How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Read online

  Helpless tears sprang to her eyes. Every one of her muscles locked tight and finally, finally, she was able to sob in a breath, dragging the strength into her lungs to push into her trembling limbs.

  With a burst of power, drawn from the deepest recesses of her pain, she heaved him away from her.

  He stumbled back a step, emitting an oath of puzzled opposition.

  Alexandra sprang forward, bolting around him, evading his reach.

  “What—Alex—?”

  She shook her head again and again as she backed away from him. Injected with an instinct and an energy as old and necessary as life, itself, she turned on her heel and fled.

  Fled his body and his unslaked desire. Fled the intimidating sex he’d meant to drive inside of her, and the desperate sound of her name ripped away from him by the wind. Wind that now tore the tears from her eyes and whipped her with loose tendrils of her damp hair, stinging her cheeks and invading her mouth.

  She ran until she ran out of beach. Pumping her legs so swiftly, she wasn’t certain her feet touched the sand. She ran until her lungs threatened to burst. Scampered up the stairs even though her ankles ached, and her thighs seized.

  She ran away from ten years of grief and pain and guilt and fear. She ran from the almost doglike confusion clouding her husband’s savage features. From constant anxiety for her friends, and the persistent threat of discovery. Of death. Of retribution.

  And even as she ran hard and fast and long enough to possibly kill her, a part of her knew it was all for naught.

  Because she could never escape what she’d done. What had been done to her.

  When she had such demons chasing her, she didn’t even notice if hotel staff or guests gawked as she raced through the hotel to her rooms, locking the world out.

  Every part of her hurt. Burned. Inside and out.

  Wanting to go nowhere near a bed, she dove into the corner between her wardrobe and the wall, pulling her knees up into her chest and locking her arms around them, making herself as small as she possibly could. Her trembles became quakes, and then bone-clenching convulsions.

  She tried to stop. To breathe. To cry. What little logic she still possessed began to lose hope. To fear that this was her new reality. That she’d been pushed beyond the brink of sanity. Her body was no longer her own. Her fears no longer contained.

  She’d become her worst nightmare.

  Helpless.

  Even against herself.

  Burying her face against her knees, she bit down on her skirts, filling her mouth with the taste of salt and wind and silk.

  The scream crawling up her throat finally erupted, muffled by the fabrics as her entire soul rent apart in one quivering, bone-shattering cry of pure, helpless, hopeless anguish.

  She’d thought she was healing. That her patient, tempting husband opened her body and mind, seducing her into the world of carnality.

  But no. She was broken. Damaged. Dirty.

  No matter how many baths she took. No matter how many tears she offered. How much restitution she paid or forgiveness she begged. No matter how many years were put between her and the night her body had been invaded. She was damaged. Soiled. Unclean and fallen.

  She would never again be innocent.

  Because she was not an innocent. But guilty. Of murder.

  My fault. My fault. My fault.

  Another scream overtook her as she realized what happened next. Once her husband dressed and came after her, he’d demand answers.

  And she’d have to confess. Confess or lie.

  Either way, she was damned.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Piers availed himself of the service corridor rather than the front entrance. He could bear no more telegrams, or “Your Graces,” or, Christ preserve him, fucking archeologists.

  He wound his way to the laundry, aware he still clenched his soiled towel in a death grip, and he searched for a pile of such grubby linens in which to abandon it. That accomplished, he pumped a trencher of water, and rinsed the sand from his hair over a basin, snatching up another towel with which to scrub his scalp dry.

  Straightening, he caught sight of his reflection in the mirror, and was reminded of why he never did that anymore.

  He still looked like a monster.

  And today, with his wife, he’d acted like one.

  He looked above him, as though his gaze could penetrate the stories between them and spy upon his bride in the tower suite. The urge to go to her was a physical drive, tugging and straining until his boots relented and took a step.

  His conscience, however, nailed those boots to the floor.

  Today had been … a disaster. In every catastrophic way imaginable. But until a few moments ago, he’d not realized the extent of the damage he’d wrought.

  All this time, he’d been such a dunce. A self-absorbed ass.

  He’d thought his wife shy. Or cerebral. Awkward and self-conscious, perhaps. Deliberate and overanalytical.

  He assumed she feared him because he was big, mean, and terrifyingly unattractive.

  It’d never occurred to him, self-obsessed duke that he was, that her behavior had nothing at all to do with him.

  Squeezing his eyes shut against the truth did little to help. The pure, unfiltered terror with which she’d regarded him was now branded on the backs of his eyelids. The frantic, extraordinary strength it had taken to shove him away. The desperate speed she’d used to escape him. He’d witnessed that kind of behavior before. In prey animals.

  When they ran for their lives.

  His breath rattled in and out of his chest as he drew it deep. A thousand possible scenarios barraging him with vivid and hellish vibrancy.

  He hadn’t known his wife long, but today he’d learned something new. Something devastating.

  Someone had hurt her.

  And without realizing it, he’d reopened a wound inflicted by another man.

  Turning to avoid shattering the mirror with his fist, he caught sight of some of his clothes folded neatly on a table, and several garments hanging on a line, a few of them belonging to Alexandra.

