LITMIR.BIZ

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already piling her hair on the top of her head in anticipation.

      “Where have you been?”

      Eleanor flinched at the sound of that voice. It startled her so badly that it took her longer than it should have to realize that it was Vivi, of course. Because who else could it be?

      She dropped her arms, the hair she hadn’t quite managed to put into a knot tumbling down around her shoulders, and she told herself she had no reason whatsoever to feel guilty. About anything.

      And yet that was exactly what she felt as she found her sister standing there in the doorway to the bedroom, her arms crossed and a flat sort of look on her face.

      For a moment, they stared at each other across the stillness of the early morning.

      “Sometimes when I can’t sleep,” Eleanor said with as much quiet dignity as she could manage, “I walk in the halls. It gets the blood moving, at the very least.”

      Vivi let out a small sort of laugh that suggested she didn’t find anything funny at all.

      “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that, can you? I’m your sister, not your seven-year-old student.”

      “What are you doing here, Vivi?” Eleanor asked softly. “The guest suites are clear across the house.”

      Vivi’s mouth was a taut line, and that flat look was still making her new gold eyes look a bit more tarnished than usual. “I went looking for you. I was after a little bit of sister time. And guess what? You haven’t been here for hours.”

      “You wanted sister time in the middle of the night?” Eleanor asked, and she didn’t try too hard to keep the skepticism out of her voice. “Did you imagine that I would be awake? Or did you think you would wake me up, even though I have to get up and work in the morning?”

      Neither one, she was well aware, said great things about how her sister saw her. Hugo’s words swirled around in her head, and it seemed she couldn’t banish them the way she wished she could. And something sour was sloshing around in her belly, making it worse.

      Because Eleanor didn’t know that it would really be all that out of line if Vivi had assumed that Eleanor would be perfectly all right with being woken up at all hours. Wasn’t that what her role had always been? And there was only one person who had demanded Eleanor stay in that role. Eleanor herself.

      She had always been so desperate to be needed, because love was tricky and people died and took their love with them. Need was better. Need made her indispensable.

      But it had never made her feel as alive as Hugo had. As if she’d been sleepwalking for years.

      “Do you think I can’t tell what you’ve been up to?” Vivi asked. Her voice was strange. As flat as her gaze, and yet there was that sharp undercurrent. “How could you do this?”

      “I don’t know what you think I’ve done.” Eleanor squared her shoulders and forced herself to ignore the part of her that had always been afraid to square off with Vivi. Because if she lost Vivi on top of everything else she’d lost, what would she have? She clarified. “To you.”

      Vivi shook her head. “All the things I’ve done, all the trouble I’ve gone to for us, Eleanor. And you can’t even tell me the truth.”

      “I think that’s unfair.”

      “If you had something going on with the Duke, you should have told me, so I wouldn’t have bothered making a fool of myself at that dinner last night.” Vivi shook her head. “Am I just a party trick you like to trot out to amuse yourself and your aristocratic friend?”

      The sweeping injustice of that was almost enough to knock Eleanor back a step or two.

      “I don’t have any ‘aristocratic friends,’ Vivi,” Eleanor managed to say, her voice on the verge of trembling. It felt a lot like anger, something she’d always swallowed down before. Something she’d always pretended she didn’t feel, no matter what. “I think we both know that’s you, not me. I work at Groves House. You’re on holiday. It’s been years since we decided it would make sense for you to make like a socialite and land a rich husband, and all you’ve done since is go to parties and spend the money I make. Which one of us is the party trick?”

      She heard her own words hanging there in the quiet of the room, and could feel them shaking around inside of her, like a new kind of shivering. And she didn’t know if she needed to lie down. Or possibly get sick. Or apologize, instantly.

      But she didn’t do any of those things. She should have said something years ago. She’d bitten her tongue and she’d bitten her tongue—and it was funny, wasn’t it, that it took Hugo teaching her all the other, more fun things she could do with it to loosen it at last.

      Eleanor waited to feel shamed by that, but it didn’t come.

      “This is why they call him a monster,” Vivi said softly. “You know that, right? He ruins everything he touches. Even us.”

      Abruptly, Eleanor was finished with this conversation. She’d had enough. She straightened herself up and reminded herself that she was a grown woman. Not a teen who’d been caught sneaking about after curfew. She didn’t have to stand here and offer explanations.

      And she certainly didn’t need to listen to her sister’s malicious and uninformed thoughts about Hugo.

      “I don’t need an interrogation, Vivi,” she said then. Not unkindly. Just matter-of-factly. “I really do have to work in a couple of hours.”

      “You can’t possibly think—” Vivi began, a scornful sort of note in her voice that Eleanor didn’t like at all.

      “I don’t ask you to account for yourself, do I?” she retorted, cutting Vivi off as she moved across the floor toward the doorway her sister stood in. “I choose to believe that everything you do, you do with both our best interests at heart. I don’t understand why you can’t extend me the same courtesy.”

      She brushed past Vivi then, half expecting her sister to grab her arm and escalate things the way she’d been known to do in the past, but Vivi only watched her—closely—as she made her way into the bathroom. Eleanor turned on the taps, ran her fingers through the water as she fiddled with the temperature, and pretended everything was normal. That she was still a virgin. That she was still the same person she’d been yesterday.

      That she hadn’t spent her night so full of Hugo in every possible way that she could barely breathe now.

      The truth was, she didn’t want to breathe.

      And love her sister as she might, she didn’t want to share what had happened with her. Eleanor wanted to keep it to herself. She wanted to hold it tight.

      She wanted to hoard it, a bright, gleaming evening set against the rest of her practical life.

      “He will chew you up and spit you out,” Vivi said darkly from the door. “That’s what he does, like it’s his job. Because he doesn’t have a real job.”

      Eleanor shook the water off her hand as she straightened. There were so many things she could say to that. For example, she could point out that Vivi had dressed for dinner last night as if she was perfectly willing to risk a few tooth marks. But she didn’t. She only walked to the bathroom door and she smiled at her sister.

      “Are you concerned for me?” she asked quietly. “Or is this something else?”

      Vivi flushed at that. Her eyes narrowed. “Of course I’m concerned for you. What else would it be?”

      “I can’t imagine.”

      “I’m not jealous of you, Eleanor, if that’s what you mean.”

      “Perish the thought,” Eleanor said dryly.

      “The truth is, I know what men like Hugo Grovesmoor are like. You don’t. I’ve spent years around his type while you’ve...”

      “Yes.”

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