Kitabı oku: «Undone By The Billionaire Duke»

CHAPTER ONE

ELEANOR ANDREWS WAS certain that she could handle the likes of Hugo Grovesmoor, and no matter that no one had ever quite managed to do so before in living memory. As the papers shrieked daily, the Twelfth Duke of Grovesmoor was not only known to be a terrible villain in every salacious way imaginable, he was impossible. Too wealthy. Too full of himself. And worse still, so appallingly and egregiously handsome that he’d essentially been born spoilt through, and had only descended further from there.

Into pure, hedonistic, and ruinous devilry. Usually with pictures.

And Eleanor was delivering herself directly into his clutches.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” her younger sister Vivi said with a sigh, sending her long and lively brunette curls slithering this way and that every time she exhaled. When all Eleanor had done was express the tiniest hint of concern about her brand-new role as governess to the poor seven-year-old in notorious Hugo’s care.

As occasionally trying as Vivi was—and if Eleanor was honest with herself, it was more often than occasionally—Eleanor couldn’t help but love her. Desperately. Vivi was all she had left after their parents had been killed years ago in the tragic car accident that had nearly claimed young Vivi’s life, as well. Eleanor never forgot how close she’d come to losing Vivi, too.

“I don’t think I was being dramatic at all,” Eleanor replied. She chose not to point out that the opera heroine histrionics were usually Vivi’s department. Surely that went without saying.

Vivi was addressing Eleanor through the mirror in the bedroom of the tiny, crowded, so-called “one-bedroom” flat they shared in one of London’s less fashionable neighborhoods. The “one bedroom” in question being the space on the far side of a bookcase in the long room with a cramped kitchenette slung beneath the eaves on the other end. Vivi was applying a third, slick layer of mascara to her lashes, the better to emphasize the eyes one of her many boyfriends had once called as warm and bright as new gold. Eleanor had heard him—as had half the street in the village where they’d grown up as their distant cousin’s charity cases after their parents had been killed and Vivi had finally gotten out of the hospital—given that the poor sod had been shouting it toward Vivi’s window long after the pubs had closed, as pissed as he was poetic.

Vivi lowered the mascara wand and rolled said new gold eyes. “You won’t actually see Hugo. You’re going to be the governess of his ward who, let’s face it, he can’t possibly like that much. Given all that messy history. Why would he give either one of you the time of day?”

A dismissive wave of her hand encompassed all the salacious details everyone knew about Hugo Grovesmoor, thanks to the fascination the tabloids had always had with him.

Eleanor knew the three main points as well as anyone. The dramatic on-and-off relationship with beloved society darling Isobel Vanderhaven, whom everyone had been certain Hugo would ruin with his shocking brand of committed wickedness that even Isobel’s innate goodness couldn’t cure. The way Isobel had left him for good when pregnant with his best friend’s Torquil’s child, because, everyone agreed, love had finally triumphed over wickedness and Isobel deserved better. And Isobel’s celebrated marriage to and subsequent tragic boating accident with said former best friend, which had resulted in famously reluctant Hugo being named the legal guardian of the child whose very existence had wrecked his chances with the lovely Isobel forever.

All this while the nation jeered, applauded, and mourned in turn, as if they knew all of these people and their pain personally.

“A man as rich as Hugo is dripping in properties and can’t be expected to visit even half of them in the course of a year. Or even five years,” Vivi said with the same nonchalance, and Eleanor reminded herself that her sister would know.

After all, Vivi was the one who’d spent time with Hugo Grovesmoor’s sort of people. She was the one who’d attended the posh schools and while she hadn’t exactly distinguished herself academically, she’d certainly had a sparkling social calendar that had carried over to her life in London. It was all in service to the glittering marriage they were both certain Vivi would manage to score any day now.

Vivi was eighteen months younger than Eleanor and the beauty of the pair of them. She had the sort of slim-hipped, smoky-eyed, lush-mouthed prettiness that left men struck dumb when they beheld her. Literally. Her wild curls gave the impression she’d just rolled out of someone’s bed. Her just-wicked-enough smile hinted that she was up for any and all adventures and suggested that if a man played his cards right, that bed could be his.

And to think that after the accident, the doctors had doubted she’d ever walk again!

Vivi had proven herself to be more or less catnip for a certain sort of man. Usually one endowed with a great many estates and a bank account to match, even if, so far, she hadn’t quite managed to break out of the “potential mistress” box.

