“Have you entirely eliminated the theory that the Duke of Redmayne simply fancies you and would like you to be his duchess?” Cecelia asked.
Alexandra gave her a fond smile. Cecelia’s logic often battled with her innate sense of goodness and romantic naïveté. It was so beyond her to be anything but kind and honest that she forever fought the notion that others could be capable of brutality.
A grimace preceded Francesca’s own distinctive eye roll. “That man is as fond of me as he would be of a rash on his arse, which is another reason I suspect his motives for marriage. Why wait until I’m a verified spinster before calling me to heel?”
It was an excellent question, Alexandra had to admit. “What is he like?”
Francesca stuck out her tongue. “He’s not at all like a gentleman of his status should be. More concerned with hunting and horses and hounds than being a duke.”
“I should think you’d like that,” Cecelia said. “You love hunting and horses. And … probably hounds. Who doesn’t like hounds? Is he handsome?”
Francesca shrugged, taking a generous swallow of her brandy. “He might have been once but now he’s just a brutish old boor. Big, dark, and hairy. I hardly see him but he’s dressed like a barbarian, rushing from one venture to another.” Francesca made a face. “You’ll meet him tomorrow, and see for yourselves how incredibly ill-suited we are. Were we to marry, our life would be years and years of senseless battles, him trying to put me in my place, and me trying to murder him in his sleep. I’m telling you, I won’t do it.”
“You won’t have to,” Alexandra soothed. “We’ll help you out of this mess, one way or another.”
“Our first order of business is to find a way into the duchess’s locked rooms,” Cecelia said. “Hopefully before the masquerade in two days’ time. It’s better if this is all sorted out before your betrothal to Redmayne becomes public.”
“I agree.” Alexandra expelled a troubled breath. “But how?”
“Tomorrow morning, Redmayne and I meet in his study with the solicitors,” Francesca said. “I’ve gleaned that Redmayne keeps the key there in a box. I can pilfer it then and we can sneak away to the family wing during the masquerade.”
“It seems too great a risk to take it right in front of his nose,” Alexandra protested.
“You forget I’ve been a gypsy as well as a lady. I perfected sleight of hand much faster than I did French.” Francesca held up Alexandra’s bracelet with a victorious smile.
“I had no idea you were so skilled!” Cecelia clapped delighted hands as Alexandra set her teacup down so Francesca could fasten the small gold chain back on.
Cecelia yawned, stretching her voluptuous body in one lithe motion. Alexandra became certain all the men Cecelia studied with must struggle to keep their minds on mathematical figures, when her figure was on display.
“I’d almost hoped you’d fallen in love. Despite our vow,” Cecelia confessed. “I find I should have liked to be Aunt Cecelia.” She pursed her lips in a sly smile. “Or Uncle Cecil.”
“Not to a Redmayne git, you wouldn’t,” Francesca snorted. “They’re all inelegant Viking brutes with more strength than sense.”
“Yes, but we’d teach them to be proper little heathens, wouldn’t we?” Cecelia’s eyes danced with mischief.
“Can you imagine? Me with a brood?” A shudder appeared to slide all the way down Francesca’s spine. “I’d much rather remain a spinster until death, I’ll thank you to remember.”
Her friend’s laughter spilled warmth over Alexandra’s unsettled soul, the effect much like a languid bath.
Tomorrow, she promised herself. They could only handle one murderous crisis at a time. Tomorrow she’d reveal her own treacherous secret, and hope the women remembered this moment, because “until death” might just be sooner than they all thought.
* * *
To soothe the pervasive restlessness in his blood, Piers escaped the hoard of guests the next morning and unleashed Mercury on the Maynemouth Moors. He set off from the stables at a slow canter, warming Merc’s muscles for a hard ride. If he turned right, he’d follow the lowland moors to the village. And so he pointed the stallion’s head left, climbing and descending the soft slopes along the cliffs over toward the ruins of the old Redmayne fortress at Torcliff’s edge. It was only a mile or so across gentle hills, and from there he could unleash Mercury’s full speed over Dawlish Moor.
