LITMIR.BIZ

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      That was what the paper screeched, in that awful tone they used when they were putting words into people’s mouths. Then again, he imagined a woman who could giggle aggressively the way Vivi Andrews had could turn a pointed phrase or two when she had a mind to.

      He doesn’t give a toss about poor Isobel’s baby, preferring depraved sex romps in his country estate to changing nappies.

      It was nothing he hadn’t read before a thousand times. It wasn’t even particularly well done, in his opinion, given he was now a kind of connoisseur of tabloid hit pieces. A giant spread with vague accusations about unsavory sexual practices, a glamour shot of Vivi as if she was the governess in question next to a picture of what might have been Eleanor in a hooded something or other, and an excuse to fling pictures of lost, sainted Isobel and Torquil all over the place. Along with everyone’s favorite picture of toddler Geraldine—all gap teeth and copper curls, looking lost and in need of nappy-changing—as if she’d been preserved forever at an age when Hugo’s neglect could have resulted in her toddling about in her own filth.

      He was tempted to ring up Vivi Andrews himself and demand a cut of what must have been a very tidy profit. But he couldn’t do that, could he, because that would mean very coldly and calculatedly discussing when and how Vivi and her sister had decided to set him up so beautifully.

      And then asking the question he wanted to know the answer to but was afraid to ask: How had they known that Eleanor’s brand of stroppy innocence would send him crashing to his knees? He’d had women throwing themselves at him his entire life. Some were desperate for the title. Others only wanted a little turn in the tabloids. He’d have said that there was no possible approach he hadn’t grown tired of years ago.

      But somehow they’d picked the one that worked.

      He had a lot of questions for Eleanor. He was even tempted to question whether her virginity had been real—but no. He knew better. He’d been there. The betrayal was real, but so was that night. So was what had passed between them.

      Hugo might not know much, but he knew that.

      Not that it helped. He still found himself stalking around his damned house in the gloomy twilight, like a sepulchral poet or something equally tragic.

      Hugo couldn’t remember the last time he’d surrendered so completely to self-pity. He made his lonely, nauseatingly melancholic way into his library, broodingly eyeing the shelves he’d once told Eleanor she’d nearly knocked down. Tonight he was tempted to knock them down himself. With a bottle of whiskey and his own hard head.

      Because he never learned.

      He was the monster of all of England’s most fervent fantasies, paying out his penance in his rambling out house, alone. Forever.

      Nothing could change that. Not his own disinterest in the narrative. Not the fact his ward was, despite all wailing to the contrary, a healthy and relatively happy child. Not a scowling, insufficiently respectful governess who’d treated him as an irritant to be borne, much like the sulky moors all around.

      He might have imagined that things had changed that night and that wildly optimistic morning after, but that was only more proof that he was an idiot of epic proportions.

      “Nothing new in that,” he muttered to himself, not even bothering to scowl at the fire. “It’s the bloody story of my life.”

      As was the certainty that somehow, he would pay for this, too.

      The door to the library opened then. Hugo watched, bemused, as it scraped its way inward across the thick rug on the floor. Almost as if the person entering the room wasn’t strong enough to move it.

      He blinked when he saw the figure standing in the door then. It was Geraldine, who never sought him out of her own accord, and never here. She usually suffered warily through her dinners with him, eyeing him suspiciously from her place down the table. Tonight she looked less like the celebrated daughter of a world-renowned beauty and more...like a kid. Her copper-colored plaits stood out at odd angles from her head, she was dressed in a jumper and jeans like any random child might have been, and her little face was drawn into a frown.

      She looked sturdy. And surly, Hugo couldn’t help but notice.

      “Yes, my ward?” he drawled. He lounged back in his chair before the fire and raised his brows at her, doing his best, as ever, to sound like a proper guardian instead of the world’s favorite scandal.

      The little girl screwed up her nose while the corners of her pudgy mouth turned down, but she kept her scowl aimed right at him.

      Evidence of Eleanor’s teaching, clearly, he thought, and hated the lancing sensation of something that couldn’t be pain—because he refused to accept pain—straight through him.

      “Nanny Marie says Miss Andrews is never coming back.”

      Hugo waited for her to continue, but Geraldine only stared at him. Rather challengingly, actually.

      “I am at a loss as to where Nanny Marie,” and he utterly failed to keep the sardonic inflection from his tone at that name, “would get the impression that she has access to staffing decisions.”

      “I like her.”

      “Nanny Marie? I couldn’t identify her in a lineup, I’m afraid. Much less determine whether or not I cared for her one way or another.”

      “Miss Andrews.”

      Geraldine sounded testy, but definitive. And that was the trouble. Hugo liked Miss Andrews, too. Definitively.

      Even now.

      He’d told Eleanor things he’d never told anyone. He’d expected her to understand him when no one else had, ever. And then sure enough, she had. Meanwhile, she’d held on to her innocence far, far longer than most women her age, and she’d gifted it to him. Him. As if it had never occurred to her that Hugo the Horrible wasn’t a suitable recipient for such a gift.

      As if she’d felt completely safe with him, which should have been impossible.

      And as if that wasn’t enough, Hugo wasn’t entirely sure that she was the one who had been rendered fragile by what had happened that night. There were parts of him that no longer fit the way they had before. Parts of him that scraped at all the walls he’d built inside, as if he didn’t fit anymore.

      He had been perfectly content here. Happy enough to live out the consequences of Isobel’s decisions far away from prying eyes and telescopic lenses. Perfectly willing to let the country shake in horror at the notion of what he might be doing to their lost saint’s precious little girl. No small part of him had thrilled to the idea that he was literally some people’s nightmare. Every single night.

      He’d taken pleasure in that. They deserved it.

      Hugo couldn’t understand where all that had gone. How it had disappeared in the course of one very long, very thorough exploration of a prim governess’s astonishingly curvy body.

      What was it in him that couldn’t shrug her off the way he had all the others? Why was it so impossible to draw a line under the latest tabloid scandal and move on? When his past mistakes had aired out his laundry in front of whole nations, Hugo had been unbothered.

      He had the sinking, lowering notion that all this time, he’d never known real ruin at all.

      “You didn’t fire her, did you?” Geraldine demanded, reminding him he was not alone with his brooding.

      Hugo eyed her. The little girl had moved further into the room. Now she stood near the fireplace, her hands on her little hips, glaring at her guardian without a seeming care in the world. As if she thought, should there be an altercation, she could take him.

      He had tried so hard these past three years, since the accident that had taken Isobel and Torquil. He’d kept his distance from this child. He had tended to Geraldine’s needs, but not in a way that could ever hurt her. Or compromise her. He’d been certain—as certain as his critics, if not more so—that

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