Undone by the Billionaire Duke by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews [Crews, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarlequinUKLtd
Published: 2017-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

HUGO COULDN’T SLEEP.

As he was not a man unduly plagued with the demands of conscience, this was not an issue he generally struggled with. But it wasn’t some newfound and unruly set of principles that kept him up tonight, roaming his own halls like his very own ghost story.

It was Eleanor.

Eleanor, who he’d come to depend upon over these last weeks. For her starchiness. Her prim disapproval. Every spicy, challenging word that fell from her notably disrespectful mouth—the very same mouth that Hugo had tasted and which haunted him more than he cared to admit to himself, even now.

He had the terrible suspicion she would haunt him forever, not that he allowed himself to think such things. Not when he refused to think about next week, much less the rest of his life. Or anything approaching forever.

But the Eleanor he rather thought he’d come to know had disappeared tonight.

She’d been noticeably absent when he’d run into her and her sister in the hall outside the summer salons, en route to the nursery wing. Gone was the fiercely capable Eleanor who’d been giving him hell and in her place was a far more quiet and distant version, as if she’d been trying to disappear where she stood.

Hugo hated it.

He’d never met Vivi Andrews before. But he knew her at a glance, because he knew her type intimately. It took him all of two seconds on his laptop to find entirely too much about the actual Vivi Andrews, and the sorts of shenanigans she got herself into with high-profile members of the aristocracy. The more he read about her, in fact, the less he understood about Eleanor. How was she so forthright and dependable when Vivi was anything but?

The truth was, the younger Andrews sister—who Eleanor was supporting, if he’d understood that right, which made no sense while Vivi pranced about decked out in the sorts of labels the heiresses of his acquaintance wore because their fortunes were so vast that a six-thousand-pound T-shirt was a “little treat”—was the sort of creature Hugo usually slummed around with. Vivi had showed him her true colors in their first meeting, all batting eyelashes and come-hither smiles as if they’d been in a club instead of a hallway in his ancestral home. And she’d kept it up throughout dinner while Eleanor sat beside her, subdued. Vivi had distinguished herself by being endlessly pouty, unkind at the slightest provocation, and obviously convinced that she was a great, rare beauty when the truth was, thousands of equally ambitious girls looked just like her. Her sister was the rare beauty, but he had no doubt Vivi wouldn’t see it that way.

She looked nothing like Isobel, and yet the resemblance was impossible to miss. Hugo felt Vivi’s attention the way he’d always felt anything that reeked a bit too much of Isobel’s sort—like an oily sort of shame inside him, as if the fact a person like her was so obviously interested in him made him somehow like them.

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