If he skirted the forest, he’d avoid the hunting party that had left before dawn, many of them still a bit knackered from the night before.
Mercury kicked dew from the vibrant clover and thick, mossy grasses beneath him, pumping his powerful neck as he cantered higher along the sea cliffs toward Torcliff’s edge. The skeleton of the medieval Redmayne fortress slowly crumbled over a black cliff edifice into a hungry sea.
The ruin of a time when these shores were invaded, by forces of strong, greedy men.
Until one family was powerful enough to stop them and waves of marauders and enemies broke upon Redmayne strength.
As Piers galloped closer, he noted movement among the white and gray stones. Curious, he dismounted to investigate, climbing the old steps to the fortress tower, which claimed no ceiling but the sky.
Who would wander up this far at such an early hour? Not the hunters, surely. They’d stick to the forests on the other side of Tormund’s Bluff, opposite the sea.
Puzzling patterns of colorful skirts twirled into the old courtyard as a trio of ladies, their chins all tilted to the sky, frolicked like a tumble of exuberant schoolgirls.
A feminine exclamation struck a chord of enthusiastic recognition in Piers that traveled all the way down to his sex. “Look at this place! It’s a thousand years if it’s a day. I’m itching to dig into the walls, to see what secrets are buried here.”
Alexandra Lane.
The sight of her took the rhythm from his step, and he nearly tripped on a barnacle-crusted stone.
The sound of her unselfconscious laugh pilfered the breath from his lungs.
And when she’d noticed his approach, something hot and guilty in her garnet eyes stole a full beat from his heart.
What a little thief she turned out to be.
Awareness pulsed through the brined air between them.
She sank into the safety of her compatriots, rousing them from their investigation of a nest residing in a crumbling embrasure.
He’d not recognized Lady Francesca Cavendish until he’d joined them in the old courtyard, which was now little more than a meadow.
“Your Grace,” the countess greeted in surprise. “I thought our appointment wasn’t for another hour or so.”
“Ladies.” He bowed.
Alexandra’s auburn brows drew together with an expression both astonished and troubled. “Your … Grace?”
Their gazes shifted in unison. They’d both noted the glint of metal from behind the old portcullis. The movement of a forearm. The unmistakable click of a hammer.
“Get down!” he bellowed.
Alexandra hurled her body toward the other two women, knocking them back just as a pistol blast joined the din of the hunting rifles in the distance.
Most of the guests awake at this hour were shooting pheasant in the forest beyond the grounds.
A brilliant time for a murder.
All three women had appeared to avoid injury. They scrambled to their feet and ran for what had once been the medieval armory, now a crumbling wall covered in ivy.
Piers launched himself at the gunman, breaking his firing arm before the volley had finished echoing through the stones.
The subsequent violence was, admittedly, self-indulgent, but Piers couldn’t stop his fists from slamming into the face of the assailant again and again.
And once more.
As the skin of his knuckles split against a stranger’s jaw, Piers tried to think of a more satisfying sensation than the impact of flesh and the crunch of bone beneath his fists.
Nothing
came to mind.
There was fucking, he supposed. But he could think of no lover, mistress, nor whore who provided the kind of unadulterated release as did delivering a well-deserved beating.
Not these days, anyhow.
Power. In this arena, the physical one, he wielded it. He studied it. He became power. Primal and potent. It no longer had to be something he danced with. Something he was shackled to. Something to run to the farthest corners of Blighty to escape.
Strength gathered in his sinews and flowed through the arrangement of his motion. It bulged in the cords and ropes of muscle he’d built maneuvering through countries where the environs were just as lethal as the locals and the lions.
And almost as lethal as he.
Almost.
Beneath the gray stone grandeur of Castle Redmayne, it had been easy to forget that this was a power available to him.
Until the fucking warthog of a man beneath his blows had given him the perfect excuse to unleash it.
“There’s another on the hill!” someone warned.
