Czytaj książkę: «Modern Romance Collection: October 2017 5 - 8»

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.