How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Read online

  She burrowed into his body, and was heartened when he pulled her close without hesitation. A new emotion had likewise seeped into his embrace.

  Possession, she liked to think.

  Alexandra watched the arms of his mantel clock, content to time the rhythm of his slowing breaths. Just over an hour before she had to go.

  She fought a sense of doom at the thought of leaving the safety of his arms.

  The sensation of his limbs became lush and heavier upon her, twitching with dreams. A quiet, masculine snore rumbled through him. Just the one.

  She smiled, glad he could sleep.

  At least one of them should.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  A portent of dread sang through Redmayne’s blood, yanking him from a blissful, languorous sleep. He clutched at his head, feeling like the very devil had woken him.

  Needing comfort, he reached for his wife, disconcerted to find himself alone in bed.

  He sat up, calling her name as the covers drifted away from his naked body.

  The wind no longer cooled his fevered skin but added an insidious chill to a gathering sense of doom.

  Don’t be a melodramatic fool, he admonished himself. He mustn’t allow the events of the past fortnight to weaken his constitution. He needed to remain sharp. Self-assured. To enhance his instincts and keep his wits about him.

  It was the only way to keep his wife safe until he dealt with the threat.

  Her sheets were cold enough to have been empty for some time. Too long for a visit to the washroom. The fact pierced him with no small amount of displeasure, and something eminently darker.

  He stood, intent upon finding her.

  Perhaps she’d gone back to her own room, unused to sleeping with another. Certainly, they’d made strides toward healing, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t require a great deal of space and patience. She was so used to her own sovereignty, and he’d no mind to take that from her.

  Most noble couples slept apart; perhaps that was her preference.

  Well, it bloody well wasn’t his. He’d do what he could to change her mind forthwith.

  He reached out to close the window, lost in his thoughts.

  His hand froze on the pane, the other joining it as he watched a cloaked figure haloed by a lantern scurry through the intemperate night. The wind blew the hood away from her head, uncovering a long braid of the most extraordinary color.

  He’d known who it was before he saw her hair. Of course he had. He’d memorized her walk, her height, her movements. He’d studied everything about her without even meaning to.

  He wanted to fling the window wide and call after her.

  In his drowsy stupefaction, he almost did.

  But the facts immobilized him. She’d left his bed at—he checked his clock—nearly midnight, dressed, and now made her way toward the catacombs alone.

  Catacombs he’d meant to scour for clues as to who was trying to kill him.

  Mind racing with a million thoughts, suspicions, and subsequent denials, he yanked on trousers, a shirt, a dark jacket, and his boots.

  What the veritable fuck was she up to? At this hour, she could only be about one of a few things, and each scenario that filtered through his thoughts was more sinister and offensive than the last.

  He’d given her a fortune in cash this morning. Could she possibly be leaving him? Could their mind-altering sex have been nothing more than a grateful fare-thee-well?

  Had she meant to abandon him all this time?

  A bleak thought sent him reaching for his pistol and tucking his knife into his boot.

  She might be meeting someone.

  A friend in need? A coconspirator?

  A lover?

  A growl ripped its way out of his chest. He’d been so careful, so suspicious.

  He sifted through their every interaction since they’d met, searching for a clue, stopping to stare at the bed as his breath sawed in and out of him.

  She could have pretended a great many things. Her affection, her story, her kindness.

  But not this. A woman’s affectation could falsify her pleasure, but not her body. The trembling. The need. The wide-eyed awe of it. The wet, pulsating releases.

  But what of everything else? What about …

  I think it’s possible that I love you.

  Why would she say that, if she’d meant to leave? If she was meeting another man?

  Was it possible she wanted to throw him so completely off course she’d stoop to such a heartless confession?

  She’d been a weakness of his since the moment he’d met her. A dazzling, alluring, infuriating, confounding woman. One he’d been so desperate to claim as his own.

  All this time, could her heart have belonged to another?

