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
