If that affected this maddening woman in any way, she hid it behind her mountainous coat and that equally dour gray scarf.
“I told you, I have no intention of being replaced.” He couldn’t say he liked the exaggerated note of patience in her voice then. “Certainly not of my own volition. Whether you wish to replace me or not is, of course, entirely up to you.”
“I might.” He arched a brow. “I do detest poachers.”
She eyed him as if he was her charge, not his ward. His ward. He hated even thinking those words. He hated even more the fact that Isobel had done exactly what she’d spitefully promised she’d do, time and again: kept her hooks in him even from beyond the grave.
“You should do as you please, Your Grace, and something tells me you will—”
“It is my gift. My expression of my best self.”
“—but I might suggest you see how I handle the child before you send me packing.”
The child. His ward.
Hugo hated that he was required to think about anyone’s welfare at all when he cared so little for his own. He had extensive staff in place, paid handsomely to think about the health and happiness of all his many tenants and other staff members and various employees, leaving him free to lounge about being as useless as he liked.
Which—he’d read in the papers and heard from a chorus of people who would know, like his own dearly departed father—was all he was good for.
The girl, however, was a different sort of responsibility than real estate in Central London or a selection of islands in the Pacific or a coffee plantation in Africa or whatever else was in his holdings.
To say Hugo bitterly resented this was putting it mildly.
“What an excellent idea,” he murmured. “I’ll see she’s waiting for you in the great hall when you finally make it to the house. It shouldn’t be long. Five minutes’ walk if you keep a good pace.”
“You must be joking.”
“Fair enough. Ten minutes’ walk if your legs are shorter than mine, I suppose. I’m afraid I can’t tell, as you appear to be wearing enough goosedown to leave the entire goose population of the United Kingdom shivering and bare. Assuming that’s what’s making you so...” He nodded at her voluminous black tent. “Puffy.”
“Your hospitality is truly inspiring, Your Grace,” she said after a moment, and the fact she managed to keep her face and voice smooth...poked at him.
He didn’t like it.
Just as he really, really didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t remember the last time anyone or anything had managed to get beneath his skin.
“That is, as ever, my only goal,” he replied.
And then, because he could—because he’d dedicated himself to being every bit as awful as he was expected to be, if not worse—Hugo spun the horse around, galloped off, and left the problematic Miss Eleanor Andrews there to find her own damned way to his house.
And his ward.
And this life of his that he’d never wanted, but had inherited anyway. Some would claim he’d earned it. That he deserved it and more.
That it really was fate, not luck, after all.
Hugo knew it didn’t matter. He was trapped in it all the same.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Eleanor trudged up to the front of the house at last.
The front door itself rose forbiddingly up over a circular area directly in front of it that was paved with smooth stones and accented by the remnants of a garden turning brown as winter approached.
It seemed like an omen. Though Eleanor did not permit herself to believe in such things, of course.
The closer she’d got to the house, the more she’d wondered exactly why she’d agreed to any of this in the first place. Was it truly necessary that she isolate herself in this creepy old manor house? Was all that lovely money really worth marooning herself in Yorkshire with a man she’d never imagined she’d meet face to face—and didn’t want to meet again, thank you?
And why couldn’t Vivi do something for herself for a change?
But such thoughts made her feel disloyal. A little bit sick to her stomach. It felt like an act of betrayal when Vivi had come so close to losing her own life in that terrible accident. And had fought so hard to stay here. And walk again. Eleanor had been the only one left unscathed.
Sometimes she felt the guilt of that as if it was her own scar, slashed bright and hot across her whole body.
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she told herself briskly, pulling herself together as best she could. “You already took the position.”
She rang the great and imposing bell that hung beside the door before she could think better of it, tugging on the slick old pull once. Then again.
It sounded long and low and deep, like some throwback to medieval times. She half expected knights in shining armor to come cantering up, wittering on about old King Arthur and ladies in lakes.
She was coming over all fanciful. That was what that man had done to her with his smirk and his amusement and his mouth when he was nothing but the same unsavory character she’d read about in the papers all these years. Only worse.
The fact that he was infinitely better-looking than any picture she’d ever seen of him didn’t help. Worse, he was not nearly as fatuous as she’d imagined and he’d been entirely too sardonic besides. Her knees hadn’t felt right since.
But as the door swung inward, she found herself staring not at a disgraceful duke in all his questionable glory, but down into the bright blue eyes and suspicious face of a little girl.
A little girl with silky red-gold hair plaited on either side of her head and a brace of adorable freckles across her nose. A little girl who made Eleanor’s breath catch, because it was impossible to look at her and not see her very famous, very dead mother. Isobel Vanderhaven of the sunny smile and titian hair, who’d looked like everybody’s best friend and the girl next door—if, that was, you happened to live next to one of her parents’ rolling vineyards in South Africa.
“I don’t need a governess,” the child announced at once. In a tone that could only be called challenging.
“Of course you don’t,” Eleanor agreed, and the girl blinked. “Who needs a governess? But you are lucky enough to have one anyway.”
The little girl considered her for a moment, as the October wind blustered and moaned, rushing in from the moors smelling of rain and winter.
“I’m Geraldine.” Her lower lip protruded just slightly, and made her look her age, suddenly. “But you probably know that. They always know that.”
“Of course I know your name,” Eleanor said briskly. “I couldn’t very well take a job if I didn’t know the name of my charge, could I?”
It was clear to Eleanor that this child would keep her standing on the doorstep until the end of time if she didn’t do something about it herself. So she pushed open the door with her free hand, and brushed straight past Geraldine, who watched her with a mixture of surprise and interest.
“They usually just stand in the drive, texting and whingeing,” she piped up.
“Who is ‘they’?” Eleanor reached past Geraldine once she’d stepped inside and shut the door, firmly, which took some doing because it outweighed her by approximately seven tons. And when she turned