Julia, while friendly, could try the patience of a saint, and Piers often found himself marveling that his wife remained unperturbed by her.
Not so, today.
After such distressing family news, the overwrought duchess was stretched to the edge of an invisible tether.
Generally, he agreeably enjoyed the reminiscing banter of the two school chums, but today he would do what he could to ease his wife’s social burden until she could collect herself.
“Lady Throckmorton,” he greeted. “Are you awaiting your Dr. Forsythe?”
Several guests started when she threw her head back, exposing her neck in an overexuberant giggle. “My Dr. Forsythe? Listen to you! I think he left early for the dig. I was on my way to see him now.”
“That is where we’re headed as well.” He tucked Alexandra’s arm in his own. “I’ll bid you good—”
“Oh, that’s wonderful.” Lady Throckmorton gestured expansively. “Might I prevail upon your generosity to conduct me there? Dr. Forsythe mentioned that they’d finish transporting the Redmayne bones today, and he seemed thrilled to distraction over the prospect. I promised him I’d be there, but I fear he has left without me.”
It wasn’t in his nature to pity Forsythe, but he was mightily tempted. It appeared the good doctor was doing his best to avoid the tenacious flirt, and suddenly Piers found he was impatient to conduct her to Forsythe’s side.
“You may share our conveyance, of course.” He led his brooding wife and the beaming Lady Throckmorton to their carriage and handed them both inside. The catacombs were less than two miles away, short enough to walk, but the day promised to be hot and did its best to melt them in their work clothes. The sooner they got underground, the better.
Since Alexandra seemed incapable of conducting conversation as they trundled over the ancient cobbled streets, Piers rose to the occasion. He’d learned that one only needed to wind Julia Throckmorton like a clockwork toy and then sit back and make appropriate noises until she ran out of breath.
“My wife tells me, my lady, that you have quite the tour of the Continent scheduled after your stay here. What is your itinerary?”
Her expression turned rapturous. “Dress fitting in Rouen, then off to Paris for a fete with the Duc de Longley, and Venice and Milan. After that I have been invited to a soiree in the Alps where two eligible Prussian princes will be in attendance. Then I’ll see out the summer at Lake Geneva, where they’re having a marvelous grand party for our ten-year reunification at de Chardonne.” She turned to Alexandra. “You, Francesca, and Cecelia are planning to attend, aren’t you? Especially now that you’re married to a duke. How properly sick with envy everyone will be, and it’ll give us something else to reminisce about that isn’t … you know … the unpleasant scandal.”
Piers’s brow crimped as he felt his wife go tense as a bridge cable beside him.
“Scandal?” he queried.
“She never told you?” Julia lifted a golden brow at Alexandra. “Less than a month before we graduated de Chardonne, our headmaster quite disappeared. There was such a to-do, they didn’t even hold a proper soiree for our launch.”
“How terrible that must have been for you,” Piers did his best to keep his dry sarcasm out of his voice, suspecting he only half succeeded.
If Julia noticed, she gave no indication. “An absolute nightmare, to be sure. There was to be dancing with the boys at le Radon, which included two Italian dukes, and rumor had it, a Romanoff. All canceled. Can you imagine having to return from the Continent swathed in black? I never got to wear my lavender dress commissioned for the occasion. I’ve never quite recovered from the disappointment.”
Piers turned to his wife, thinking her pallor hadn’t yet quite improved. “We can attend, if you wish,” he offered solicitously. “Lake Geneva is rather diverting in the—”
“No,” she said decisively, then took a moment for deeper consideration, her expression smoothing into a remote, placid courteousness. “No, thank you both, but neither Francesca nor Cecelia can attend, and I promised not to go without them. I hope you understand, Julia.”
“Of course,” she said graciously. “How extraordinary that the three of you are still so inseparable. I’ll at least be able to tell everyone that I went on holiday with the new Duchess of Redmayne. Everyone thought the three of you would remain hopeless spinsters. Now if only we can marry off the other two, though I doubt they’d be able to catch such lofty husbands, if you don’t mind my saying.”