Piers hauled the man around to use as a human shield, ducking to reclaim the pistol his victim had dropped in the moss. He sighted the figure on the hill, drew a bead, and fired.
The man dropped, taking two more bullets to the torso before he hit the ground.
Piers threw the sack of blood and rubbish on the stones of the ruins and pressed the burning end of the pistol against the assailant’s head, ignoring his cry of pain. “Tell me what you’re doing here before I send you to hell,” he demanded from between clenched teeth. An unholy fury thrummed beneath his skin, setting it ablaze.
A few garbled noises bubbled around blood and spittle escaping the blighter’s open mouth.
“It appears you’ve broken his jaw too inexorably for him to confess at the moment.” The clear, unperturbed voice of Lady Francesca pulled him around once more. “Though we are lucky you stumbled upon us, if that is, in fact, what you did.”
At first, Piers thought it was the haze of red, which often accompanied violence, that touched the three women before him with such unparalleled brilliance.
He checked to make certain. Yes, the stones beneath his boots were gray, the moss clinging to them alternately umber and olive and russet. The ocean winds ruffled waves of verdant grass in the distance, and the sky stretched blue above them.
No, the scarlet hue of blood rage had receded. These women were simply … vibrant.
Vibrant redheads to the last one.
Piers blinked past Lady Francesca to Alexandra. His gaze slipped over her supple body, remembering every place his hands had been only yesterday.
Her fists curled tightly at the sides of her slim, midnight-blue skirts, and she gawked at him from eyes so owlish, he could see the whites all the way around the pupils. She wore some sort of stunning female equivalent to a man’s suit, complete with a silk cravat trimmed with lace, a high-necked blouse, and a fitted vest.
Inexplicably, he ached to rip away the starched, scholarly layers. To ascertain injury, if nothing else.
Her breasts rose and fell at double the rate of her companions’, and her eyes flashed gold in the dappled sunlight.
Piers told himself his cock was at attention because violence was sometimes just as physically arousing as vice.
He told himself that twice, before attempting to speak.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Her features were ashen, her lips devoid of the lush color he’d so admired before.
Francesca gave him her usual tight-lipped smile. “We’re no worse for wear, Your Grace, I assure you.”
He had to remember that his question should have been directed at all of them.
At the Countess of Mont Claire, in particular.
“Francesca?” Alexandra whispered the unfinished question to Lady Francesca, but her eyes never left his bleeding knuckles, which had begun to smart like the very devil.
“Oh yes.” Francesca stepped closer, examining the roughshod figure writhing on the ground before she leveled an inscrutable cat-eyed gaze on him. “Ladies, allow me to introduce His Grace, Piers Gedrick Atherton, the Duke of Redmayne, and my fiancé.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Piers’s eyes narrowed as something meaningful passed between the three women he didn’t quite understand and liked even less.
“Your Grace.” Francesca continued her introductions as though they weren’t speaking over a man he’d only just beaten within an inch of his life. “These are my bridesmaids, Miss Cecelia Teague, of London, and Lady Alexandra Lane, daughter of the Earl of Bentham.”
“Pleased to meet Your Grace.” Miss Teague spread her lavender skirts and executed an elegant curtsy. Her spectacles hid maybe the most brilliant blue eyes he’d ever come across. The brilliance, he marked, had just as much to do with what shone from behind her gaze, as the hue of it.
A jab from Miss Teague’s elbow broke Alexandra from a rather worrisome stupor, and she did something with her knees so ridiculous, Piers couldn’t have found a curtsy in it if he’d a magnifying glass.
His absurd bubble of amusement had to be the aftermath of violence still singing through his blood.
“Remarkably swift thinking back there, Doctor Lane.” He looked down at her with his most imperious expression. “Or should I say, Lady Alexandra?”
Lady Francesca glanced between them. She crossed her arms over nonexistent bosoms wrapped in a pink so garish, it almost hurt to gaze upon. On any other woman, the color would have been hideous. On her, it was oddly fetching.
“It appears you two have already been introduced.” She narrowed her eyes at Alexandra, though Piers detected no true malice in the look.
