“I want to believe you, but… you don’t know anything about my life before we met. I think you would feel differently.”
“How would you know if you never let me in? You can care about me despite all my foibles. You can look past that? Do you think I am so shallow I would cast you aside over your past? Eloise, you’re twenty-five, accomplished, and well-spoken. How bad could it really be?”
I knew I should have left it. He looked so earnest. He did care. I had to trust him, or this was pointless. He trusted me with everything, but Duncan was a romantic. I knew that more than ever. I never had a grownup relationship and was never convinced by such things. While I worried about my career, I feared losing this vulnerable moment and connection. His heart was on his sleeve. It was time to unload and hope for the best.
50
FAMILY SECRETS
DUNCAN
Eloise folded her tiny, perfectly manicured hands. She stared at them in her lap, unable to meet my gaze. All I wanted—all I needed—was for her to be honest. I knew deep down it would not matter what she said.
Setting the delicious game aside, I made it all about her. I did not mind carrying her burden. I was purpose-driven to serve her. I wanted to be goodforher. I wanted her to care about me. I needed her trust and belief in the good in my heart.
She stared ahead. “I will say all of this and please do not hate me.”
I couldn’t have. “Eloise, I won’t. But I would like you to say it.”
Eloise spoke to the wall. “I grew up wealthy, like Mo. I was raised in those circles. My father and mother were probably what yours would call climbers. My father built a very successful business from the ground up. And while my mother was born dirt poor, she climbed out by the skin of her teeth. She ran away, got a waitress job, and entered community college with a dreamto start a business, but Dad fell in love with her. She was young and pretty and together they had me and built an empire.”
It was no surprise she was raised wealthy. Her manners and time at Seymour suggested that much.
Eloise’s eyes filtered to her hands. “I was raised between the Lower East Side and the Hamptons. My parents were transplanted Midwesterners, so I spent the summers back with my grandparents on Lake Michigan. You may never hear much of an accent. I was shipped off to boarding school at age 9. Here. Because the expectation, Duncan, was that I would meet a son of the aristocracy eventually in the good circles here and marry up. This—what we’re doing now—was some sort of wet dream for my mother.”
I chuckled. “I think we’d scar her.”
Her face softened at my joke and she turned back. Her big blue eyes told the story of how hard this was.
“I was close to my Dad. He always was so proud of me for being book smart and for my riding. I spent summers at horse shows really cleaning up and he came to everything. He didn’t have to care how many charter flights it would require. He would be there. My mother was distant and struggled with her mental health, so nannies provided me with emotional stability at home. No one physically abused me or anything like that. But my mother… she inflicted enough pain on me just in her disdain for my body after puberty. She was tall and thin. My father’s family is short and stout. And… I am closer to that side as you can see. I’ve got no thigh gap. My ass is huge.”
“I love your ass,” I said. “The best on either side of the Atlantic.”
“Oh, stop! You think you like it until the media tear me apart and call me hideous and fat and you realize you could do better, Duncan.”
I took in her full cheeks and the way they flushed when I complimented her. It brought out my smile.
“There is nothing they could say that I would believe. God, you’re beautiful. I am sorry anyone has ever made you feel less-then.”
“So you are telling me my fat thighs and my big calves and my belly that will never ever get toned no matter what I fucking do to it appeals to you?”
I shook my head. “I love the way your ass jiggles and how soft you feel. I love that your thighs are powerful and I think you have the most adorable feet. I never would have said anything about your calves. Your tits are magnificent and the whole of you… it’s beautiful. So, no. I have seen far more women naked than I gather you have seen men. And no, I do not care. You are the one I want. Right now, lying here, totally honest, I can say it isyouI want, Eloise.”
“But you are physically perfect.”
I shrugged. “I’m not hideous, but you could do a lot better with a younger model.”
“Disagree. You won the genetic lottery. Your mom was a total smoke show in her twenties and your Dad… well, we know where you get it from. I say this trying not to be creepy but to affirm your superiority. No one has such business being such an attractive family.”
I snickered.
“It’s the inbreeding.”
“Oh, stop!” She giggled and slapped my chest.
I stared lovingly. “If your fucked up parents and childhood are a reason to disown you, no society girl would ever suit me. That’s just life in the fishbowl, darling.”
“No. There’s more. Dad died of a heart attack when I was sixteen.”
