How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 17

  “Of course.”

  He didn’t step back to make room for her, and the moment the door closed behind her, Alexandra found herself enfolded against a solid wall of heated steel.

  Once, she might have panicked. Or struggled. He didn’t warn her, and she’d not prepared herself for the physical contact.

  But as he gathered her against him, one of his large hands pressing against her back and the other cupping her head, she found that her limbs didn’t seize with the familiar instinct to thrash or flee.

  A strong, rhythmic thump against her cheek held her in thrall. His heart raced, pounded, and the sound of it hypnotized her, lulled her into a sense of contentment

  He held her closer than he had before. With less deference and more desperation, as though he’d been half afraid he’d find her gone.

  Breathing deeply, Alexandra searched for a foreign or female scent but found nothing but his distinctive, alluring essence.

  She smiled at this. Rose had been drenched in a floral French perfume. Surely if they’d embraced—if they’d been intimate—he’d reek of her.

  Indulging in a sigh of relief, Alexandra relaxed against him. She even slid her hands around his ribs to his back, attempting to encircle the great, big whole of him and found it almost impossible.

  She burned to know what had happened, but she sensed he needed this. Needed her for another silent moment.

  Silence she could give him. Silence she had in spades.

  What a thing it was to be held. An odd and oddly ubiquitous, intrinsically human thing. A thing, she realized, she’d not experienced for ten years. And never by a man.

  Until now. Until him.

  She’d uncovered a grave in Pompeii where the bones of a man and a woman had been intertwined in just such an embrace. Alexandra had stared at them for incalculable hours, bereft at the idea of separating them. Wondering at what had driven them together like this, and if they’d clung to each other in life as they had in death.

  And why.

  This, she thought once more. This was why. A body, a heart, needed another nearby. An embrace fed an elemental physical need she’d never known she’d lacked until an abundance had been available.

  And here was the physiological proof. His heart slowed against her ear, adopting a more reasonable rhythm. Incrementally, his muscles melted from steel to iron, his arms relaxing until his hands idly explored the length of her spine.

  “Do you fear me, Alexandra Lane?” She heard the words as a resonant vibration in his chest.

  His perceptivity was beginning to be problematic. “I do. I have,” she admitted carefully.

  He hesitated, his chest hitching on a breath. “Does it frighten you to have to—look at me?”

  “No,” she assured him. “No more than it frightens you to look in the mirror.”

  “I don’t look in the mirror,” he rumbled.

  Alexandra leaned back to see him, though his arms tightened at her waist as if he wasn’t ready to let her go.

  “Why?” she asked gently. “Is it difficult to face who you are?”

  He gazed down at her, his features stony and tense. The left side of his aspect turned slightly to her, as though daring her to face the parts of him she should fear. “I don’t always see the man I am, I see the man I could have become. He is difficult to look at.”

  Despite herself, she reached up and shaped her palms to his jaw. “You’re going to think me silly, but when we met I fancied that ancient gods had done this to you out of jealousy for your mortal perfection.” She grazed shy fingers through his beard, tracing the angry marks.

  He tensed. Twitched, but he didn’t move.

  “I’m sorry for your pain,” she continued earnestly. “But these are a part of you now, and this encounter altered you for the better.” She lifted onto her tiptoes, and nudged his head down, pressing her lips to the fissure on his cheek. “Both inside and out,” she amended. “I think you’re quite handsome. And, beyond that, I think you are good.”

  Something lit in his eyes that sparked an answering ache in her heart. Half disbelief, half yearning. “Then why fear me?” he puzzled. “Because of what happened at the ruins? Because I killed a man?”

  Alexandra didn’t say a word as her lashes swept down to cover her expression. She was the last person who could condemn him for that.

  “Was that the first … person you’ve ever killed?” she queried, wishing she could tell him that they shared this kinship. Wondering if his hands were stained with the blood of others.

