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To every survivor.
#metoo
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since I began to chase my dreams to be an author, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a tribe of truly incredible women with whom I share this journey. I used to think that these fierce and wonderful female friendships and business relationships were rare and precious. And they are precious, but I was wrong about them being rare.
Throughout history, women have been supporting, elevating, protecting, and loving each other. Though our strict definition of the word tribe may have changed, the overall connotation has not. We need our tribe to survive. And as I look around at the wonderful change that is happening through and on behalf of women, I’m so happy to be here to see it.
Thank you, my ladies, for helping me to survive.
Thank you, Cynthia St. Aubin, for your tireless encouragement and your trust and bravery in the face of unthinkable adversity. You are my beacon and my safe place. I loved going through this crazy year with you. My person.
Thank you, Staci Hart, for your gigantic open heart and for the most precious resources you offer me with abandon: your time, your strength, and your many mad skills. Your generosity and your friendship are gifts I treasure beyond words. This entire project would have immolated without you.
Thank you, Christine, for the incalculable hours you spend on my behalf. I admire the living shit out of you and I owe you everything.
Thank you, Monique and the team at St. Martin’s, for having faith and patience and being the engine that puts my stories into the world.
Thank you, Janna Macgregor, for the bitch fests and the brainstorming.
Thank you, Claire Marti, Kimberly Rocha, RL Merrill, Ellay Branton, Eva Moore, Kimberlie Faye, Dawn Winter, Janet Snell, Lori Foster, Penny Reid, E.V. Echols, Nikita Navalkar, Maida Malby, Martha DelVecchio, Marielle Browne, Cindy Nielsen, Kelli Zimmerman, and the many others who are there with a quick read, an opinion, a word of encouragement, a shout-out online, a hug at a conference, and some wonderful words I get to read for fun.
Just … thank you.
PROLOGUE
L’Ecole de Chardonne
Mont Pèlerin, Lake Geneva, Switzerland, 1880
“Do you know why I called you to my study at such a late hour, Lady Alexandra?” Headmaster Maurice de Marchand’s hand disappeared beneath his imposing desk at her approach, but Alexandra dared not glance down to note it.
She didn’t want to imagine what his hands were up to, concealed from her view.
Besides, liars looked down. And a liar she was about to be.
She’d always hated this room. The overstated opulence. Damask everywhere. Splashing together in garish reds, oranges, and canary yellows. Even at this hour, one felt the need to squint against the visual onslaught.
“No, sir, I do not.” She summoned every lesson in deceit and temerity she’d gleaned from the Countess of Mont Claire in four years, and met the shrewd gaze of the headmaster with what she hoped was clear-eyed innocence.
Objectively, she understood why so many of the girls at de Chardonne found him handsome. With patrician cheekbones and an angular jaw, he portrayed the kind of sartorial elegance found in ladies’ novels. Alexandra thought his neck too long on his strong shoulders, an effect exacerbated by a diminutive chin.
Her friend Julia had once mooned over his brooding, dark eyes, comparing their color to a rich, black Croatian stout. But Julia, she’d long ago decided, was incessantly ridiculous. And if Alexandra had to compare his eyes to anything, it’d be whatever Jean-Yves, the gardener, fertilized his hothouse orchids with.
Julia had obviously forgotten about his penchant to lash the girls’ palms when they misbehaved. It wasn’t kindness in his eyes she noted then. But something else. Something darker.
He wanted them to cry. He moistened his lips at the sight of their tears.
De Marchand’s hand reappeared from beneath the desk, and he templed his fingers, resting the index tips against his lips. The sleeves of his black headmaster robes puddled at his elbows where they rested on the imposing desk. It was a desk shadowed by many such men, passed like a scepter and crown to each new lord of their château.
Lord of what, exactly? Alexandra barely suppressed a roll of her eyes. Lord of little girls? How pathetic.
“Come now,” he taunted, his French accent weighting his words with a treacle vibrancy. “You’re perhaps the cleverest girl we’ve ever educated here at de Chardonne.”
Alexandra imagined generations of clever girls before her better trained—or more willing—to hide their intellect. “You flatter me, sir. But I confess pure ignorance as to why I’ve been summoned to your study at so dark an hour.”
His lids lowered to a sleepy cast, his eyes darkening to a rather hostile brunet. “Always so polite,” he murmured, arranging implements on his desk away from his person. A stack of papers trapped beneath a marble paperweight he returned to their leather folder. “So proper and careful.” The uncapped fountain pen he set to the far left. “Perfect marks. Perfect comportment.” He put his letter opener to the far right, equidistant from the pen. “The perfect student … the perfect woman.”
“I am not yet a woman.” The reminder felt imperative. Though she was to graduate de Chardonne in a matter of days, at seventeen she was the youngest in her year, and would remain so for some months hence. “And I am quite aware of my defects, sir.”
