“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