Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8. Heidi Rice

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       CHAPTER NINE

      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 to wear black. All black, save for a hint of gray in the shirt she wore beneath her cardigan, as if she was in mourning.

      Or as if she was reacting to her sister’s earlier claim that it was her favorite color. A poke at Vivi, he wondered? Or a twisted sort of penance?

      “Don’t be silly, Your Grace,” Vivi had simpered at him. She’d been in a slinky sort of red dress Hugo thought would have been more appropriate for a club in Central London than a country duke’s dining room. But the point was likely to draw his attention to all the skin the tiny dress left bare. “Everyone swears we are practically twins.”

      He was apparently not supposed to realize that she was being cruel.

      But before he could express his feelings on that—which, it turned out, were extensive and a bit overprotective—Eleanor had sighed. Mightily.

      “No one has ever said that. Not one person, Vivi. Anywhere.” She’d aimed one of her chillier smiles at Hugo. “My sister and I are quite aware of our differences, Your Grace. We choose to revel in them.”

      Vivi laughed then, long and loud. The way Hugo had then realized, belatedly, she would continue to do all night. Because she clearly imagined she was being lively and full of fun, or whatever it was women like her told themselves to justify their behavior. He should be better versed in it, he knew. He’d heard it all before.

      Sometimes from his own mouth.

      He’d settled himself in for an endurance event. But it had turned out that he was more than capable of blocking out the likes of Vivi Andrews. She’d brayed on about the guest suite she’d been given while she remained in Groves House and something about her feelings regarding the Amalfi Coast, and Hugo had watched Eleanor disappear. Right there in front of him. She’d simply...gone away.

      It had made Hugo edgy. And something far darker and more dangerous than that.

      And now he was wandering his own damned halls, scowling at the portraits of men who looked like him, wondering why the plight of a governess and her family were getting to him like this.

      Well. He wasn’t wondering. He knew.

      Watching Vivi create an entire character she called Eleanor—stiff and humorless and faintly doltish and unattractive—while Eleanor sat right there and was not only none of those things, but offered no defense against the brush that was being used to paint her, was maddening. But it was also familiar.

      It was what Isobel had done to him.

      He was in the grand ballroom, glaring out at the rain that lashed at what was left of the garden this far into fall, when he heard a faint noise from behind him. Hugo turned, and for a moment he couldn’t tell if he’d conjured up the sight before him or if she was real.

      But god, how he wanted her to be real.

      Eleanor moved across the floor, light on her bare feet. She wore some sort of soft wrapper that showed him the better part of her legs and made Hugo wonder what was beneath it. But the thing that made his chest hurt was that finally, her hair was down. It wasn’t ruthlessly scraped back and forced to lie flat and obedient against her skull. It was glossy and dark and swirled around her shoulders, making her look softer. Sweeter. Even that razor-sharp fringe seemed blurred.

      Mine, he thought instantly.

      And he wanted her so badly that he assumed this was a dream.

      Until she stopped walking, jerked a little bit, and stared directly at him as if she hadn’t seen him until that very moment.

      “Are СКАЧАТЬ