Some days she could focus on nothing else.
De Marchand said nothing; his gaze reached for her across the expanse of the desk until Alexandra became so unsettled her stomach curdled against something she couldn’t quite identify.
Something unseemly. An unconsecrated anticipation she should have feared.
Instead, she settled her notice in his hair, the lambent color of drenched sand at low tide. Darker than gold, lighter than brown. An unassuming color for such an insolent and powerful man.
“Do you think, Lady Alexandra, that if you are perfect during the day, no one will notice what you do in the dark?”
Alexandra’s fingers fisted in the folds of her dress, her breath drove into her lungs like a cold rail spike. She valiantly fought the instinct to flee. “I assure you, sir. I’m ignorant as to what you are referring.”
Splaying his fingers on the desk, he stood and loomed over her for a terse moment. A spiteful victory danced across his features. He moved to the sideboard next to the window overlooking Lake Geneva. The waxing moon gilded the mountains with silver, and the town below competed with their own metallic golden light. “Clever people have the most exasperating tendency. They spend so much time overestimating themselves, they underestimate everyone else.”
A frown weighted Alexandra’s mouth and pinched the skin beneath her brows. “Sir, if I’ve done something to offend someone, I—”
“Would you like some port?” De Marchand spun from the si
deboard sporting a diamond-cut crystal decanter and two matching glasses.
The sight of it turned Alexandra’s tongue to the consistency of gravel.
She’d pilfered that selfsame decanter from him not two years ago, along with a bottle of port from his extensive collection of wine.
Which meant … he knew.
He’d discovered the cave.
The Ecole de Chardonne for girls had originally been built into the side of Mont Pèlerin as a clever château-fortress by a Frankish aristocrat in the eleventh century. In its depths, the boiler churned and roared, and during a night of exploration four years prior, Alexandra had chanced upon a labyrinthine walkway which, when bravely followed, became less of a hallway and more of a cave until it abruptly ended at a wall of ivy and thorn bushes.
Here, she and her dearest friends, Francesca Cavendish and Cecelia Teague, had created a haven for their Red Rogues Society. Red, because they all had hair of some variant shade of such. Rogues, because they spent every moment away from their so-called lady’s education, to learn all the things not allowed their sex. They read Poe and Dumas, war reports, and lascivious poetry. They taught themselves Latin and algebra. They’d even given each other masculine monikers which they used during their society gatherings and in correspondence. Frank, Cecil, and Alexander.
They’d become too bold over the years, Alexandra realized as she stared at the port decanter gripped in the headmaster’s hand. In their quest to discover and enjoy manly pleasures and pastimes denied ladies, they’d taken to occasionally pilfering a thing or two from the few male residents and employees at de Chardonne. Innocuous things, they thought. Things that would never be missed.
Like one of any dozen of decanters the headmaster possessed.
“Port is not a drink one offers a lady,” he started. “But I think you’ve developed a taste for forbidden things, have you not?” An almost giddy satisfaction dripped from de Marchand as he offered her the glass. “A hunger for pleasures only allowed to men.”
Dumbstruck, Alexandra could think of nothing else to say or do but accept the wine with white, trembling fingers. She dared not take a sip. She couldn’t have swallowed if she tried.
“You assumed no one knew about your little society all these years?” he scoffed gently. “Your trio of redheads. The fat one with all the wealth and no title. The scrawny, impertinent countess.”
Indignation flooded her at his valuation of her compatriots, enough to free her tongue. “I don’t at all consider that a fair assessment of—”
“And you,” he said with ungainly, almost accusatory heat. “The flawless balance of both. Slim, but supple. Delicate and desirable.”
Alexandra’s dinner roiled in her stomach.
De Marchand stepped back behind his desk and pulled open a drawer.
“It isn’t appropriate of you to say such things, sir. My father wouldn’t appreciate—”
The sight of the pearl-handled shaving razor halted her breathing, and as de Marchand began to produce the contraband she and her friends had acquired over the years, a strangling sensation paralyzed her.
A pair of braces, a top hat, cuff links, shirts, and several other incidentals. They hadn’t all been his, and many others had been castoffs.
Even so.
She hated that he’d been to their cave, that he’d defiled their sanctum with his odious presence. She resented him for touching things that, although not hers to begin with, had become treasures.
Treasures the Red Rogues had fully intended to return upon graduating.
“Four years.” The number seemed to impress him as he placed the items in a cluster at the edge of his desk in measured, meaningful motions. “You stole from me when you didn’t think anyone was watching. You delved into my intimate things. Forbidden things.”
A slither of oily disgust oozed through her insides, snaking around her guts and tightening them painfully.
His head shook in barely perceptible motions. “We are more alike than you’d imagine, Lady Alexandra. I, too, have a penchant for forbidden things.”
Forbidden.
As forbidden as what lurked in his ever-present dark eyes upon her.