  The length of his breath answered her before his words ever did. “No. I’ve been attacked before. In Argentina we hunted too closely to an American company’s gold mine. We’d a brutal encounter, I couldn’t tell you the body count. And, there have been other times, but I can promise you I’ve never taken a life that hasn’t been in defense of my own. Or that of another.”

  They were silent in the dark for a few breaths before he pressed, “Can you forgive me that?”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.” She ventured a look at him. “I know there are reasons to kill.”

  Redmayne pulled her back into him, relief and regret lowering the timbre of his voice to a soothing depth. “Even so, I’m sorry you witnessed the savagery of which I am capable. I want you to know I’ve never in my life used my strength against a woman.”

  Alexandra relaxed into the dark, pleasant circle of his arms, groping for words. “What did—how did Rose—?”

  “Marry me.”

  Puzzled, she pulled back enough to look up at him. “I thought our engagement had already been established.”

  The smile he gave her was full of infinite tenderness before he dropped his head to trail his lips against her temple. Her cheekbone. The corner of her mouth. His lips didn’t take hers, instead they indolently explored the soft, sensitive place where her neck met her jaw, his hands brushing her hair over her shoulders to give him better access.

  “Tomorrow,” he whispered against her ear. “Not in a month’s time in some stuffy cathedral in London. Tomorrow in the old rectory.”

  Alexandra’s heart assumed the frantic pace his had only just abandoned as she stepped away from his embrace. She needed to think, and she couldn’t while his mouth was doing … that to her ear.

  “Why tomorrow?” she asked.

  His eyes were two shards of ice in his swarthy face. “There is a ship that sails for Normandy tomorrow evening. We could spend our wedding night at sea and wake up away from these people. From this castle. From the men who attacked yesterday. Away from a bedroom where I—” He broke off, but Alexandra knew the end of that sentence.

  Where he’d been with Rose.

  “A French university has been unearthing ruins in Normandy for the last several months; my father used to fund them years ago, trying to verify Magnus Redmayne’s connection with William the Conqueror. Patrick revived the project when he thought he’d become a duke.”

  He let out an intemperate breath at the mention of his cousin. “Even upon my return, I didn’t have the heart to shut the operation down, and I recently received word that the archeology students might have discovered where Magnus Redmayne’s father is thought to be interred. They’re calling in an expert to assist with the final excavation.”

  As he caught a tendril of hair at her nape, his features tightened with a yearning for something she identified instantly.

  Escape.

  “I don’t share my father’s obsession with the past,” he continued. “But I would hazard that you do, Dr. Lane. Would you like to see the place for our honeymoon? Poke about the dig sites?”

  His enthusiasm to abscond was infectious, and Alexandra found herself on the edge of convinced. She’d rather swim the length of the Channel than walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey or wherever one would marry a duke of his standing. And it moved her that he’d select a honeymoon spot tailored to her interests.

  “What about the licenses, the banns, and the priest? My family hasn’t
even been notified.”

  “Would they be terribly upset if you eloped?” He touched his nose to hers in an affectionate gesture.

  She gave that a good deal of thought. “Not with a duke,” she concluded.

  His smile was at once wry and bitter, an admittedly unsettling sight on features as satyrlike as his. “In that case, I happen to be a duke, and related to a very influential politician.” He released her. “Leave the details to me.”

  Feeling more than a little dazed, Alexandra nodded. “Do you want to … resume what we were about before Rose—erm.”

  He took her face in his hands once again and pressed a searing, searching kiss to her lips. “More than anything. But I want to have you as my wife. Away from here. Away from her.”

  Alexandra found she vehemently agreed. “Tomorrow then,” she mumbled in disbelief.

  “To think, I found a treasure like you on a train platform.” He kissed her swiftly and released her. “Be ready in the morning.”

  She watched him go until he was nothing but a hulking shadow in the distance before turning back to her room and facing the two women pretending they hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  “Tomorrow, then,” she echoed, unable to shake herself from a daze. “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Alexandra only remembered flashes of her wedding day, but she’d recall her wedding night the whole of her life.