  He drifted toward her intimate undergarments, remembering a frustration from the night on the veranda with a sick clench in his belly. He’d tried to touch her through the slit in her drawers, and was unable to.

  His fingers shook as he took the delicate item down from the pins, opening the beribboned legs to uncover a row of curious stitches at the seam.

  A surge of furious heat overtook him with such force, he thought he might breathe fire rather than give credence to the word battering at every mental wall he could possibly erect.

  A figure froze in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Your Grace.” Constance Murphy’s gentle voice still grated like wind-whipped sand, chipping away his paper-thin veneer of civility. “I—I’ll come back.”

  Recognizing her as someone whose family had worked for the Redmaynes for generations, as someone he’d selected as his wife’s lady’s maid, he held up a hand to stay her. He didn’t look away from the little stitches as he forced the words through his lips. “Did she bid you stitch these, thus?”

  She paused so long, he fought the urge to throttle an answer from her. “Nay, Your Grace, my lady does it, herself.”

  “It is wonderous odd, don’t you think?” He finally looked over at her, meeting her young, solemn gaze.

  “Wonderous odd,” she agreed, staring at what he gripped in his hands with a stark sort of sadness.

  “What do you make of it?”

  She looked back at him as though he were daft.

  As well she should.

  Piers begged her with his eyes, pleaded with her to give him some explanation other than the black, ugly conclusion now amalgamating in his mind, adhering like tar and pitch.

  “Your Grace?” she breathed.

  “Why would a woman do this?” he bit out through clenched teeth.

  He already knew. Of course he did. Before Constance’s chin wobbled. Before her eye
s welled, turning an unflattering shade of pink. He knew what she would say, because he’d been rejecting the gut-wrenching, unthinkable truth with every step he’d taken toward the hotel.

  It was why he hadn’t chased Alexandra when she’d fled.

  Abruptly, he changed his mind. He didn’t want the girl to answer his question anymore, but she did, goddamn her.

  “Mayhap, Your Grace, her only worry in regard to her”—she gestured to the garment, unable to find the words—“inn’t convenience, but protection.”

  Protection.

  A wave of emotion inundated him, threatening to pull him under a violent tide of grief and fury. He flushed hot, then cold, shivers of goose pimples breaking out on his skin even as he thought he might burst into flames when a brilliant, almost luminescent rage surged through every fiber of his being.

  Was he fire? Or was he ice?

  What he was, was an idiot. A blind, selfish, fucking worthless rutting imbecile.

  “I’ll … come back, Your Grace.”

  He barely marked the maid’s watery offer, nor her exit as he examined the painstakingly perfect rows sewn into Alexandra’s undergarments.

  She’d never taken a lover.

  But a man had taken her. Against her will.

  Everything about her, since the first moment they’d met, clicked into place like a terrible, blood-chilling puzzle.

  When Mercury had almost crushed her, she’d winced away from Piers’s touch. Not because he was the Terror of Torcliff, ugly and scarred, but because he was a man.

  Alexandra had kept the gun at her side while they’d walked together on Maynemouth Moor, her finger close to the trigger.

  For protection.

  Not against assassins, but against him.

  Frustrated wrath welled within him as her endearingly artless seduction the night she’d proposed now became something altogether insidious.

  He’d thought her an overwrought, spinster virgin who’d had too many years to research, contemplate, and complicate a very simple act of pleasure.

  But no. Yet again, he couldn’t have been more mistaken.

  The thought of their wedding night had caused her so much distress, she’d come to “get it over with.”

  Her list … Those conditions he’d found both absurd and adorable. Dear sweet contemptable Christ! The entire fucking time, she’d been trying to figure out a way to not relive a past nightmare.

  She hadn’t wanted him to use his tongue.

  Because someone had used theirs against her, somehow.

  She’d wanted them to disrobe.

  Because someone hadn’t bothered to take their clothing off before—

  He stared down at the garment in his hands. The stitches blurred by a narrowing of his vision as red began to bleed into his periphery.

  How many times had he made use of the convenient opening with a mistress or a lover?

  He’d endeavored to do the same with Alexandra the other night.

  Anger tightened his shoulders, then his chest, the tension rippling down his arms until he dropped her undergarment as though it scalded him.

  Turning, he searched for something to break.

  The table closest to him did nicely. He kicked at it, sending it colliding into the crank press. Then he proceeded to dismantle it violently with fists and boots, fighting the horrific portrait forming in his mind.

  She’d requested that they face each other …

  Because she’d been taken in some dreadful, demeaning fashion.

  He ripped something off the wall and smashed it onto the ground.

  He’d been too aroused, too utterly entertained by her to truly wonder why she’d asked him to be gentle so as not to do her intimate damage.

  Because … Because someone …

  He roared as his gorge rose, and he had to swallow several times, using iron will not to heave the contents of his stomach on to the floor.

  Something else violently disintegrated beneath his gathering madness.

  He tried. By God, he tried not to allow the clues to conjure the images of her … like that. But alas, he’d narrowed down her ordeal to a few lurid and unthinkable circumstances.

  The portrait screamed at him, and he wished she could rip open his skull and scrub the image from his mind.