Eleanor, on the other hand, went to very few parties while working at least one job and sometimes more, when things got rough. Because while Vivi was the pretty one, Eleanor had always been the sensible one. And while she’d had her moments of wishing she, too, could have been as effortlessly charming and undeniably pretty as her sister, Eleanor was twenty-seven now and had come to a place of peace with her role in life. They’d lost their parents and Eleanor couldn’t bring them back. She couldn’t change the many years of hospitals and surgeries that Vivi had survived. But she could take on a bit of a parental role with Vivi. She could hold down decent jobs and pay their bills.

Well. Vivi’s bills. There was no point gussying up Eleanor in the sort of slinky, breathtakingly expensive clothes Vivi had to have to blend in with her highbrow friends—and that sort of thing required money. Money Eleanor had always made, one way or another.

This latest job—as governess to the most hated man in England—would be the most lucrative yet. It was why Eleanor had resigned from her current position as a front desk receptionist at a bustling architecture firm. Vivi had been the one to hear of the governess position through her high-flying set of friends, since men like the Duke did not exactly pin up adverts in the local pub. More important, she’d heard what the Duke intended to pay his governess. It was so much more than all the other jobs Eleanor had taken—combined—that she hardly dared do the math, lest it make her dizzy.

“The rumor is the Duke has dismissed all the governesses he’s been sent. Being a distraction is apparently the top reason for getting sacked and, well...”

Vivi had shrugged with a regret that had not struck Eleanor as being entirely sincere. Her small, perfect, perky breasts had moved enticingly behind the filmy little silk dress she’d worn to some or other desperately fashionable soirée that evening, as if in an approving chorus.

“But you might just be perfect!”

The sleek agency that had handled the interview had agreed, and here Eleanor was, packing up her case for the trip into the wilds of the Yorkshire moors to what had to be the most overwrought of all the ducal properties in England. Groves House, as the sprawling dark mansion was quaintly called as if it wasn’t large enough to merit its own postal code, had been looming over its vast swathe of the brooding moors for centuries.

“A governess is a lowly member of his household staff, Eleanor,” Vivi was saying now, with another eye roll. “Not a guest. It’s highly unlikely you’ll encounter Hugo Grovesmoor at all.”

That was more than fine with Eleanor. She was immune to star power and the sense of self-importance that went along with it. She told herself so all the way up on the train the next morning as it hurtled at high speeds toward deepest Yorkshire.

She hadn’t gone to the north of England since she was a child and their parents had still been alive. Eleanor had vague memories of traipsing about the walls that surrounded the ancient city of York in a chilly summer fog, with no idea, then, how quickly everything would change.

But there was no point heading down that sort of sentimental road now, she told herself sternly as she waited in the brisk October cold at the York rail station for one of the slower, more infrequent local trains out into the far reaches of the countryside. Life went on. That was just what it did, wholly heedless and uncaring.

No matter what anyone might have lost along the way.

When Eleanor arrived at the tiny little train station in remote Grovesmoor Village, she expected to be met as planned. But the train platform in the middle of nowhere was empty. There was nothing but Eleanor, the blustering October wind, and the remains of the morning’s fog. Not exactly an encouraging beginning.

Eleanor cast a bit of a grim eye at the case she’d packed with what she’d thought she’d need for the first six weeks she’d agreed to spend at Groves House without any break. It was only the one case. Vivi needed to travel with bags upon bags, but then again, she had a wardrobe. Eleanor had no such problems. And no excuses. It took a second or two to pull up a map on her mobile and find it was a twenty-to-thirty-minute walk to the only stately manor in the area. Groves House.

“Best set off, then,” she muttered to herself.

She heaved her heavy shoulder bag higher up on her shoulder, grabbed the handle of her roller bag and tugged on it, and strode off with every confidence in the world. Or every appearance of confidence, anyway, she amended when she walked for five minutes down the road only to realize she should have headed in the opposite direction, away from the quaint little town arranged on either side of a slow river.

Once headed in the right direction, Eleanor tried to channel Maria Von Trapp as she trudged along the lonely country road that wound further and further into the fog and the gloom. She marched on, aware of her breathing in the otherwise still afternoon and very little else. She’d lived so long in the hectic rush of London now that she’d almost forgotten the particular quiet of country lane, particularly one that seemed to be swallowed up by moors in all directions and peaks here and there that she expected would have names. If only she’d researched them.

