“I don’t think so,” she said quietly. “You’ve had scandals and overdrawn bank accounts before without getting on a train. What makes this different?”
“I don’t want to talk about London. It’s so boring. What’s not boring is you holed up in this gorgeous house with Hugo Grovesmoor. Something you failed to mention to me, night after night after night. If that’s not a lie, Eleanor, I don’t believe I know what one is.”
“You were certain I would never encounter him,” Eleanor replied, and she was aware of the fact that she was trying much too hard to keep her voice even. Though she allowed the slightest hint of impatience, as if this was one of Vivi’s flights of fancy that she was called upon to temper. Because it should have been. “And I saw no reason to tell you of his comings and goings, because I hardly know when or if I’ll lay eyes on him.”
“You met him before today.”
“Yes, I met him. If you consider being presented to him like any other member of staff ‘meeting’ him.” She made quote marks in the air with her index fingers, and shook her head at her sister. “I think when you meet men it’s a little more momentous than when I do.”
She expected Vivi to argue. But instead, her sister only smiled. Which did not make Eleanor easy in any way, because she knew Vivi. There was always a scheme. There was always the next plan. The smile was never acquiescence.
Or worse, that little voice chimed in, she agrees.
When had she become so awful about her own sister?
And anyway, Vivi was changing the subject. “Why have I been shuffling about London, forced to spend my nights in a grotty bedsit, when you’ve been living it up like the landed gentry?”
“These are the governess’s quarters,” Eleanor said. She made herself smile. “This is what passes for a grotty flat to a duke.”
“You are in terrible, terrible trouble, big sister,” Vivi said, but if there was a storm, it had passed.
Once again, Eleanor saw before her the sister she knew. With a mischievous look in her golden eyes and an infectious grin. She blinked, doubting herself. It was as if she’d made her sister into some kind of enemy the moment she’d dared walk into the house—which said nothing nice about Eleanor. It said a whole lot, however, about jealousy and envy and a whole host of other, vile things that Eleanor didn’t want to admit were sloshing around inside of her.
Congratulations, she thought. You’re a terrible person.
“I know you have to work,” Vivi continued merrily. “I’ll take you to task later. In the meantime, I think I’ll help myself to that glorious bath.”
Eleanor stood there for a long while after her sister disappeared. After she heard the water turn on in the bathroom, splashing into the huge tub. She stood there and she tried to collect herself. She tried to remember the person she’d been before she’d come to this far-off place, and more, before she’d let Hugo touch her. Change her.
Make her into that jealous, dark-minded creature who was selfish beyond measure.
She told herself that it was over. That whatever the spell was that had held her in its grip these last weeks, Vivi’s appearance had broken it. It was time to wake up and remember what she was doing here.
She made the money. Vivi was the one who reeled in men like Hugo. And for good reason. She was the sort of girl who caused scandals that ended up in tabloid newspapers. She was someone.
Eleanor had never been anybody.
She forced herself to leave, then. She closed the door to her own rooms quietly behind her and headed into the hall. She had to find Geraldine and get back to her job, which was the only reason she was here. The fact of the matter was that Vivi should never have come here, but she had. And worse, she’d run straight into the Duke within moments of her arrival, when he could have thrown them both out.
But he hadn’t done that. And Eleanor knew why.
And if something lodged in her heart, making it feel cracked straight through, she told herself it was nothing.
Nothing at all. Nothing new.
Nothing that mattered.
HUGO COULDN’T SLEEP.
As he was not a man unduly plagued with the demands of conscience, this was not an issue he generally struggled with. But it wasn’t some newfound and unruly set of principles that kept him up tonight, roaming his own halls like his very own ghost story.
It was Eleanor.
Eleanor, who he’d come to depend upon over these last weeks. For her starchiness. Her prim disapproval. Every spicy, challenging word that fell from her notably disrespectful mouth—the very same mouth that Hugo had tasted and which haunted him more than he cared to admit to himself, even now.
He had the terrible suspicion she would haunt him forever, not that he allowed himself to think such things. Not when he refused to think about next week, much less the rest of his life. Or anything approaching forever.
But the Eleanor he rather thought he’d come to know had disappeared tonight.
She’d been noticeably absent when he’d run into her and her sister in the hall outside the summer salons, en route to the nursery wing. Gone was the fiercely capable Eleanor who’d been giving him hell and in her place was a far more quiet and distant version, as if she’d been trying to disappear where she stood.
Hugo hated it.
He’d never met Vivi Andrews before. But he knew her at a glance, because he knew her type intimately. It took him all of two seconds on his laptop to find entirely too much about the actual Vivi Andrews, and the sorts of shenanigans she got herself into with high-profile members of the aristocracy. The more he read about her, in fact, the less he understood about Eleanor. How was she so forthright and dependable when Vivi was anything but?
The truth was, the younger Andrews sister—who Eleanor was supporting, if he’d understood that right, which made no sense while Vivi pranced about decked out in the sorts of labels the heiresses of his acquaintance wore because their fortunes were so vast that a six-thousand-pound T-shirt was a “little treat”—was the sort of creature Hugo usually slummed around with. Vivi had showed him her true colors in their first meeting, all batting eyelashes and come-hither smiles as if they’d been in a club instead of a hallway in his ancestral home. And she’d kept it up throughout dinner while Eleanor sat beside her, subdued. Vivi had distinguished herself by being endlessly pouty, unkind at the slightest provocation, and obviously convinced that she was a great, rare beauty when the truth was, thousands of equally ambitious girls looked just like her. Her sister was the rare beauty, but he had no doubt Vivi wouldn’t see it that way.
She looked nothing like Isobel, and yet the resemblance was impossible to miss. Hugo felt Vivi’s attention the way he’d always felt anything that reeked a bit too much of Isobel’s sort—like an oily sort of shame inside him, as if the fact a person like her was so obviously interested in him made him somehow like them.
Because, after all, it had. Given enough time, he’d become exactly who Isobel had made him, hadn’t he?
He hadn’t cared much for that thought, either.
“It astonishes me that you are sisters,” he’d said during their excruciating dinner.
Eleanor appeared to have taken it upon herself to embody the very soul of the starchiest possible governess, with Victorian overtones. Her hair was more severe than he had ever seen it before, wrenched back from her poor face as if she was trying to pull it out, so that only her fringe offered any kind of relief. And he doubted it was a coincidence that she’d chosen