Dr. Forsythe gestured to a few of the crates stacked on wide wooden bases while burly sailors folded ropes at their corners securing them with gleaming steel hooks. “I invited His Grace to inspect some of the sundries I’m accompanying out to the dig,” he explained in his lively, cultured accent. “Besides, Redmayne and I found the coffee wasn’t strong enough in first class, isn’t that right, Your Grace?”
Redmayne said nothing as he tossed the last of his tin back, the taut muscles of his neck working over a swallow in a most distracting manner.
Julia abandoned Alexandra’s arm to sidle closer to Dr. Forsythe. “Your brilliant reputation precedes you, Doctor,” she simpered. “I find the subject of your work simply enchanting. Promise me you’ll tell us all about it.”
“Oh, you’ll find it quite tedious, I assure you.” Forsythe directed a polite smile in Julia’s direction before turning back to Alexandra. “But, dear Dr. Lane, you’ll be absorbed to learn that they’ve broken through the ground of an ancient settlement above Le Havre and found a Persian aristocrat buried in the same crypt as what appears to be a Moorish prince and a Viking sailor. I’m aching to take you to the catacombs and show you what we’ve found. If my suspicions are correct, oceanic trading was taking place far earlier than we’ve suspected—”
“Dr. Atherton.” They all turned to stare at the duke as the growled name was familiar to no one, least of all Alexandra.
“Pardon?” Forsythe cocked his head in a rather spaniellike gesture.
“You are addressing Her Grace, Lady Alexandra Atherton, Duchess of Redmayne.” He enunciated every word with abject clarity. “You never mentioned, Forsythe, that you’re acquainted with my wife.”
“I didn’t realize you’d married, Your Grace. I wasn’t aware she was your new duchess.” As though he realized the danger he was in, Forsythe sputtered artlessly, his vigorous color intensifying to ruddy. He retreated maybe two steps before Alexandra felt compelled to jump to his rescue.
“We’re on our honeymoon, Thomas.” Alexandra flinched at her overbright tone. “This jaunt to the archeological dig is my new husband’s indulgence of my voracious obsession with the past.”
“Well.” Forsythe recovered his look of surprise rather deftly, reaching out to reclaim his coffee cup. “May I offer my belated felicitations.” His congratulations sounded genuine, but his earnest brown eyes were touched with a tinge of melancholy. “I see we are about to dock, and I’ve a few things to attend to before we disembark. I will bid you good morning, Your Graces, until we meet in Seasons-sur-Mer. I imagine you’re staying at Hotel Fond du Val in town?”
Lips compressed into a white line, Redmayne nodded curtly.
Once again, Alexandra rushed to be gracious. “I’m looking forward to seeing the catacombs, Thomas,” she said.
“I’ll follow you, Doctor,” Julia offered solicitously, threading her arm through another elbow that had yet to be offered. “You can tell me all about your Persian Vikings.”
Over her golden head, Forsythe and Alexandra shared a wince at Julia’s disgraceful grasp of history. His eyes crinkled before he departed with a good-natured wink, Julia attached to him like a barnacle.
Alexandra turned to her husband, who watched Forsythe’s retreat with a flinty glare. “Tell me, wife, is he a part of your obsession with the past?”
His question evoked a stunned laugh from Alexandra’s throat. “Thomas? Decidedly not. I barely recalled his existence until today.”
“Thomas?” A dark, skeptical brow lifted before he turned away from her to watch seamen throw great ropes overboard, and dock cranes lower to attach to prodigious crates of cargo.
“Dr. Forsythe is a friendly and respected professional colleague.” Alexandra joined him at the railing, not appreciating the undeserved cold shoulder he offered her. “It’s not as though he ever had access to my bedchamber by way of secret tunnels. He’s never had intimate knowledge of me with which you two could compare notes.”
It wasn’t in her nature to throw Rose between them, but Alexandra had never been one to suffer the double standards upon which her sex was expected to castigate themselves.
She wasn’t about to start now.
