“If you don’t like your life, you should change it,” Vivi said quietly. “I’ll help. But Hugo Grovesmoor isn’t a change, Eleanor. He’s an atom bomb. And I understand that you’re hopped up on hormones right now and feeling lavish, but I don’t think you’re prepared for the damage a man like him will do.”
“I love you, Vivi,” Eleanor managed to say past the sudden, sinking feeling inside of her, because who was she kidding? She knew nothing about men, much less men like Hugo. Why was she so certain she was right and Vivi was wrong? “You know I do. But I have to get ready for my day.”
“I love you, too,” Vivi retorted. “And don’t worry. I’m going to prove it. I’ll take care of you. I always said I would.”
Eleanor didn’t know what that meant and more, she was certain she didn’t want to know, especially once Vivi left.
She ran her bath and she sat in it for a long time, until the water grew cold and the clock in her living room told her it was time to move. Then she climbed out, toweled off, and got dressed for her usual day with Geraldine as if she was still the same old Eleanor in the same old body she’d had before.
Because she was, damn it. No atom bombs. No damage.
She was exactly who she’d always been, despite her ill-considered words to Vivi. She castigated herself for each and every one of them as she took Geraldine through her lessons, the last she’d have for a few days now that Eleanor’s initial six weeks were up and Eleanor was due a brief holiday. They talked about what Geraldine would do over her break. They talked about the books Geraldine was reading and Geraldine’s many adventures with Pono, the rooster plush toy she liked best.
They did not see the Duke. Eleanor told herself she was grateful. Because she didn’t want to be that silly virgin—the one even her own sister seemed certain she already was—and that meant she’d needed the day to regain her equanimity.
“You’re fine now,” she told herself stoutly as she climbed the stairs from the nursery that led to her rooms. “Perfectly fine, as ever.”
But when she let herself into her rooms, Vivi was waiting. Again.
“You should have just had a cot brought in,” Eleanor said mildly.
“I think you’d better pack, love,” Vivi replied. “We’ll need to leave tonight.”
“No need for that, surely,” Eleanor said. She sank down on the nearest upright, Elizabethan chair. “We can leave in the morning. More chance of a train, I’d think.”
“You don’t understand,” Vivi said, and while her voice was patient, her gaze was not. Her eyes fairly danced, too bright and a bit too sharp, as if she’d been at the spirits again. “You’re not going to want to be here in the morning.”
Eleanor discovered that she was tired. Very, very tired. That was what happened when a person got all of about twelve minutes of sleep all night long. She couldn’t say she regretted it. But it had obviously dulled her brain, because she wasn’t following Vivi at all.
“Vivi,” she began, “I really don’t...”
“I told you I would take care of you and I meant it,” her sister said stoutly. “There are certain tabloids that are so desperate for a story about Hugo that they’d pay anything for a fake one. Which means they’d pay twice that for a real one.”
Eleanor was glad she was sitting down, because she thought that if she hadn’t been, she might have fallen.
“No,” she managed to say from a far distance, while her ears buzzed at her and her lunch threatened the back of her throat. “I signed a nondisclosure agreement. I can’t sell anything.”
“You can’t,” Vivi said with a hard sort of shrug. “But I can. There’s been nothing new on Hugo in ages. Everyone’s tired of speculating what horrors he’s visiting on that poor kid. A sex romp with the governess is exactly what they’d expect, isn’t it?”
“I forbid it,” Eleanor snapped, and she hardly recognized her own voice. Or the fact she’d surged to her feet and had balled her hands up into fists.
Vivi only eyed her from across the room, that pitying look on her face again.
“I thought you’d say something like that.”
“You thought correctly.”
“Which is why I didn’t consult you.” Vivi shook her head. “It’s done, Eleanor. We have five hundred thousand pounds in our account and you don’t have to say a word. Or do another thing. Our troubles are over. But the story is running tomorrow.” Vivi tilted her head, taking in the house all around them. This life Eleanor had known better than to get too attached to—hadn’t she? And Hugo, whose name seemed to detonate inside of her, shaking through her. Shaking her. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t be here when he reads it.”
ELEANOR HAD BETRAYED HIM.
What bothered Hugo most was that somehow, this entirely predictable turn of events surprised him.
“Off to catch the last train,” Mrs. Redding had said yesterday afternoon when Hugo had actually lowered himself to ask where Eleanor was, with her usual disapproving sniff. “A bit keen to celebrate her time off, if you ask me.”
“No one did,” Hugo had replied, with a smile. A cheeky one. Which had done absolutely nothing but make the old woman roll her eyes. Their love language, he’d told himself.
But that had been before the tabloids published their usual filth and innuendo in the morning. That had been when he was still looking forward to seeing her. Craving it, if he was honest. He’d woken yesterday morning to find her missing from his bed and it 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