  He refused to believe it, that she would break him so thoroughly.

  Icy fingers of doubt and dread slithered their way around his heart, freezing it, turning it brittle and still.

  Women did what they had to do, didn’t they? In lieu of honorable duels, lucrative vocations, and socially sanctioned means of survival, they had to find a way to seize their power through any means necessary, didn’t they? They were adrift and prisoners of the social mores of men, and so to get what they wanted, they often stooped to stunning feats of brutal manipulation.

  His mother, his former intended, his mistress …

  His wife?

  He fought the urge to slam out of his rooms, creeping through the hotel and veering toward her path in a steady, silent jog. He took no lantern, accustomed to navigating in the dark, using the sliver of the moon and the swing of the distant lantern as a guide.

  His wife had a reason to hate all men. For, no matter how suspicious he became, he couldn’t deny that her trauma had been real.

  He’d held her as her heart shattered. Had her sanity gone, as well?

  What a brilliant woman he’d married, and hadn’t it been socially and medically acknowledged that there was a fine line between madness and brilliance? Was it possible she was both victim, and mastermind? Could she have married him intending to become his wealthy widow all along, waiting for the final strike until she’d at least a small fortune with which to disappear?

  She wasn’t harmless. She knew how to wield a pistol.

  He could be walking into a trap, even now.

  Even as all these suspicions drove spikes into the coffin of ice surrounding his heart, he violently rejected them.

  The more he desired to trust her, the more his mind seemed to sway with riotous suspicion bordering on paranoia.

  He didn’t believe she would try to hurt him.

  This was Alexandra. As compassionate as she was determined. As honest as she was enigmatic. Logical, levelheaded, and lovely.

  Except she’d had secrets, hadn’t she? He’d seen them lurking in the shadows of her eyes. But he thought they were done with that, that he’d uncovered them all.

  Apparently not.

  You’ve only known her ten days, his reason whispered.

  Another sensation raised the hairs on the back of his neck, causing him to duck behind cover and squint into the night.

  It still felt as though the devil walked here, looking to smother what little light he’d found in darkness. Piers’s hunter’s instincts sensed danger out there. Not a being, but a void. Something or someone hollow, abysmal, hungry.

  Another predator?

  With his hand on his weapon, he stalked his wife in the dark, as he had so many other creatures, intent on following her to the source of her mysteries.

  * * *

  Alexandra trained her pistol into the shadows beyond where the illumination of the lantern danced upon the damp walls of the catacomb. She might be willing to sacrifice herself for her friends, but that outcome certainly wasn’t her first option.

  Especially now.

  Now that she’d fallen in love with her husband.

  No, not fallen, per se. But drifted into it in barely recognizable shifts of her heart. He�
��d become necessary. A curator of healing and joy. The idea of him finding out. Of rejecting her. Or worse, of falling victim to her tormentor, was simply untenable. She had to do what she must to keep something like yesterday’s cave-in from happening again.

  Alexandra hoped to meet her nemesis in the first antechamber past the crypt entrance, the stability of which remained dubious in her estimation. But as she’d tripped over smaller rocks still yet to be cleared from the causeway, she’d discovered a note stuck between the temporary buttress and the seam of the cave.

  The Redmayne Tomb.

  She swallowed the harsh, metallic flavor of panic as she made her way down what now seemed to be an eternal, windowless hall. The dank stone, cracked by the insistent roots of grass and vegetation, threw every one of her footsteps back at her in an eerie echo. She’d the sense she was being watched, or followed, and she couldn’t help but wonder what lurked in the shadows beyond her feeble light.

  She couldn’t say why she lowered her pistol when she turned the corner to the Redmayne crypt. Perhaps because the thought of shooting a friend seemed so ludicrous.

  Of course she would never. She didn’t have it in her to kill.

  Except she did. She had.

  That’s why she was here.

  “Julia?”

