Undone By The Billionaire Duke

Can she tame the shameless duke?

The brazen antics of Hugo, Duke of Grovesmoor, and the string of women to grace his bed are tabloid gold. But Eleanor Andrews, newly hired to care for the duke’s young ward, refuses to see him as anything but her boss. She desperately needs this job. No matter how gorgeous Hugo is, the stakes are simply too high...

Well acquainted with lies and betrayal, Hugo is jaded and cynical, unconcerned with dispelling the salacious rumors about him. But there’s something about Eleanor that fires his blood, and he can’t turn down the challenge to unbutton his uptight employee!

“I am the boss, Miss Andrews,” Hugo reminded her from between his teeth. “You are the employee. Everything about the way you are speaking to me is disrespectful, not to mention foolish. Why would you try to antagonize the person who pays your spectacularly generous salary?”

Eleanor’s frown smoothed out a bit, though it didn’t precisely soften. And still Hugo wanted to taste that faint crease between her brows, where the edge of her fringe kissed her skin the way he wanted to do.

“In point of fact I won’t be paid for two weeks,” she said after a moment, as if she couldn’t help herself.

Maybe she really couldn’t. He couldn’t have said why that notion washed through him like a new sort of heat.

“A notable distinction,” Hugo murmured.

And then, because he loved nothing more than complicating any given situation beyond repair, the better to make it worse, he kissed her.

And then they were in real trouble, because she tasted like magic.

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author CAITLIN CREWS loves writing romance. She teaches her favourite romance novels in creative writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilise the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest, with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

Books by Caitlin Crews

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Scandalous Royal Brides

The Prince’s Nine-Month Scandal

The Billionaire’s Secret Princess

Wedlocked!

Bride by Royal Decree

Expecting a Royal Scandal

One Night With Consequences

The Guardian’s Virgin Ward

The Billionaire’s Legacy

The Return of the Di Sione Wife

Secret Heirs of Billionaires

Unwrapping the Castelli Secret

Scandalous Sheikh Brides

Protecting the Desert Heir

Traded to the Desert Sheikh

Vows of Convenience

His for a Price

His for Revenge

Visit the Author Profile page

at www.millsandboon.co.uk for more titles.

Undone by the Billionaire Duke

Caitlin Crews

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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To Maisey Yates and Nicole Helm for encouraging my flights of fancy—like rearing horses and billowing cloaks...oh, my!

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

About the Author

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Extract

Copyright

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.”