His stare had become a chill permanently lodged in her spine. And that chill kept her posture ramrod straight as she stood before him. It readied her limbs for retreat.
“So clever,” he repeated. “But not clever enough to have known I watched you.”
“I do know you watch me, sir.” She’d been aware of it since she’d been too young to recognize just what glimmered in his eyes. A desire not only forbidden, but criminal. “More than is seemly. More than is right.”
“Let us not dwell on what is right or wrong.” He motioned to her stolen goods. “I’ve watched you enough to find your eyes search for me, as well.”
A breath of disbelief escaped her. “Only like a rabbit searches the sky for an eagle.”
“You think me a predator, then?”
Indignation scored at her. He wanted her to fear him. “I don’t think of you, at all, sir.”
His handsomeness rearranged itself in the firelight into something undeniably hideous. He tossed the port back and set the glass next to his reclaimed property.
Alexandra admitted her guilt. She’d been caught out for a thief. And yet, his sins far surpassed hers, she knew that intrinsically, with every part of herself.
“What do I do with the three of you?” He eyed her with exaggerated speculation. “Were I feeling unduly punitive, I would contact the police. Were I feeling cruel, I could expel you.”
“No!” Alexandra gasped. As a woman, she’d have a difficult enough time being accepted into a university. If she didn’t produce the recommendation she relied upon from de Chardonne, she’d have no chance, whatsoever. “Please, sir. It was only a bit of harmless fun. I apologize for taking your things. We only intended to borrow them. I promise to make reparations if you’ll just—”
He stooped to gather something from yet another drawer of his desk, retracting a long, slim strap every girl at de Chardonne had come to both fear and despise. The sight of it once again choked the words from her throat.
“After tonight, I will be certain to remain in your thoughts every time you intend to misbehave.”
Alexandra set her own glass down, her cold, stiff fingers no longer able to carry it as he rounded the desk to tower over her.
Her nostrils flared with hatred, but she bore down on her dread and extended her palms to him. She’d never been struck before, had never done anything to warrant it. But she’d seen the strap applied in the classrooms to unruly girls. She’d noted their stiff movements for weeks.
“It is my fault, Monsieur de Marchand. Punish me, but please leave Francesca and Cecelia out of it. I am the instigator. I, alone, deserve this.”
“As you say.” He stared at her upturned palms, leached of color and trembling like hummingbird wings.
He lifted the strap, and she turned her head in an involuntary wince as she prepared for the strike.
The strike that never came.
Releasing her breath, she dared a glance at him and instantly regretted it.
A notion darkened his visage as he lowered his arm.
“No.” He pointed the strap toward the desk. “No, for you the punishment will fit the crime.”
She glanced at the smooth surface of the desk, uncomprehending. “How do you mean?”
“You’ve desired these past four years to be treated like the boys at le Radon?” He grasped her elbow, drawing her toward the desk. “Then you will be punished like one.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
His teeth glowed brilliant white, even in the dim firelight. “Bend over.”
Alexandra’s eyes peeled wide and she took a step back, tugging against his hold. She knew exactly where he wanted to strike her.
“No,” she whispered, her mind searching for an out. Francesca would know what to do. At the very least, she’d use her influence as a
countess to bring the headmaster to heel. Even Cecelia could use her wealth as leverage. No one dared risk losing the income she provided the school.
What clout did Alexandra have?
“My father, the Earl of Bentham, will never stand for this.” She planted her heels into the carpet, to no effect. “When he hears of how I’ve been treated, he’ll ruin you.”
De Marchand brought his face alarmingly close to hers. “Everyone knows your father couldn’t ruin a painted whore, let alone a man with my influence.”
He didn’t give Alexandra time to consider his words as he shoved her against the desk. With a strong hand between her shoulder blades, he pressed her chest against the surface.
She gasped out a cry of pain as the sharp edge bit into her hip bones.
“Spread your arms,” he commanded.
So stunned by the pain, so unfamiliar with brutality, Alexandra complied, smoothing her fingers over the cool mahogany. Closing her eyes, she counted the petticoats beneath her heavy skirts.
They’d soften the sting of the strap at least.
With a breath pinned in her lungs, she braced for the first blow.
Instead, she felt the whisper of cold air against the backs of her stockinged knees.
“No.” The hoarse objection ripped out of her once again as she reared back and did her best to twist away.
His hand clamped on the back of her neck, slamming her back over the desk with such force, her cheek ground against the grain.
Terror pierced her more than the pain. This was no simple punishment. No retributive fury.
A current of something angrier, uglier, pulsed in the atmosphere around them. What had she done to evoke such a malevolent reaction from him? How could she take it back?
“Please.” Fighting to remain calm, she struggled to lift her neck. “Let me up. You’re hurting me.”
“Do you think the boys squirm and plead so prettily?” His question was punctuated with hard consonants, as though he’d spoken them through his teeth.
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 1