  The woman reclined against the mound of dirt where the Redmayne skeleton had once rested, still attired in a dinner gown and bedecked with diamonds. The diamond comb in her golden hair glittered in the light of the lamp resting at her elbow. It must have cost more than any one of Alexandra’s payments.

  “Oh, don’t let’s pretend to be astonished, Alexander.” Julia tipped her head to the side, eyes narrowed like a serpent’s. “You’re just so exceptionally clever, you had to have at least suspected it was me.”

  Alexandra flinched, but mainly at Julia’s use of the Red Rogue nickname for her.

  She had suspected Julia. That is, the woman had been on her list of possible suspects, though she’d never truly believed it simply because …

  “You don’t need my money,” she puzzled. “And yet, you’ve taken mine all these years…”

  “Of course I didn’t need your money, but you did. Everyone knows your family has been in financial decline for decades. I simply enjoyed the idea of your suffering.”

  “But … we’re friends.” She realized how insipid the statement was; they obviously were anything but. However, she couldn’t seem to stop listing reasons why her blackmailer and persecutor couldn’t possibly be Julia Throckmorton.

  Even though she stood right before her, admitting it.

  She’d always been rather timid as a girl. Dainty and gullible and, forgive her, intellectually hopeless. Had she changed so much in ten years? Enough to mastermind a cave-in, hire assassins, instigate the accident on the ship, and also time the catacomb cave-in just right so she hadn’t been caught in the wreckage. It seemed improbable. Impossible.

  But then, Julia had been flitting from tomb to tomb the day before, hadn’t she? Touching everything, bothering people just enough that they’d purposely ignored her. She must have tampered with something.

  She’d been on the ship deck when the load had fallen. At the wedding where the assassins had been. On the train platform.

  She’d been everywhere that something had gone wrong.

  “Friends?” Julia toyed with her necklace, pinching her lips tight against her teeth. “Friends? Friends don’t fuck each other’s fiancés, Alexander.”

  Stymied, Alexandra stepped back. “I—I never … whatever rumor you heard, it was wrong. I’ve never taken a lover.”

  The woman’s skin tightened over her bones with a terrifying look of pure malice. It was the ugliest expression Alexandra had ever seen. “You had one, didn’t you, Alexander? And don’t bother denying it, I watched you that night. I saw what you did. I witnessed everything.”

  Struck dumb, Alexandra gasped cold, dank air into her lungs. Julia couldn’t mean …

  “Maurice de Marchand.” Julia whispered his name like that of a saint. “For two years I was his muse.” A look of nostalgic rapture overtook her, transporting her, no doubt, to the past. “He stripped me bare and worshipped my body. He showed me how to tempt and please a man. Taught me how much pleasure could be found in pain. I was his obsession. The only object of his desire.”

  “If you truly believe that, you are a fool.” Alexandra shook her head, the tableau before her inconceivable. She’d assumed the blackmailer would be an opportunist at best, and at worst someone with a grudge against her family.

  But never someone who actually missed the man she’d murdered.

  With a blink Julia returned to the present, pinning Alexandra with a glare of hatred so poisonous, it curdled the contents her stomach.

  “He loved me,” she spat. “You were nothing but a diversion. An opportunity. He spent hours worshipping at the altar that was my body. And I at his. All he did was bend you over his desk and shove up your skirts like a cheap whore. Don’t think you were special to him, Alexander.”

  Alexandra’s hand tightened on her pistol. She really wished Julia would cease using that name. She didn’t know which she found more shockingly abhorrent, the woman’s cruel words, or the madness glittering like her diamonds in her hard, hard eyes.

  “De Marchand hurt me, Julia. Don’t you understand that?” Anger rose within her, welling from a place so old and dark it frightened her. “If you witnessed what you claimed to have done, then you know that we were not lovers. That I didn’t want him anywhere near me.”

  Julia threw up her hands in a gesture of disbelief as old as time.

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh. Everybody wanted him. You snuck into his rooms and took his most intimate things for years. I’m the one who told him, you know.”