Piers minded just about every word that escaped her mouth, but he inwardly smiled when Alexandra’s grip on his arm tightened with a possessive edge. He would have liked to remind Lady Throckmorton that she hadn’t gone on holiday with them, she’d insinuated herself into their honeymoon. Instead, he inclined his head and replied, “Not at all.”
“One does wonder, though…” She gave her chin a speculative tap. “Whatever happened to Maurice de Marchand? He really was quite a … imposing sort of headmaster, wasn’t he?”
“Imposing, yes,” Alexandra agreed, not taking her eyes from the sparkle of the sea-swept morning.
“Think you he ran off with a lover?” Piers ventured. “Or perhaps stole money from the institution and disappeared?” Or perhaps he killed himself, he added silently. The very idea of wrangling a gaggle of giggling debutantes was enough to make one properly consider wrapping his lips around a pistol and pulling the trigger.
“One hopes.” Julia shrugged. “Though the authorities treated it like a murder. There was speculation that a little blood was found along with other evidence.”
“None of the evidence was conclusive, if I remember,” Alexandra cut in. “The coroner reported that there wasn’t even enough to confirm a paper cut, let alone a death.”
“Yes, well, men don’t just vanish into thin air. There must have been a witness—”
Alexandra leaned forward, her features solemn and troubled. “Witnesses can perjure themselves. Science does not. If you’re going to speculate about a murder, you must have proof.”
“Actually,” Julia argued, drawing her shoulders up in a huff. “You don’t have to have proof to speculate about anything, darling. That’s what speculation is. I don’t know why your dander is up, Alexandra, it’s not as though anyone accused you of murdering him.” She laughed giddily. “The very idea!”
That was his wife, a scientist before all things, staunch and passionate in regard to the truth.
Not at all a bad stance to hold, he thought proudly.
“If the headmaster was murdered, Lady Throckmorton, who would you hazard did it?” he asked idly, glad the dig site drew near.
“It’s obvious who did it.” Julia twisted her lips, blue eyes sparkling at Alexandra. “I’ve always known.”
The fingers on his jacket became talons as his wife leaned toward the smug woman opposite her. “Who?” she demanded.
Julia quirked her lip, gorging on the rapt attention. “Either his lover or…”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Or the groundskeeper.
Alexandra pried her clenched teeth apart and rubbed at her aching jaw. She glanced up from the crate of bones she’d classified and categorized in front of her to watch her husband dip a ladle into the water bucket.
Julia’s words had been running through her mind all afternoon.
De Marchand hadn’t been killed by a lover, but a victim. And buried by the groundskeeper.
Did Julia know? Or did her words exhume a whisper of truth Alexandra would rather remain buried?
That the groundskeeper wasn’t as trustworthy as they’d all suspected.
Jean-Yves had been among the workers at the tombs these past four days, watching her alertly and smiling when he caught her eye.
Just as he did now.
Alexandra did her best to smile back at him, though the attempt felt brittle and tense. It unnerved her to have the man touch elbows with her husband.
Could his expression of geniality hide a de
eper greed or malevolence?
She would find out on the morrow.
With the tunnels and vaulted crypt completely secured, Redmayne and Forsythe hauled the crates she’d packed with various sundries, artifacts, armor, and, as soon as she could finish dusting and chipping away some remnants of the burial shroud, the bones of Ivar Redmayne.
She’d have worked a great deal faster if she’d not been plagued by infernal distractions all day, not the least of which had been her barbarian husband.
He’d been moving stones and earth all morning before aiding Forsythe and the engineers as they fortified the final tunnel into the Redmayne Crypt.
Sweat glistened at his hairline and painted his tawny neck with a lustrous gleam in the lanternlight. One more button of his smudged ivory shirt had come undone, revealing the dramatic swells of his pectorals.
Quite suddenly, she became aware of the dryness of her own mouth, now plagued with a powerful thirst. One the water might not quench.