“Touché.” Redmayne leaned on his elbows, stubbornly keeping his eyes on the distant cliffs past the long golden beaches.
Alexandra studied his strong profile, which concealed the disfigured side of his face. From this vantage, his masculine beauty was startling. The sun heightened the dusky hue of his skin, kissed by many such days beneath its relentless heat. The wind tossed his disobedient hair with abandon, and she longed to reach for it. For him. To cover the cold expanse of his fury and find the warm, tender man he’d so often been with her.
“Piers.” She’d not made use of the intimacy of his first name, and she wished doing so would remind him of the subtle intimacies she’d hoped they’d share as husband and wife. “I can promise you, Dr. Forsythe has never been of any interest to me. He’s not my lover, and I had no idea he’d be here now. Need I remind you it was not I who suggested this voyage, nor did I make the miraculous arrangements to do so—”
“You need remind me of nothing,” he said grimly. “I am aware our situation is entirely of my making. We’ve no need to discuss it further.”
“You say that, but last night—”
“Did you not hear me?” He turned to her, his features forbidding, eyes glinting with disdain. “I don’t wish to discuss last night. Nor are the circumstances of your previous lovers a particular concern of mine.” He spat into the sea, as though he’d a sour taste in his mouth. “I was the fool to have assumed you were virgo intacta in the first place. You are a worldly, educated woman, quite apparently much in the company of men. Since you are lovelier than the usual bluestocking, it doesn’t at all surprise me that you were seduced.”
“I wasn’t—”
“Furthermore,” he cut her off. “As you’ve so judiciously pointed out, I’ve had scores of lovers, myself, and objectively have no real moral reason to begrudge a beautiful spinster her pleasures.”
Alexandra squinted up at him. Had he just insulted her and called her beautiful in the same sentence?
“Unfortunately,” he continued drolly. “The fact remains that my heir needs to be born of your body. And, as impertinent as you might find it, I must be certain any issue of yours belongs to me. Thus, we can forbear each other’s company for ten days or so; I’m certain you won’t find that too much of a chore.”
“I wouldn’t resent forestalling our intimacies to ease your mind,” she said carefully.
“Of course you wouldn’t.” He swiped up his coffee cup and stared into the grounds at the bottom, as though wishing to divine the future in their depths.
“I confess to being confused by your logic,” she admitted.
He slid her a level glance. “How so?”
“Well, if we avoid the marriage bed for now, it’ll be proven that I am not with another man’s child at this time,” she began. “But when I conceive in the future, how can you—or any man, for that matter—be certain that a child belongs to him. There’s no way to tell.”
“I’d know,” he growled.
“You couldn’t possibly.” Her brow puckered. “It’s something that, as a scientist, I’ve always found odd about our society compared to many of the ancients. A name follows that of the male line, however, one only has categorical proof that a child is the product of a woman’s body. No man can be absolutely certain a child is of his line, that his wife hasn’t taken a lover, unless he’s with her every moment of every—”
With a furious burst of strength, Redmayne hurled his cup overboard. It sailed through the air, reflecting the sunlight with every rotation until it splashed into the water and disappeared.
Alexandra stared at the place it sank, not daring to meet the dangerously glinting eyes now boring a hole into the side of her head even as he bent to grit into her ear, “I’d. Know.”
She turned her face, h
er cheek meeting his, grazing the grains of his beard. She expected him to pull away, but he didn’t. The absurd notion to rub against him like a cat rose within her, and she drew her cheek across his.
“I wouldn’t,” she whispered against him. To any onlooker, they’d appear to be the besotted newlyweds, nuzzling each other beneath the French sun. “Take a lover, that is. I don’t betray my vows. I hope you can trust that.”
His cynical grunt was hot against her neck, as he rooted into the hollow behind her ear, inhaling against her hair. “There’s no reason to trust you,” he lamented, his fingers curling around her arms to draw her closer. “And I probably never will.”