  “You. What?” Alexandra’s finger caressed the trigger of her pistol at her side, reeling with disbelief. “Did you know what he would do to me? Did you throw me to him hoping he’d steal my virginity?”

  Julia rolled her eyes and kicked her hip away from the empty dais ledge. “Oh, don’t be dramatic, of course I didn’t. I thought he would strap you a good one and then come looking for me … How could I have known you would practically ask for it.”

  “I did nothing of the—”

  “You let him spank you first, when everyone knew how aroused he became when he did so. You even admitted to him that you knew he liked to cause pain. That it made him harder than a—”

  Alexandra cocked the pistol and pointed it at Julia’s chest. Or somewhere thereabouts; she shook so violently, she couldn’t be sure. “He … he raped me, Julia. Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I can’t tell if you’re lying to me, or to yourself.” Julia eyed the pistol pensively, without fear, but like a puzzle in need of solving. “You barely fought him. God, once he got inside you, you just lay there like a cold fish—”

  “Stop. Just stop it!” Alexandra screamed.

  She could pull the trigger.

  If she did, Cecelia and Francesca would be safe. Her husband would be free. She might bring the entire tomb down upon them, but what did it matter? This nightmare would be over.

  Her finger brushed the trigger, her breaths shortened. Focused.

  And then she dropped her arm, emitting a wounded sound of defeat.

  She couldn’t do it.

  Because, the truth of the matter was, Julia was just as much a victim of de Marchand as herself. Arguably more so. If he’d been with Julia two years before the rape had occurred, then he’d begun to prey upon a girl at just fifteen. He manipulated her in her formative years. Had created a zealot out of a simple adolescent.

  She hoped he was burning in hell.

  “Julia,” she began, hoping to reason with the unbalanced woman. “I’ve brought the money.” She held out the purse, a veritable fortune inside.

  Julia eyed it like she offered her a serpent. “I decided, now that you’re a duchess, a mere fortune will no longer do.”

/>   “What more could you want?”

  Julia regarded her contemplatively, adopting a posture of scrupulous study. “I thought your husband would be a torment to you. The Terror of Torcliff, a dominant, disfigured lech. I thought he’d make you suffer, that I could watch you squirm like a worm on a hook. But, alas, it seems the two of you are disgustingly well suited.”

  “Is that why you tried to hurt him?” Alexandra began to change her mind about shooting the woman. “To make me suffer?”

  “Hurt him?” Julia scoffed. “I’ve devised something worse than that, I think. I want you to tell him. To confess what you did.”

  “There’s no need for that.”

  Alexandra whirled around, dropping her purse as Redmayne melted from the shadows of the crypt entrance, an immense specter of quiet fury.

  At first her soul soared, elated at the very sight of him, at the safety and strength he brought with him. She was no longer alone. So utterly alone and afraid.

  Then, as though shot out of the air by a masterful marksman, her joy plummeted to despair.

  He knew. He’d heard everything.

  “Your Grace,” Julia greeted him like an old friend. “Do come in, your wife has such a compelling story. Should you tell it, Alexander, or should I?”

  “Stop. Calling. Me. That,” Alexandra commanded. It was folly to antagonize the woman, but what did that matter now?

  Redmayne’s winter-cold gaze scanned Alexandra for a moment and then turned on Julia. “Listen to me.” He enunciated his words through his teeth, waves of malevolence rolling off him. “I’ve never in my life hurt a woman, but I will see to it that you—”

  “I’m sorry, Your Grace, but if anything happens to me, it’s your wife who will be locked away.” She pursed her lips into a pretty pout. “Tell him, Alexander,” she cajoled dramatically. “Tell him what you did. How you bent over for our headmaster, how you lay there and enjoyed it until your shame drove you to—”

  Redmayne lunged past Alexandra toward Julia, stabbing a warning finger toward her. “Shut your mouth, you mad bitch.”