  So much of that morning had been lost in a frenzy of preparation. She, Cecelia, and Francesca had arisen early, and by some miracle had cobbled together a wedding dress from a pearlescent evening gown of Francesca’s that was so tight, she was forced to acquiesce to a corset rather than make alterations.

  Cecelia sent Jean-Yves to the gardens and presented her with a breathtaking crown of white chrysanthemums in lieu of a veil an hour before the ceremony.

  An announcement had been made at breakfast, of all places, that whoever desired to attend the wedding could do so in the rectory at precisely two o’clock.

  At a quarter past noon, a gentle knock on the door drove Alexandra to her feet. She’d flung the door wide, expecting a visit from Redmayne, hoping for last-minute assurances.

  “Oh. Hello.”

  Manners dictated she school the disappointment from her expression when she found a grim-faced stranger rather than her intended. He was possessed of dark hair, a fair complexion, and a large build, but something about the eyes and the cruel set of his mouth struck Alexandra as familiar.

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked politely, his presence infusing her with instant unease.

  “Lady Alexandra Lane?” he inquired, his accent as clipped and starched as his collar.

  “Yes.”

  “Allow me to introduce myself.” He bowed at the waist. “I am Lord Patrick Atherton, Viscount Carlisle, at your service.”

  The familiarity at once made sense. Patrick Atherton. The duke’s disloyal cousin.

  Rose’s husband.

  Cecelia and Francesca drew up behind her, doing their best to match as bridal attendants in gowns of vastly varying shades of violet.

  Since Alexandra couldn’t bring herself to address Rose’s husband, she was forever grateful for Cecelia’s interjection. “What service can you mean, Lord Carlisle?”

  His eyes, a darker copy of Redmayne’s, lingered on Alexandra in an insulting manner even as he replied with never-failing politeness. “His Grace is aware you haven’t family in attendance to give you away for your nuptials, and so the duty falls to me, as his closest family member.”

  “I thought Sir Ramsay, his brother, was his closest family member,” Francesca said frankly.

  Lord Carlisle’s features remained remarkably passive, though Alexandra detected a tightening about the mouth. “He is conducting the ceremony, my lady,” he said before dismissing Francesca altogether. “Now if you’d accompany me, Lady Alexandra, I shall take you to the rectory.” He offered a stiff elbow, lifting his eyebrows with expectation.

  Why would Redmayne send his detested cousin to escort her down the aisle? As a taunt, perhaps? A reminder that Lord Carlisle had very little chance of ever becoming a duke now that Redmayne was marrying and likely to bear children?

  For a moment, she had almost forgotten Piers had precipitated their marriage as a vengeance against Lord and Lady Carlisle. Or, perhaps she’d begun to make more of their swift connection than he.

  Because this gesture on his part was anything but gentlemanly.

  Which reminded her of how truly little she knew of Redmayne. To say nothing of his intrinsic self. His less-than-heroic qualities. His flaws and failings. Suddenly, his warnings began to cycle through her thoughts, barraging her into silence before Redmayne’s rather impatient cousin.

  I’m a rather mercenary sort of fellow.

  Spite is the only reason I have left.

  Don’t try to make me a good man.

  Swallowing a surge of nerves, she managed to reply. “T-tell His Grace that I appreciate his thoughtfulness. I’m sorry that you’ve taken the trouble, Lord Carlisle, but I have an old family friend in attendance who will be performing that service. I thank you for your pains.” She closed the door on his bewilderment without awaiting a response.

  Something about the interaction, about the entire situation, set her teeth on edge and left an oily feeling in her belly, as though she’d swallowed a bad scallop.

  The feeling persisted as Lord Bevelstoke, eager to regain the acquaintance of her family now that she was to become a duchess, conducted her down the aisle of the overcrowded rectory.