She refused to watch. Refused to want.
There was simply too much to do. Too much at stake. Too much to ponder over and worry about beyond his diverting feats of unbridled masculine strength.
Besides, he’d been absolutely insufferable all afternoon, turning every burdened journey down the tunnel into a rivalry, insisting upon shouldering the heaviest load.
At one point he’d actually foisted upon Forsythe a crate of animal bones, with some snide remark about how bones were hollow and light. Then he’d promptly lifted a crate the size of a small horse packed with iron weapons and jogged—jogged!—down the tunnel.
Was it any wonder he nearly drank the entire bucket of spring water?
Alexandra couldn’t decide who she was more churlish toward. Him for acting like a self-important, teenaged ass, or her for being impressed by it.
On top of everything, Julia enjoyed the spectacle immensely. That is, when she wasn’t insisting upon wandering about the various rooms, touching everything, fiddling with mechanisms, and asking incessant, inane questions of both her and Forsythe.
And speaking of poor Dr. Forsythe, once his masculinity was called into question in front of his workers and two women, he’d done his best to match Redmayne lift for lift and load for load.
Between all of this, the responsibility for a delicate skeleton, and a blackmail letter scalding her through her skirt pockets, Alexandra thought she might expire from the rein she’d held on her temper. Tension coiled her muscles as tight as a springboard, and a headache had begun to crawl from her shoulders and into her neck, threatening to winch a vise around her temples.
Forsythe joined Redmayne at the water bucket, waiting his turn. At this late afternoon hour, he appeared nigh close to death, sweat-drenched and red-faced as she’d never seen him.
Taking pity on him, she offered a conciliatory smile, one he returned with a bit of his old winsome vigor before Julia distracted him.
Noticing their shared moment, Redmayne set his ladle down, stalking toward her with that loose-limbed, feral grace of his.
At the possessive heat in his gaze, Alexandra almost dropped the femur, so she returned her own gaze firmly to her work, refusing to mark his approach even as he leaned down to address her.
“You may offer him your pretty smiles, wife,” he growled low in her ear, “because your pretty moans and sighs are mine.”
Ignoring the burst of butterfly wings in her womb, Alexandra glanced up sharply to make certain Forsythe hadn’t heard his salacious comment on the other side of the cavern.
The doctor’s head was bent toward a cooing Julia, seemingly inured to them.
Alexandra whirled on her husband, shaking the femur at him like the finger of an impassioned politician.
And quite forgot what she was going to say.
Must he insist on smelling so appealing all the time? Even his sweat was alluring. Clean and sharp with hints of leather, earth, and a salty, masculine musk.
Instead of castigating him for tormenting her thus for four days, she whispered curtly, “You’re being unkind.”
His large shoulder lifted in ambivalence as he bent to press his lips to her aching jaw. “I’m being honest,” he rumbled.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Now who is unkind?” he teased, rooting into her hair to nuzzle at the downy skin behind her ear.
She swatted him away, not because she wanted to, but because she understood the dangers of his intoxicating touch.
“This is the last of it.” To distract him, she held out his umpteenth-great-grandfather’s impressive thigh bone to him. “I’ll admit, the men of the Redmayne line certainly share a remarkable physical structure. Down to their very bones. Ivar would have been mere inches shorter than you, but I’d wager he was equally thick and burly. Also, his teeth were healthy, as I’ve noted yours are.”
He ran his tongue over wolfish incisors, testing their health as his eyes twinkled the color of the Baltic Sea on a clear day. “A man might dine upon such poetic compliments from his lady wife.” He sighed dramatically.
She frowned, refusing to be charmed by his good humor. “I’ve found a few healed broken bones, likely suffered in battle,” she continued. “But for one on his tibia from when he was a child. Other than that, he was a robust man, even his knees were intact and his joints healthy. His cause of death would have had to have been something to do with his organs, because his bones show no signs of deterioration or disease. At least not upon initial inspection.”