She found the turnoff for Groves House between two stone pillars and started up the drive. It wound about just as much as the road had, and was only differentiated from the lane she’d left behind by its absence of hedges and proper stone walls. And its slight incline straddled by lines of stout and watchful trees. She’d lost track of how many turns she’d taken and how far she’d gone from the road when she looked out in front of her and saw the house at last.

Nothing could have prepared her.

The house loomed there on the far ridge. It was rambling, yes, a jumble of stone and self-importance, but none of the pictures she’d seen had done it justice. There was something about it that made a raw sort of lump catch there in her throat. There was something about the way its interior lights scraped at the gloomy afternoon that seemed to speak to her, though she couldn’t think why.

She found she couldn’t look away.

It was not a welcoming house. It was not a house at all, for that matter. It was much too large and starkly forbidding. And yet somehow, as it gleamed there against the fall night as if daring the dark to do its worst, the only word that echoed inside Eleanor’s head was perfect.

Something rang in her then, low and long, like a bell.

She didn’t know why she couldn’t seem to catch her breath when she started walking again, her case seeming heavier in her grip as she headed further up the hill.

And that was when she heard the thunder of hoof beats, bearing down on her.

Like fate.

* * *

His Grace the Duke of Grovesmoor, known to what few friends he had left and the overly familiar press as Hugo, found fewer and fewer things cleared his head these days. Drink made his skull hurt. Extreme sports had lost their thrill now that his death would mean the end of the Grovesmoor line of succession after untold centuries, tossing the whole dukedom into the hands of grasping, far-removed cousins who’d been salivating over the ducal properties and attendant income for perhaps the entire sweep of its history.

Even indiscriminate sex, once his favorite go-to for obliteration on a grand scale, had lost its charm now that his every so-called “indiscretion” went rabbiting off to the papers before the sheets had gone cold to tell further tales in the nation’s favorite narrative. Evil, soulless Hugo, despoiler of saints and heroes, etc. He was either glutting himself in excess to hide from his dark regrets or he was so extraordinarily shallow that a shag or two was all he was capable of. The stories were all the same and always so damned boring.

It galled him to admit it, but the tabloids might actually have won.

The particular horse he rode today—the pride of his stables, he’d been informed, as if he gave a toss—liked him as little as he liked it, which meant he found himself rampaging across the moors very much as if he’d sprung forth from a bloody eighteenth century novel.

All he needed was a billowing cloak.

But no matter how far he rode, there was no escaping himself. Or his head and all his attendant regrets.

The vicious creature he rode clearly knew it. They’d been playing a little domination game for weeks now, raging across the whole of Hugo’s Yorkshire estate.

So when Hugo saw the figure slinking along in the shadows up the drive to Groves House, all he could think was that it was something different in the middle of an otherwise indistinguishably gray afternoon.

God knew Hugo was desperate for anything different.

A different past. A different reputation—because who could have foreseen what his shrugging off all those early tabloid stories would lead to?

He wanted a different him, really, but that had never been on offer.

Hugo was the Twelfth Duke of Grovesmoor whether he liked it or did not, and the title was the important thing about him. The only important thing, his father had been at pains to impress upon him all his life. Unless he bankrupted his estates and rid himself of the title altogether, or died while engaged in some or other irresponsible pursuit, Hugo would simply be another notation in the endless long line of dukes bearing the same title and a healthy dollop of the same blood. His father had always claimed that knowledge had brought him solace. Peace.

Hugo was unfamiliar with either.

“If you’re a poacher, you’re doing a remarkably sad job of it,” he said when he drew close to the stranger on his property. “You really should at least try to sneak about, surely. Instead of marching up the front drive without the slightest attempt at subterfuge.”

He reined in the stroppy horse and enjoyed the dramatic way he then reared a bit right in front of the person creeping up his drive.

It was then that he realized his intruder was a woman.

And not just any woman.

Hugo was renowned for his women. Bloody Isobel, of course, like a stain across his life—but all the other ones, too. Before Isobel and after. But they all had the same things in common: they were considered beautiful by all and sundry and wanted, usually quite badly, to be photographed next to him. That meant fake breasts, whitened teeth, extensions to thicken their silky hair, varnished nails and careful lipstick and fake lashes and all the rest of it. So years had passed since he’d seen a real woman at all, unless she worked for him. His crotchety old housekeeper, for example, who he kept on because Mrs. Redding was always as deeply disappointed when he appeared in the tabloids as his father had been. It felt so comfortable, Hugo often thought. Like a lovely, well-worn hair shirt tucked up next to his skin.