  So he ripped other things, clothing, linen, rending them so they matched the tattered shreds of his humanity.

  God! The things he’d accused her of. The ruthless seduction he’d all but forced upon her on their wedding night. She’d requested the lights off, not so she couldn’t see his face, but so he couldn’t see her fear.

  He’d been so uncompromising about her shyness, so relentless in his all-consuming desire.

  And so unforgivably cruel when he’d thought she’d lied about her virginity.

  She’d not been acting the innocent, she’d truly not known what to do. She’d never experienced pleasure before, only pain.

  You claim you’ve never been kissed? Well, you sure as hell have been fucked.

  A raw, torturous breath hissed out of his throat as a fathomless, abysmal pit of regret, shock, and self-disgust threatened to buckle his legs from beneath him.

  Like the monster he’d never wanted to be, he’d tortured his poor wife.

  The games. The teasing. The agonizing anticipation of ten days, when all she wanted was to be done with her wifely duties. To have the untenable obligation in her past, instead of looming like a sword over her head.

  Because the expectation of a terrible thing was often worse than the reality of it.

  And how had he finally approached that situation this evening? By pressing his inflamed, naked body against her. Kissing her with all the savage lust unleashed by a brush with death and exacerbated by her exquisite feminine beauty.

  He’d pinned her to a chalky cliff, imprisoned her with his oafish body, intent on wrapping her strong, lovely legs around his waist so he could fuck all the life-affirming desire roaring through him into her.

  No woman deserved that for their first time with a new lover, no matter how many she’d had before, let alone a woman with her particular trauma.

  The crimson-hued wave of rage receded, and another tide of exhaustion overtook him as he surveyed the devastation he’d wrought on the laundry room.

  It shamed him that he’d acted thus, but he couldn’t have faced her filled with such impotent, violent, passionate hatred.

  Never. He’d never frighten her like that. Never face her with the fury contained within him. Not as long as he lived.

  He needed this fatigue in order to maintain the gentility she’d require of their next interaction. Because, even now, a cold splash of murderous haze lingered inside of him. Longing to demand answers from her.

  Like who? And how? And where could he find the—he dare not even call him a man—the mud-sucking villain?

  Because every breath he took was borrowed from the devil. Every day since the terrible day he’d put his hands on her would be carved out of his flesh.

  Yes. A Redmayne’s revenge was slow. It would be wet. It would be messy. Methodical. And ultimately lethal.

  But now was not a time for that. First, before he could hunt down and take apart a true monster, he must do his level best to put his wife back together.

  She deserved that, at least, to feel safe with him. From him.

  Carefully, he retrieved her drawers and hung them just as they’d been before, his hands visibly trembling. They seemed so small and pretty and clean in a room afflicted with such disarray.

  Turning, he went to find her, prepared to answer for his crimes against her, whether intended or not.

  In the hallway, Constance single-handedly held back a bevy of wide-eyed clerks, porters, and his favored maître d’. They all gaped at him, some with wariness, and others with apparent concern.

  “I’ll replace all that is broken on the morrow, and pay for any extra work I’ve caused,” he offered wearily. “I couldn’t … go to her—”


  “Do not you worry yourself, Your Grace,” Constance said in a small, kind voice. “They only know what they need to, but they understand.”

  “They understand what?” he asked, not wishing to have brought any embarrassment to his wife.

  Constance opened her mouth to reply, but a young, swarthy porter beat her to it.

  “Quelqu’un a essayé de nuire à la femme qu’il aime.”

  Wearily, Piers turned to take the back stairs up to her room, not allowing himself to contemplate why he didn’t bother to correct the boy.

  Someone tried to harm the woman he loves.

  * * *

  When Piers didn’t immediately find Alexandra upon opening the door to her room, he called her name, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness.

  No lamps had been lit, and daylight had almost faded entirely, giving way to an early gloom. Other than the cream damask curtains performing a ghostly dance at the open balcony doors, everything in the cozy suite remained still.

  A magnetic awareness tuned the fine hairs on his neck and arms. A charged pull as subtle and as potent as that of the moon on the tides drew him around to find her. On the other side of the bed, tucked between the wardrobe and the wall, Alexandra stared stone-faced and unmoving, her arms around her knees and her gaze fixed on the far wall.

  This time, when he said her name, it was in an aching whisper.

  She flinched, but didn’t look at him. Not until he made his way around the bed, slowing to attempt a careful approach.

  Countless questions and platitudes sprang to his lips, the first of which was: Are you all right?

  But he bit down on his lip, refusing to ask the insipid question. Because, of course, she wasn’t all right.

  And part of that was his doing.

  In a swift but oddly graceful motion, she pushed away from the wall and stood, stepping out to face him. Her back straight and shoulders squared, like a martyr readying to meet her fate. He yearned to help her, to hold her, but wasn’t certain she’d even want him to touch her just now.

  The soft blue of an overcast gloaming painted her a paler shade of ivory than he’d ever seen. Tears smudged bruises beneath her eyes and pain etched hollows below her cheekbones. Her lips, swollen with her grief, with his kisses, glistened as they shook.