Undone By The Billionaire Duke

Sometimes she felt the guilt of that as if it was her own scar, slashed bright and hot across her whole body.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she told herself briskly, pulling herself together as best she could. “You already took the position.”

She rang the great and imposing bell that hung beside the door before she could think better of it, tugging on the slick old pull once. Then again.

It sounded long and low and deep, like some throwback to medieval times. She half expected knights in shining armor to come cantering up, wittering on about old King Arthur and ladies in lakes.

She was coming over all fanciful. That was what that man had done to her with his smirk and his amusement and his mouth when he was nothing but the same unsavory character she’d read about in the papers all these years. Only worse.

The fact that he was infinitely better-looking than any picture she’d ever seen of him didn’t help. Worse, he was not nearly as fatuous as she’d imagined and he’d been entirely too sardonic besides. Her knees hadn’t felt right since.

But as the door swung inward, she found herself staring not at a disgraceful duke in all his questionable glory, but down into the bright blue eyes and suspicious face of a little girl.

A little girl with silky red-gold hair plaited on either side of her head and a brace of adorable freckles across her nose. A little girl who made Eleanor’s breath catch, because it was impossible to look at her and not see her very famous, very dead mother. Isobel Vanderhaven of the sunny smile and titian hair, who’d looked like everybody’s best friend and the girl next door—if, that was, you happened to live next to one of her parents’ rolling vineyards in South Africa.

“I don’t need a governess,” the child announced at once. In a tone that could only be called challenging.

“Of course you don’t,” Eleanor agreed, and the girl blinked. “Who needs a governess? But you are lucky enough to have one anyway.”

The little girl considered her for a moment, as the October wind blustered and moaned, rushing in from the moors smelling of rain and winter.

“I’m Geraldine.” Her lower lip protruded just slightly, and made her look her age, suddenly. “But you probably know that. They always know that.”

“Of course I know your name,” Eleanor said briskly. “I couldn’t very well take a job if I didn’t know the name of my charge, could I?”

It was clear to Eleanor that this child would keep her standing on the doorstep until the end of time if she didn’t do something about it herself. So she pushed open the door with her free hand, and brushed straight past Geraldine, who watched her with a mixture of surprise and interest.

“They usually just stand in the drive, texting and whingeing,” she piped up.

“Who is ‘they’?” Eleanor reached past Geraldine once she’d stepped inside and shut the door, firmly, which took some doing because it outweighed her by approximately seven tons. And when she turned around to face the hall that had been waiting there behind her, she was glad the little girl didn’t appear to be paying strict attention to her.

Because she was standing in a bloody castle.

Or close enough, anyway. Groves House had looked so grim and brooding from the outside, but here in the spacious foyer, it gleamed. Eleanor couldn’t tell how it was doing that, precisely. Was there gold in the walls themselves? Was it the way the chandeliers hit all the paintings and the elegant furnishings and the rest of the things that seemed to clutter up rich people’s foyers, that she’d only ever seen before on episodes of Downton Abbey?

“Everyone knows my name,” Geraldine was saying with all the self-possession of the very young. “Sometimes they yell it at me in the village. You’re the fifteenth governess so far, did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Mrs. Redding says I’m disobedient.”

“What do you think?” Eleanor asked. “Are you?”

Geraldine looked a bit thrown by the question. “Maybe.”

“Then you can stop, if you like.” Eleanor eyed the mutinous little face before her and didn’t see any disobedience. She saw a lonely little girl who’d lost her parents and had been sent off to live with a stranger. Eleanor could certainly relate. She ducked her chin so her face was closer to Geraldine’s and whispered the thing that no one had ever bothered to say to her when she’d been heartsick and orphaned, waiting to find out if Vivi would make it through her latest surgery. “It won’t matter either way, you know. Whether you’re good or bad. I can already tell we’ll be great friends and that means we always will. Friends don’t change their minds about each other when things get tough, after all.”

All Geraldine did was blink. Once, then again. But that was enough. Eleanor started unzipping her big coat.

“She’s not any more disobedient than any other small human creature,” came a male voice Eleanor wished she didn’t recognize, wafting down the length of the hall as if it, too, was made of gold. And was set to shine. “She’s seven. Let’s not put the child in a cage so quickly, shall we?”