“Why?” she asked, breathing him in, as well. His exotic scent mixed with the brine of the sea, intoxicating her. What a strange conversation to be having with their mouths, when their bodies reacted to each other’s proximity in such a conflicting way. “Why do you doubt I am in earnest?”
“Do you trust my word?” he challenged, his mustache tickling at her neck before his lips pressed there. “When you know next to nothing about me?”
She hesitated. He was right. What did she know of him? She’d no idea if he was truly a man to be trusted. Not with her body. Her past. Her secrets.
Her life.
She knew the smell of his sweat was anything but repellent. That she liked to sink her hands beneath the lapels of his jacket just so she could shape her fingers over the breadth of his chest. That for such a big man, he had yet to use his strength against her. Even in anger. And that horses allowed him to be their master. That an extra sense of such beasts could often pick up the measure of a man.
Jean-Yves had a dog whose ears would flatten, and lips would curl, at the presence of Headmaster de Marchand.
It should have been a warning.
But the horses and hounds at Castle Redmayne, they responded to Piers’s firm lead because of his alternate gentility with them.
The beasts trusted him.
Shouldn’t that count for something?
“Perhaps, my lord, rather than avoiding each other for ten days, we could spend our honeymoon in each other’s company?” she suggested.
He stiffened and pulled away.
She missed him instantly.
“That really isn’t necessary. What would be the point?”
“Well, if we are to be Duke and Duchess of Redmayne. If we are to raise a child—children—together it might be easier if we are better acquainted. Friendly, even.”
He tossed his head in an almost equine manner. “Dukes don’t generally have much of a hand in raising their own children.”
“No…” she acquiesced. “But Redmayne, while very grand, isn’t like modern vast estates so it’s unlikely you’ll be able to avoid them. Or me.”
“Not if I install you somewhere else,” he muttered.
She decided now wasn’t the time to mention that she’d never remain installed anywhere. She would go where she pleased. “Is that your design? How will I bear you a bevy of heirs if I’m not accessible to you?”
He paused, his frown deepening to a scowl, as though she’d made a point he’d not considered. “What are you proposing, exactly?”
“Merely an appointed time every day where we share each other’s company,” she suggested. “A dinner, perhaps. Or a walk of some kind, like the one we took the other afternoon along the cliffs. Minus the assassin, of course.”
“You mean the walk when you threatened to shoot me?”
Alexandra bit her lips to suppress a grimace, or a smile. Perhaps both. “I only threatened to shoot you because you were on top of me.”
“I’d just saved your life, if you remember.”
She did remember being on the precipice of a cliff, in more ways than one.
“It wouldn’t do to spend our honeymoon apart,” she said, turning from him. “But if that is your wish—”
He seized her arm, pulling her back into their intimate posture, his breath hot against her ear as his body melded to hers. “Do you have any idea, wife, what ten minutes in your company does to me?” His whisper was almost like a snarl in its animalistic intensity. “Do you really think I can smell your scent, that I can watch you knowing what lies beneath your shapeless dresses, and keep myself from tasting what is mine?”
Alexandra surreptitiously glanced at the workmen on the deck, all of them doing their utmost to not notice them and succeeding superbly.
Too well, in her opinion.
“Now that I’ve explored your curves, tasted your breasts, and experienced your pleasure, I’ll think about nothing else until I have you naked once again, do you understand me? Our time together now is an agony, in more ways than one.”
Three days ago, his words would have frightened her beyond imagining.
Three days ago she’d not known what it was like to experience the ruthless patience of his passions. To be the object of his desire and to find that desire ignited in her own dormant soul.
“I don’t see why … we couldn’t make some sort of arrangement,” she offered breathlessly.
“Arrangement?” The word sounded indecent from his voice.
“We could … trade favors. Without intercourse. It could … help us to further our acquaintanceship.”
And, if they were lucky, they could teach each other a little about trust.
“I have one condition,” he murmured into her ear.
“What’s that?”
“You let me use my tongue.”