“Well—I—no?” Lady Alexandra gasped.
“Is that a question?” Francesca smirked. “You could have mentioned it last night.” She pronounced the t’s with undue emphasis.
As Lady Alexandra’s alluring mouth opened and closed soundlessly for several seconds, Miss Teague crept toward their attacker, who’d given up writhing for limp twitches and guttural moans.
“I say, he seems to be in a great deal of pain. Shouldn’t we get him some help?”
Francesca turned to her. “Honestly, Cecelia, he attempted to murder one of us not moments ago. Do let him suffer for a bit longer. I should think he brought it upon himself.”
A bold and officious woman in every facet, that was his wife-to-be.
God, they were going to make each other miserable. Not that he disagreed with her on any particular point, it was simply that this was a trait they shared, and with both of them stomping about Castle Redmayne demanding their own way, who would keep the peace?
Assuming she wouldn’t notice his inability to keep his eyes off her closest friend.
“I’ll need to ascertain which of you the bullet was intended for.” Piers dragged his gaze from Lady Alexandra to glare down at the man on the ground between them. “Is he familiar to any of you?”
Both Lady Alexandra and Cecelia stared at the gunman, shook their heads in the negative, then turned to look at Francesca, who blanched.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” she announced, almost too innocently. “Though we should probably all take a gander at the man up the hill, just to be certain.”
“Good thinking, dear,” Cecelia agreed amicably. “Should we take the long way toward the tree line, and then follow it until we can ascertain that there is no one else? It’ll make us less of a target, won’t it?”
“Indeed.” Francesca picked up her skirts and stepped over the moaning man as nonchalantly as one would a pile of manure. “Excellent suggestion.”
Piers curled his hands into fists, the masculine equivalent of pinching himself. No, he wasn’t dreaming, so …
Just who were these ladies? Where were the tears and histrionics? Couldn’t they have at least afforded him a modicum of feminine display for his—he wasn’t too modest to say—rather heroic behavior?
Cecelia followed in his be
trothed’s wake, performing a little dainty hop over the incapacitated man that did something to her enormous breasts he’d have to be completely blind not to notice. “Do you think we should contact the authorities before or after the ambu—”
“I wasn’t aware he was a duke!” Alexandra blurted.
They all paused, turning to look at her.
She stood frozen to the exact spot she had been in since they’d ventured out from behind the stone wall. Rapid blinks and darting eyes revealed a woman still too shocked to have caught up to the moment. “I—I would have mentioned, had I known. He’s the stablemaster I told you about with the runaway stallion. That one.” She pointed at Merc, docilely grazing nearby. “That one right there.”
Cecelia made an interested noise. “He’s the one we spied on last night? Of course! I should have known from the shoulders.”
Piers’s head snapped up. The one they what?
The thought of Alexandra watching as he’d wrenched off his shirt did little to soothe the battle heat in his blood.
Had she liked what parts of him she’d seen?
“Yes!” she affirmed.
Yes?
“Yes, he’s the one! He said—” Alexandra turned to him, a frenzied accusation in her gaze. “You said you kept the beasts at Castle Redmayne.”
“And so I do.” He nudged the man with his boot. “Wasn’t it Alexander the Great who wrote, ‘Every man has a wild beast within him’?”
“It was Frederick the Great,” Lady Alexandra corrected without seeming to notice that she’d done so. “And, as apropos as that quote may be, it still doesn’t—”
“Speak of the devil,” Francesca cut in. “Don’t look now, but ‘the beasts’ are returning, and are about to stumble upon a fresh kill.”
A crowd of inveterate revelers in wool jackets and jodhpurs, with shotguns draped over their arms, tromped through the grass on the ridge not one hundred yards from where Piers had shot the rifleman down.
“What the bloody hell are they doing this far east?” Piers muttered, ducking behind a wall. “They can’t see any of us together.”
“Oh dear,” Cecelia worried. “Perhaps we should head them off and redirect them to a different path toward the castle?”
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 7