Undone By The Billionaire Duke. CAITLIN CREWS
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Название: Undone By The Billionaire Duke
Автор: CAITLIN CREWS
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
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Eleanor didn’t think Mrs. Redding was talking about the Yorkshire wind. Or not only about the Yorkshire wind.
“I’ll be certain to dress appropriately for the elements, then,” Eleanor said after a moment, her tone even.
The woman led her down an endless hallway, then stopped at the far end.
“These are your rooms,” Mrs. Redding said, waving Eleanor into the waiting suite. “I hope it will be sufficient. I’m afraid it’s a bit less spacious than some of the previous governesses were hoping for.”
Eleanor wanted to tell the woman she had been expecting a closet, or perhaps a cot down in a basement. Wherever the servants were kept in a place like this.
But she couldn’t get the words out of her mouth, because she was too busy being overwhelmed. Again.
Mrs. Redding had said rooms not room, and she hadn’t misspoken.
The flat she shared with Vivi could easily have fit into one part of the large room she walked into first, and it took her long, stunned moments to realize that it was, in fact, her own sitting room. And Mrs. Redding was still going, straight into the next room, which it took Eleanor another long beat to realize was a great closet. For the grand wardrobe she didn’t possess.
The bedroom itself was on the far side of a huge bathroom that looked like a spa to Eleanor’s untutored eyes, and as she walked into it, trailing behind Mrs. Redding, Eleanor was certain that this was the biggest dwelling space she’d ever been in.
One side of the room was dominated by a massive four-poster bed with carved wood posts and more carved wood as a canopy over top, like some kind of queen’s bower. There was another fireplace, and more places to sit around it, as if the whole sitting room wasn’t enough.
Eleanor’s breathing had gone a bit shallow. But she pulled it together, and smiled serenely at Mrs. Redding.
“It will do,” she murmured, trying her best to sound dry and sophisticated and professional. Instead of like an overexcited child in a candy store.
After the older woman left her, with instructions about where and when Eleanor was to present herself later for a tour and a breakdown of her duties, Eleanor found herself standing in the middle of this bedroom she couldn’t imagine ever calling her own. If possible, she felt more out of place than she had downstairs, where somehow the Duke’s arrogance had made her forget herself and Geraldine’s fierce, obvious loneliness had caught at her.
But here in these sumptuous rooms, she had nothing to fight. No one to defend. Only elegant emptiness all around.
Nothing but herself.
Whoever the hell that was.
HUGO HAD NO idea what had gotten into him.
He didn’t know what it was about starchy, overly puffy-coated Eleanor Andrews that scraped beneath his skin. But there was no denying the fact that he, Hugo Grovesmoor, who had never chased a woman in his entire life, had been lying in wait for this one.
It was extraordinary.
Hugo told himself he needed to see what on earth was hidden beneath that enormous coat of hers, that was all. That not knowing might keep him up at night. Was she a marshmallow creature like the monster in that old movie? Or had she hid her true, svelte form away in a billowy suit of armor?
And he knew when she didn’t back down in the foyer or unzip that great horror of a coat more than an inch or two that he needed to retreat back to his part of the house, carry on living the life of ease and leisure and loathing the whole of the world begrudged him these days, and forget all about his ward and the governess she’d decided to favor on sight. He knew it.
So he had no explanation for why he found himself lurking about in the wing he’d given over to Geraldine because he knew Mrs. Redding was giving Eleanor a tour and showing her where and how she’d be expected to do her work. The governess’s quarters were in this same wing, one floor above, right up the nearby stairs—a fact that there was absolutely no reason at all for Hugo to keep reciting to himself.
“I didn’t expect to see you, Your Grace,” Mrs. Redding said when she swept out of the nursery that was now a playroom and found Hugo inspecting the rather horrifying paintings hanging on the walls in the hall that he remembered from his own childhood.
“I can’t imagine why not, Mrs. Redding.” Hugo kept studying the garish painting in front of him as he spoke. “I do own the house and am known to be in residence. Surely I could be expected to turn up sooner or later.”
“In the child’s wing? Unlikely.” The older woman could still manage to infuse every syllable with genteel condemnation. A true skill, he’d always thought. “And yet here you are.”
Hugo turned then, smiling faintly at Mrs. Redding as he looked behind her to where Eleanor stood.
And he understood in an instant that he’d made a terrible mistake.
Because Eleanor was not as puffy and large as her coat had suggested. Nor was she as whipcord-skinny as a gazelle’s thigh, as many of her predecessors had been, eyes gleaming with avarice and ambition.
Quite the opposite, god help him.
The damned woman had the body of a goddess. A naughty fertility goddess. Eleanor had lush hips and generous breasts, sweetly separated by a tiny waist that made him hunger to test the span of it with his own hands. She was dressed in a perfectly conservative and appropriately opaque blouse over sensible trousers with a cardigan tossed on besides, and she still looked like an old pinup model. Her body was so markedly opulent that it made her harshly scraped back hair all the more intriguing—in that Hugo wanted to get his hands in it. Or feel it all over his naked body while she was engaged in other things, none of them involving any sort of harsh scraping at all.
Hugo knew he needed to stop. Now.
He needed to turn around this minute and get himself away from her, especially when she frowned at him from behind Mrs. Redding, and from beneath that fringe of hers. The legions of other women who had come this house and tried it on with him had pouted at him. They’d simpered and giggled. They’d made eyes at him over his ward’s head and had dressed in preposterously inappropriate clothing while supposedly out taking walks on the grounds in the middle of rainstorms in the hope of attracting his notice.
Eleanor Andrews, on the other hand, barreled about in the ugliest coat he’d ever beheld in his life as if she didn’t care whether or not she was found attractive, made no secret of the fact she held Hugo in rather low regard, and aimed disapproving frowns at him while she stood on his property as if she didn’t expect to receive her salary from his accounts.
It was almost as if she didn’t want anything from him.
That notion was so revolutionary it shook him a little. He found himself very nearly frowning himself, but caught it just in time. Hugo Grovesmoor СКАЧАТЬ