href="#u33dda857-f088-5d8c-94a6-e00618066094">Copyright
Undone by the Billionaire Duke
Caitlin Crews
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.
To Maisey Yates and Nicole Helm for encouraging my flights of fancy—like rearing horses and billowing cloaks...oh, my!
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