It took her a moment to find Hugo in all the dizzy brilliance of the bright foyer. But then there he was, sauntering out of one of the connected rooms toward the front door as if he hadn’t a care in the world.

Because of course, he didn’t.

He looked nothing like a duke should, Eleanor thought darkly. No Hooray Henry red trousers or Barbour slung just so for the most hated man in all of England. Not for Hugo. He came towards her in an old, battered pair of jeans. He had his hands thrust into the pockets like some kind of slumming American celebrity. He wore a T-shirt, cleverly ripped here and there, like those Eleanor had seen in the posh shops that Vivi preferred. It was the sort of T-shirt that would’ve looked like a soiled tissue on a lesser man. But Hugo hadn’t been lying about his metabolism. Or anyway, that was how Eleanor tried to view the magnificent specimen of male beauty walking toward her then: in terms of his metabolism.

Because everything on Hugo Grovesmoor’s body was cut to perfection as if he was another piece of statuary in his own hall. His chest was ridiculous, broad at the top and narrow near his hips and stunningly ridged in between. He looked as if he should be racing about in a loincloth, banging on about Sparta. Instead, his dark eyes were the precise shade of a lazy glass of whiskey, his dark hair looked very much as if he’d been galloping around in a bedchamber instead of on horseback, and that little curl in the corner of his mouth was nothing short of disastrous.

Because Eleanor could feel it everywhere. Lighting her up in places she’d long since forgotten about.

She didn’t know what that dark, edgy thing was that wound around inside of her then. What she did know was that it was Hugo’s fault.

“The child is already in a cage,” Eleanor retorted before she could think better of it. She flicked a glance around the vast hall, which was even bigger and more magnificent at a second glance, and just as dizzying, from the plump chandeliers to the acrobatic sconces on the walls. “A large one, I grant you.”

Hugo kept moving toward her, eventually coming to a stop a few feet away. And then they were all three standing there in various degrees of awkwardness, right in front of the big front door.

It was worse when he was close, Eleanor was forced to admit. It made her feel raw and unsteady inside. It had been bad enough when he was up on the back of that giant horse, hooves flailing every which way and that mocking voice of his like a weapon, but Hugo even closer was confusing. Eleanor eyed him balefully, as if that might do something about that bright nonsense sloshing around inside of her and making her feel...things.

Way too many things.

In entirely too many places.

She told herself that it was only that she still had her big, heavy coat on. The coat was the reason she was flushed. Too warm. Almost itchy, somehow. It had nothing at all to do with him.

Next to her, Hugo did nothing to change the impression she’d had of him from across the hall. Or up on that horse, for that matter. And once the shock of his astonishing male beauty wore off—or, if she was more precise, dimmed a slight bit when she managed to breathe—she found that what really exuded from him like his own, very rich and unmistakable scent was all that arrogance.

That smile of his only deepened then. It was as if he could read her mind.

But he directed his attention to Geraldine. “Well?”

The little girl only shrugged, a sullen look on her cute little face.

“No point letting this one settle in like the others, if you’re only going to complain about it later.” Hugo’s voice was...different, Eleanor thought. Not exactly softer, but more careful.

She was so busy trying to figure out what the difference was that she almost missed what he’d said.

“I beg your pardon. Are we discussing my employment?”

Hugo slid that gaze of his back to her. Too lazy. Too hot. She could feel it in too many places. More than before, and hotter.

“We are.” He raised a dark brow. “It appears you’re doing nothing but eavesdropping.”

Eleanor’s teeth hurt, and she unclenched them. “It would be eavesdropping if I was hid behind one of the flower arrangements, blending into all this feverish decor.” She forced herself to smile, and the fact that it was difficult made her uneasy. More than uneasy, but she did it anyway. “I am not eavesdropping. But you are being remarkably inappropriate.”

“It’s a bit of bad form to hurl accusations like that at an innocent child, don’t you think?” Hugo asked lazily, and Eleanor had the strangest thought that he was teasing her.

But why would the Duke of Grovesmoor tease anyone, much less someone as insignificant as Eleanor, a governess he apparently no longer wished to hire? She thrust that aside and concentrated on the only part of this bizarre interaction that she could control. Or try to control, anyway.