The woman who stared up at him now, looking nowhere near as shocked or outright terrified as Hugo imagined he would be if he’d found himself on the underside of a rearing horse, was not in the least bit beautiful.

Or if she was, she’d gone to significant lengths to disguise it. Her hair was scraped back into a tight brown bun that made his own head ache just looking at it, without a single flyaway to suggest she was actually human. Even her fringe was ruthlessly cut across her forehead to military precision. She wore a bulky, puffy sort of jacket that covered her from chin to calf and made her look roughly the size of one of the grand, gnarled old oaks dotting the property. She clutched a large black bag over her shoulder and tugged a rolling case along behind her, and she had death grips on both. Her cheeks looked flushed with the cold and there was no denying she had a delicate nose a great many of his own ancestors would have envied, given the curse of what was known as The Grovesmoor Beak that seemed to afflict the females in the line unfairly.

But most of what struck him was the expression on her face.

Because it looked a great deal like a scowl.

Which was, of course, impossible, because he was Hugo Grovesmoor and the women who usually crept onto his various properties without invitation found the very idea of him—or to be more precise, of his net worth—so marvelously attractive that they never stopped smiling. Ever.

This woman looked as if she’d crack in half if she attempted the smallest grin.

“I’m not poaching, I’m a governess.” Her voice was cool, and something else that Hugo couldn’t identify. “My ride from the train station didn’t materialize or I assure you, I wouldn’t be marching anywhere, much less up this very long drive. Uphill.”

It dawned on him then. That “something else” in her voice he hadn’t been able to place. It was annoyance.

Hugo found it delightful. No one was annoyed with him. They might hate him and call him Satan and other such tedious things, but they were never annoyed.

“I should have introduced myself, I think,” he said merrily, as the bastard horse danced murderously beneath him. The woman did not appear to know her own danger, so close to sharp hooves and the thoroughbred’s temper tantrums. Or, more likely, she didn’t care, as she was too busy trying to win a staring contest with Hugo. “Since you’re lurking about the property.”

“It is not lurking to walk up the front drive,” she replied crisply. “By definition.”

“I am Hugo Grovesmoor,” he told her. “No need to curtsey. After all, I’m, widely held to be a great and terrible villain.”

“I had no intention of curtseying.”

“I prefer to think of myself as an antihero, of course. Surely that merits a bow. Or perhaps a small nod?”

“My name is Eleanor Andrews and I’m the latest in what I’ve been told is a long line of governesses,” the woman told him from the depths of that quilted monstrosity she wore. “I intend to be the last, and if I’m not very much mistaken, the way to ensure that happens is to keep my distance.”

Hugo was used to women making similar announcements. You’re terrible, they’d coo, lashes batting furiously. I’m keeping my distance from you. This usually led directly to the sort of indiscriminate evenings from which he was now abstaining.

He had the lowering realization that this woman—wrapped up in a hideous puffy coat with her chin jutting forth and a scowl across her face—might actually mean it.

“Your Grace,” he murmured.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You should address me as Your Grace, particularly when you imagine you are taking me to task. It adds that extra little touch of pointed disrespect which I find I cannot live without.”

If Eleanor Andrews was appropriately mortified by the fact she’d addressed a peer of the realm—who happened to also be her new boss—so inappropriately, she gave no sign. If anything she seemed to pull herself up straighter in her vast, quilted shroud, and made no attempt to wipe off that scowl.

“A thousand apologies, Your Grace,” she said crisply, as if she wasn’t in the least bit intimidated by him. It made something in Hugo...shift. “I was expecting a ride from the train station. Not a walk in the chilly countryside.”

“Exercise improves the mind as well as the body, I’m told,” he replied, merrily enough. “I myself was blessed with a high metabolism and a keen intelligence, so I’ve never had to put such things to the test. But we can’t all be so lucky.”

There was enough light that he could tell that there was a remarkable sort of honey in the brown of this woman’s eyes as they glittered furiously at him. He couldn’t imagine why that shocked him, but it did. That there should be anything soft about such a bristling, black-clad, evidently humorless female.

That he should notice it.

“Are you suggesting that I am not as lucky as you?” she asked, with exactly the sort of repressed fury Hugo would expect to hear from a woman he’d just obliquely called fat.