“An impressive ancestor, indeed.” He nodded, duly impressed. “I’m fortunate for his bloodline.”
“He would have been an excessively strong man,” she said with unmistakable meaning. “A leader of men. It would have been unfair of him to expect any man to keep up. As to do so would be impossible.”
“I understand.” He smirked at her just as evocatively, eyes flicking to Forsythe. “I imagine other men were intelligent enough not to challenge him. And if they did, he broke not just their bodies, but their will.” He wiped at a smudge of dirt on her cheek, likely making it worse. “Be grateful, wife, that you’re married to a duke and not a barbarian, who, for the time being, is only intent upon breaking one and not the other.” He leaned in and gathered her lips for a loud, showy kiss that left her speechless before relieving her of Ivar’s femur, and carefully setting it in its place within the cushioned crate bound for the examination tent.
“Which one?” she asked, just to make certain she didn’t mistake his meaning.
“His body is still intact, is it not?”
Alexandra gaped at him, trying to decide if she were furious or flummoxed as he used his fist rather than the hammer to pound the crate’s lid securely tight.
Her first kiss in four days and he’d done it not for her benefit, or even his, but for that of a purely inconsequential man that only he considered a rival.
The nerve of him. The unmitigated gall.
“I’m taking tea with Julia,” she huffed. “Do be careful with your ancestor, though I recently learned bones are of negligible heft.”
She picked up her skirts and gathered Julia away from an exhausted Forsythe, who seemed content to saunter beside them, leaving her husband to haul the final crate.
Redmayne’s chuckle followed them down the long tunnel before a deep grunt told her he’d shouldered the blasted thing and ambled after them.
If he wanted the burden, he could take it.
Alexandra took a few deep breaths as she navigated the catacombs, calming her blood. It wasn’t that she was angry at him, per se. How could she be? He’d been nothing but indulgent of her. Especially this morning, capitulating to her financial suggestions.
No, she wasn’t angry. Simply … frustrated. Not even at him, exactly. Just at everything. The entire world. She’d spent the whole day railing at the past, dreading the future, and suspecting everyone in her vicinity of being or becoming an enemy.
It wore her down until her bones felt as though they belonged
in the dank and dust of this place.
She’d make amends for being so surly at dinner this evening, she decided as she lifted her skirts to climb the handful of steps out of the catacombs and into the sunshine. Perhaps she’d even attempt another intimate overture. She could tell his tether was remarkably close to breaking. It was apparent in his scalding looks. In the whisky-soft depth of his conversations, his voice as silken as his tongue had been upon her.
She climbed past the entrance buttressed by incomprehensibly large beams of wood, squinting as the afternoon sun gleamed off the water below the cliffs of Normandy.
Redmayne had assisted with the installation of those beams not two days prior, after expressing his dissatisfaction with the previous fortifications.
It pleased her that he worried after the workers and their safety.
Every part of her could feel him behind her, and it took a herculean effort, and more than a dose of her feminine pride, not to turn and—
An echo of faint pops and a familiar hiss preceded a deafening splinter of wood and stone.
What the devil—?
“Run!” Forsythe shoved both Alexandra and Julia forward just as the thunderous sound of falling stones drowned out the dismayed cries and calls of the workmen taking their afternoon tea in a tent above.
An explosion of ghostly dust engulfed them all, and the momentum of it pushed Alexandra to her hands and knees as she fought for breath, her chest spasming with bone-rattling coughs.
Chaos overwhelmed her at once. Hands dragged her farther from the tunnel entrance as students, archeologists, and workmen shouted orders at each other.
The chalky sounds of smaller rocks settling between the boulders filled her with such dread, she surged away from whoever was attempting to help her from the wreckage.
What section of the catacombs had caved in? Had everyone made it out?
Had anyone made it out?
Where was Redmayne? He’d been right behind her, and she’d been a good several paces out of the tunnel. Surely he’d crossed the threshold before—
How to Love a Duke in Ten Days Page 28