of her softness into his own mouth. Then licked them clean.
Her mouth fell open. Her pretty face went pale, then red.
“I can still taste you, Eleanor,” he said, a bit more roughly than planned, because she affected him too damned much. “It’s a bit too late for boundaries, don’t you think?”
Eleanor flinched. And he wasn’t at all surprised when she turned around, then fled the library and his presence, coming as close to running from the room as a person could without actually breaking into a sprint.
Hugo didn’t blame her at all.
He blamed himself. And the fact he really could taste her, sweet and sharp and intoxicating, was his own cross to bear as the night wore on. As he sat in his library and brooded into his fire and contemplated just how destroyed he was. How much of a monster was he, really, if he’d become the disreputable, distasteful Old Duke locked away in his ancient house, terrifying virgins? Why not simply start belching out flames and singeing the livestock, while he was at it?
But when the next day came and went with no resignation letter on his desk and Eleanor still in residence, his commitment to his self-flagellation...shifted.
Because it was one thing to lure an unwilling virgin into his dragon’s lair.
It was something else again when she knew who he was, and what he might do...and stayed anyway.
“YOU HAVE A VISITOR.”
Eleanor looked up from the textbook she and Geraldine were poring over in the grand library to see Mrs. Redding standing over them, looking more crisp and disapproving than usual. Which was quite a feat.
“A visitor?” she echoed, trying to work out from the other woman’s expression what that could possibly mean. Eleanor didn’t know anyone in the area. Aside from a few rambles about the village with Geraldine, she hadn’t spent much time off Hugo’s estate in the five and a half weeks she’d been here.
“It is not encouraged for staff to invite friends and family to the estate,” the housekeeper said coldly, as if she’d caught Eleanor throwing a party like an errant teen. “We are not guests of His Grace. We are members of his staff. I’m certain this was covered extensively in the interview with the placement agency.”
“I haven’t invited anyone,” Eleanor protested, but it was no use. Having rendered her judgment, Mrs. Redding had already turned and was making her brisk way to the door, every line of her body showing her offense at Eleanor’s transgression.
Eleanor gave Geraldine a reading assignment to keep her occupied, then followed Mrs. Redding’s crisp footsteps toward the front of the house.
There was only one person who knew where she was, but there was no way Vivi would be here, surely. Vivi preferred to stay in the bright lights of London, or in the posh homes of friends abroad. She certainly didn’t venture into the north of England. Under any circumstances.
That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it? she chastised herself as she walked.
Something was the matter with her. It had been growing inside of her since that terrible night in the Duke’s private library a week ago. As if he’d infected her with his touch. With the things he’d made her feel. She found herself tense and strange. Snappish with Vivi on the phone and even less able to sleep than she had been before.
It was her horror with her own behavior, she told herself stoutly as she made her way toward the great foyer. She’d allowed herself to be compromised and worse, she kept letting it happen.
The Duke hadn’t touched her again, which meant it was all she thought about.
But what he was doing was worse. Dropping by Geraldine’s lessons as the mood took him, for example, when Eleanor had assumed he was off somewhere else being Hugo on his usual international stage.
“This does not sound like the Latin I was forced to learn,” Hugo had said from behind her, out in the back gardens one unexpectedly fine morning, making Eleanor jump as she walked and then instantly try to conceal her reaction from Geraldine.
“It’s French,” Eleanor had said sternly.
“I am aware of that, thank you,” Hugo had replied as he’d moved to walk beside her. In French, which had made Geraldine giggle.
And Eleanor had wanted nothing more than to ask him to leave them to their walk and French conversation, but, of course, she couldn’t. It was his property. And his ward, for that matter. But she’d been psyching herself up to demand he respect Geraldine’s lesson time when he started talking to the little girl directly.
In perfect French, unlike Eleanor’s, which had been cobbled together from her time in school and the job she’d had for a year when she was barely twenty at a French company based in England.
And he kept it up for the better part of the next twenty minutes, as if Eleanor wasn’t there.
It had made her heart beat a little too fast in her chest. And it had made Geraldine glow, which was worse—because Eleanor had no defense against her scrappy charge.
And when he took his leave he bowed to Geraldine and only pinned Eleanor briefly with an unreadable look in his dark whiskey eyes. That had haunted her long after.
“Come have dinner with me,” he’d said another afternoon, appearing in the library when Eleanor had thought she and Geraldine were on their own.
Eleanor had instantly checked to see where the little girl was, but she was still at one of the tables in the center of the huge library, poring over a dictionary as she picked