Alexandra’s reply was lost in a raucous crack from above. Men shouted. The grind of metal and splinter of wood was deafening.
Redmayne’s entire bulk moved in synchronous slow motion, as he seized her, effortlessly lifted her, and surged across the deck with his head ducked over hers.
Had he been a millisecond slower, the thousand-pound crate would have crushed them both.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Piers didn’t know which suspicion he detested the most, that someone might be trying to kill his wife, or that someone might be trying to fuck her.
It unsettled him greatly that he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Alexandra. Not only because she was the most captivating woman, but because, no matter how many panicked maritime admiralties assured him that the incident on the ship the prior morning had been an accident, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that it had been anything but.
How could it be that even though the suspicions in his wary heart threatened to eat him alive, he felt the need to guard his new wife like a precious possession? As disenchanted as he was by their wedding night, as much distance as he’d vowed to maintain, he was unable to leave her side.
Not during their journey north to Seasons-sur-Mer, a little hamlet by the sea from which they could still admire the ancient rooftops of the port city of Le Havre. Not when they’d arrived at Hotel Fond du Val, and not even when she’d accepted Dr. Forsythe’s invitation to accompany him on an introductory tour of the dig site and catacombs the prior afternoon.
Piers had to force himself not to lock her in their rooms while he booked immediate passage back to Devonshire.
Where he could secure her in the tower of Castle Redmayne.
Something about the whiff of impending danger made a man want to cosset those closest to him in a fortress.
Until he could be certain she was safe. Until he could be certain she wasn’t with child.
So he could plant within her a child of his own.
The idea held a darker appeal than it ever had before. For darker reasons. This morning there’d been a shift, he noted, from his original motivations for siring an heir.
Rose and Patrick were no longer at the forefront of his mind.
This morning, as he watched his wife’s head bent toward Dr. Forsythe’s as the two passionately argued over the provenance of a bracelet they examined, his motivations had everything to do with possession.
If Alexandra were ripening with child, every man who’d dare to look upon her would know he’d
put it there. Would understand she was taken. Claimed.
One would assume that a man with Dr. Forsythe’s ostensible intellect would know better than to trifle with the Terror of Torcliff’s wife. That he’d be more cautious about concealing his longing. More judicious with his smiles and lingering gazes.
Apparently, Thomas Forsythe wasn’t as intelligent as his reputation would lead one to believe.
Piers couldn’t blame the doctor. Not when Alexandra shone with such brilliance, even when surrounded by drab tents and the soiled bones of the ancient dead. The incident aboard the ship the prior morning might as well have been forgotten, her fear replaced by a radiant joy as she surveyed the artifacts splayed in organized disarray. Her umber eyes glowed a feral gold, lit by some inner glow ignited by her passionate appetite for the past.
A longing ignited within Piers, as well, one he fervently attempted to ignore.
What if she looked at him with half the joy as she did the iron torque in her hand? What if she stroked his skin, his live warm flesh, with a modicum of the reverence with which she handled the bones of the dead?
What if she smiled at him with the same warm delight glittering up at Dr. Forsythe as they shared their professional insights?
She’d claimed Forsythe had never been her lover. Could he trust her word?
Categorically not.
Piers studied the banked heat in the other man’s gaze, the barely leashed hunger of a predator sniffing about his next meal.
There was a chance she told the truth. Because he also believed that poor Dr. Forsythe wouldn’t be so entirely, pathetically famished for a woman whose charms he’d already sampled.
Alexandra signaled to the ancient skeletons laid out over neat rows of tables, gesturing with more enthusiasm than she ever had in his presence. “I can see why we are assuming that the Moor, the Persian, and the Viking were all buried here during roughly the same century,” she posited. “But then if this was a graveyard, or a crypt, where is the church? In my estimation, these men were not buried before A.D. 1000, but Granville Priory was built in the ninth century and is in the town of Le Havre proper. Why not inter these obviously wealthy dead men on holy ground instead of a cryptic catacomb on a cliff so far out of town?”
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 21