  The ceremony had been quick, or eternal; she couldn’t really recall anything but the stifling heat and how out of place her fiancé—husband—appeared in a church with his pagan beauty contained in an obscenely expensive suit.

  All eyes were on him.

  There’d been a chaste kiss. Nothing like the ones he’d bestowed on her the evening before. Bells tolled as Redmayne hurried her back down the aisle. Flower petals were thrown when they burst from the rectory. She’d eaten none of the celebratory food, and couldn’t have named a quarter of the people who wished her well. She clung to each of her friends as they left, receiving encouragements she couldn’t hear before she was whisked into the most luxurious coach imaginable.

  When they reached the docks, Redmayne had evacuated the coach before the wheels had even stilled, explaining that he’d last-minute arrangements to look after.

  Alexandra had sat in a dreamlike daze as frenzied porters had unloaded their trunks, and then her, from the coach.

  Somehow, she’d made it to their lavish stateroom. Staterooms, she’d corrected, as she wandered through the luxuriously appointed sitting room to the bedroom, her fingers tracing over a plethora of velvets, mahogany, and leather. She appreciated the open windows through which a briny summer breeze swirled about their cabin, tinkling the crystal on the lamps.

  Constance, a shy and efficient lady’s maid, had been selected for her from Redmayne’s staff. However, after Alexandra had been dressed in one of her well-worn nightgowns with an anemic froth of white lace at the sleeves, she had sent the maid away, preferring to brush out her hair on her own.

  She’d been brushing for a long time, now. Too long. Long enough for the sun to have completely disappeared. Long enough for her hair to have spun into a vibrant mahogany mass, gleaming and soft, and her fingers to ache from how tightly she gripped the handle.

  Apprehension warred with anticipation in a tumultuous tumble of emotion. Did every bride feel some variation of this?

  Even the innocent ones?

  How was she going to endure tonight? Perhaps she could do what she’d done before and step outside of her body. Stand at the window and wait for it all to be over.

  At least the act didn’t take long, she recalled. They could get to it as quickly as possible, and then it would be over. Done.

  She violently wished for the hundredth time that they’d not been interrupted the previous nigh
t. When she’d had more courage. When she’d been less exhausted and more fortified with whisky.

  A drink. Now there was a capital idea.

  She stood and left the bedroom in search of a decanter or a bell pull when the key turned in the lock, rooting both her feet to the middle of the floor.

  The door revealed Redmayne with a creak of hinges.

  A delicate thrill followed the pang of dread. His black wedding suit was still immaculate, but the sea wind had disheveled his consistently unruly hair. A sable forelock hung over his scar, and Alexandra’s fingers suddenly ached to smooth it away.

  He closed the door to the stateroom and locked it, turning to allow his gaze to wander over her with an indolent appreciation.

  “I sometimes forget…” he murmured as though to himself.

  Alexandra swallowed layers of nerves before she could speak. “Forget what?”

  “How beautiful you are.” He undid his cravat as he traveled the length of the sitting room. “Then I see you and realize that memory cannot compare to reality. I’m left as breathless as the first time we met.”

  Alexandra’s breath abandoned her, as well. Stolen by his proximity. By the potency of his masculinity and the possibilities of what the next hours might hold.

  By his lovely words.

  She turned from him, retreating with measured steps back toward the bedroom. “The first time you saw me?” She gasped out what was supposed to be a casual laugh that wouldn’t have fooled a deaf man. “Covered in tweed and mud?”

  In three strides he was behind her. His fingers smoothing through the gleaming mass of her unbound hair, following its length to the small of her back. “You are more beautiful covered in tweed and mud than any woman swathed in silk and diamonds.”

  Alexandra withdrew once more, belatedly realizing that the farther away she drifted from the man, the closer she came to the bed.

  Neither option seemed safe. And yet, both were inevitable.

  “You don’t have to say those things to me,” she breathed. “I needn’t be wooed. Perhaps we could just begin—”