“That depends on whether or not you imagine that the storied life of a pampered duke is a matter of luck and circumstance. Rather than fate.”

“Which do you think it is?”

Hugo nearly smiled at that. He couldn’t have said why. It was something to do with the way her eyes gleamed and her surprisingly intriguing mouth was set, flashing more of that annoyance straight at him.

“I appreciate you thinking of my well-being,” she said with what he was forced to concede was admirable calm, all that flashing annoyance notwithstanding. “Your Grace.”

Hugo grinned down at her, hoping she found having to look so far up at him as irritating as he would have.

“I wasn’t aware that the last governess left, though I can’t say I’m surprised. She was a fragile little thing. All anime eyes and protracted spells of weeping in the east wing, or so I’m told. I’m allergic to female tears, you understand. I’ve developed a sixth sense. When a woman cries in my vicinity, I am instantly and automatically transported to the other side of the planet.”

Eleanor only gazed back at him. “I’m not much of a crier.”

Hugo waited.

“Your Grace,” he prodded her again when it was clear she had no intention of saying it. “I wouldn’t insist upon such formality but it does seem to chafe, doesn’t it? How republican of you. And really, Eleanor, you can’t expect to mold a young mind to your will and provide fodder for the therapy bills I’ll be expected to pay out from her trust if you can’t remember the courtesy of a simple form of address. It’s as if you’ve never met a duke before.”

She blinked. “I haven’t.”

“I’m not a particularly good representative. I’m far too scandalous, as mentioned. Perhaps you’ve heard.” He laughed when she did a terrible job of keeping her face blank. “I see you have. No doubt you’re an avid fan of the tabloids and their daily regurgitations of my many sins. I can only hope to be even half as colorful in person.”

“And it’s Miss Andrews.”

It was Hugo’s turn to blink. “Sorry?”

“I would prefer it if you call me Miss Andrews.” She nodded then, a faint inclination of her head, which he supposed was as close to any kind of recognition as he’d get. “Your Grace.”

Something moved in him then, far worse than a mere shift. It felt raw. Dangerous.

Impossible.

“Let me clear something up from the start, Miss Andrews,” he said, while his terrible horse tried to trick him into easing his hold on the reins. “I’m exactly as bad as they say. Worse. I ruin lives with a mere crook of my finger. Yours. The child’s. Random pedestrians minding their own business in the village square. I have so many victims it’s a bit of luck, really, that the country still stands. I’m my own blitzkrieg. If you have a problem with that, Mrs. Redding will be happy to replace you. You need only say the word.”

If that affected this maddening woman in any way, she hid it behind her mountainous coat and that equally dour gray scarf.

“I told you, I have no intention of being replaced.” He couldn’t say he liked the exaggerated note of patience in her voice then. “Certainly not of my own volition. Whether you wish to replace me or not is, of course, entirely up to you.”

“I might.” He arched a brow. “I do detest poachers.”

She eyed him as if he was her charge, not his ward. His ward. He hated even thinking those words. He hated even more the fact that Isobel had done exactly what she’d spitefully promised she’d do, time and again: kept her hooks in him even from beyond the grave.

“You should do as you please, Your Grace, and something tells me you will—”

“It is my gift. My expression of my best self.”

“—but I might suggest you see how I handle the child before you send me packing.”

The child. His ward.

Hugo hated that he was required to think about anyone’s welfare at all when he cared so little for his own. He had extensive staff in place, paid handsomely to think about the health and happiness of all his many tenants and other staff members and various employees, leaving him free to lounge about being as useless as he liked.

Which—he’d read in the papers and heard from a chorus of people who would know, like his own dearly departed father—was all he was good for.

The girl, however, was a different sort of responsibility than real estate in Central London or a selection of islands in the Pacific or a coffee plantation in Africa or whatever else was in his holdings.

To say Hugo bitterly resented this was putting it mildly.

“What an excellent idea,” he murmured. “I’ll see she’s waiting for you in the great hall when you finally make it to the house. It shouldn’t be long. Five minutes’ walk if you keep a good pace.”

“You must be joking.”

“Fair enough. Ten minutes’ walk if your legs are shorter than mine, I suppose. I’m afraid I can’t tell, as you appear to be wearing enough goosedown to leave the entire goose population of the United Kingdom shivering and bare. Assuming that’s what’s making you so...” He nodded at her voluminous black tent. “Puffy.”