How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

by Byrne, Kerrigan

  He couldn’t stop saying her name. He chanted it like a song, a psalm, a prayer, enfolding himself around her, over her, stroking her hair, dragging her scent deeper into his lungs with every breath.

  He swept her out of the room, taking her a few strides down the catacomb tunnel before resting his back against the dank stone wall, allowing themselves a dark place to fall apart for a moment.

  To know nothing but each other.

  To feel alive.

  They’d always connected here, in the darkness. It was a place they could be honest. Truly, finally honest.

  “You … you know everything about me now,” she whispered. “All my secrets. I’m a murderer.”

  He made a derisive noise. “And I don’t bloody care,” he said fiercely. “Alexandra, if you didn’t notice, I’ve killed more men today than you have in your lifetime. I meant what I said, the only reason I would take back what you did is so that I could do the deed myself. So it wouldn’t weigh on your conscience, so the blood didn’t stain your hands, because I’d be happy to bathe in it.”

  She wept softly against his chest, and he belatedly realized he might have said too much, might have shown her more of his ferocity than she was capable of enduring at the moment.

  “B-but … de Marchand wouldn’t have killed me, he said as much.” She gathered a wretched breath. “It isn’t the same as fighting for your life.”

  “Yes it is,” he hissed, squelching the urge to shake her. Or kiss her. Or … Or … whatever would keep her from giving in to her pain or her guilt. “You saw what he made of Lady Throckmorton. There is no question you fought for your life, Alexandra, no fucking question. There are fates worse than death, and he could have made what was left of your childhood a living hell. More than he already has.”

  She was silent for a time, sniffing in hitching breaths. Burrowing deeper against him, as if she couldn’t get close enough to his warmth.

  He understood the feeling, more than she could know. He wanted to absorb her, somehow. To shackle her to his side so they’d never again be parted. He’d the most absurd desire to whisk her home. To lock her in the tower at Castle Redmayne so he could always be assured of her safety.

  Because this inexhaustible emotion gathering inside of him threatened to completely dismantle him. He knew, then and there, that he’d walk through hell for her. He’d slay dragons and face entire armies. He’d circumnavigate the globe to lay her foes at her feet. And the power of whatever suffused him would assure him victory.

  Even though he was naught but a man. What coursed through his veins as he held her was mightier than mortals could expect to conceive of. There was a word for it, but it somehow didn’t seem long enough, or potent enough, to truly convey the breadth and scope of it.

  His entire life, he’d never quite had a sense of belonging. Had never known what the words “home” or “family” meant, or why they meant so much to others.

  Until here. Until her.

  As he buried his face in the tangled skein of her braid, he exhaled all the anguish, distrust, and misery he’d clung to for so long.

  And inhaled a courage he’d never before possessed to say the words he’d never before considered. “It’s possible—probable—that I love you.” He repeated her confession back to her. “That I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you in the mist on that train platform. I love you, my brave, beautiful wife. God, how I love you.”

  She leaned back, and in the darkness he couldn’t look into her eyes. “Piers?”

  “Yes, my love?”

  “Piers. I…” She stumbled back, and the rush of cool, underground night air made him terrifyingly aware of a wet, sticky substance on his shirt. “Piers, I’m cold.”

  He caught her as she fell, scooping her into his arms. Saying her name. Howling it as the sounds of boots and the flicker of lanterns made their way up the tunnel entrance.

  Patrick’s bullet hadn’t missed, he realized as he ran with her down the hallway. It was the cause of her pallor and her shocked insensibility.

  As he ran his every heartbeat became a prayer. His every breath a plea.

  Don’t take her from me.

  He wasn’t sure to whom he begged, but for all the adversaries he was willing to vanquish for her, there was one he was helpless against.

  Death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  He loved her.

  It was the first thought Alexandra had as soon as she drifted out of the miasma of pain and the dreamlike stupor that had seemed to banish that pain to another place for a time.

  She pried open recalcitrant lids, testing the light in the room before managing a proper look about her familiar hotel room.

  She felt as though Mercury had stampeded over her middle.

  But Piers loved her. And she loved him.

  So … where was he?

  She attempted words, but only a slight croak escaped a throat dry and hoarse from disuse.

  A figure bent over her. A man. A dear, familiar face.

  But not the one she yearned to see.

  “Petite Duchesse. Drink this,” Jean-Yves slid a strong hand behind her head, lifting it enough for her to take a sip of water. “A bullet passed through your side, just above the hip,” he explained. “You are fortunate to have survived. Fortunate, indeed, that the medic was a surgeon in the recent Franco-Dahomean War. He is familiar with bullet wounds.”

  The memories assaulted her sluggish thoughts with astoundingly vibrant accuracy. Julia. Forsythe. Viscount Carlisle.

  All the blood.

  She sputtered over a sip, and Jean-Yves patiently wiped her mouth, as if he’d been a nursemaid all his life.

  “Oh, God,” she groaned, tears pricking at the backs of her eyes. “So much death, Jean-Yves. More bodies. More secrets.”

  “Do not think of this.” A paternal hand brushed over her hair, light as the fall of an autumn leaf. “I am sorry I did not follow you that night,” he said earnestly. “I thought you were safe in your husband’s arms. In his bed. I did not think you’d slip away.” His eyes held a mild censure, one that pricked her with guilt.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, the apology encompassing more than he would ever realize. She’d never bring herself to admit to him that she’d suspected him of blackmail. That her guilt and terror had caused her to treat everyone in her sphere with the same distrust. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It is over, Duchesse. The authorities know the duke’s cousin tried to kill him, and that Forsythe killed Lady Throckmorton and that you would have been next had he not dispatched them.” His kind gaze crinkled with a sad smile. “Your secrets are now safe. Your husband is now safe.”

  “But—”

  “These bodies, I helped to bury, as well, and I always will if called upon to do so. For you, and for them.” He motioned with his chin to the door. “Your life may begin anew with a man who loves you most desperately.”

  She grasped his hand and held it, her throat too full of emotion to express her gratitude, though he squeezed her palm, his smile full of tender comprehension.

  Releasing her, he went to the door, motioning someone inside.

  Not Redmayne, but the “them” to whom he had referred.

  The Red Rogues descended upon her in a flurry of silks and exclamations.

  “You’re awake!” Cecelia leaned down and hugged the air around her as if she were too fragile to even touch. “Oh, thank God, Alexander, we were so bereft when we heard you’d been shot, we nearly rowed the length of the entire Channel rather than wait for a ferry.”

  Francesca dropped a single kiss on her forehead. “Luckily, Cecelia was able to charm a fisherman into chugging us across.”

  “And by charm, she means pay.” Cecelia nudged her spectacles farther up onto the bridge of her pert nose, hovering like a worried hummingbird swathed in cobalt silks.

  Francesca bustled about, her butter-yellow skirts swishing across the floor efficiently as she filled Alexandra’s water glass, adjuste
d the drapes for optimal light, placed her shawl close by, selected a book for her to read, and scrutinized the label of the tonic on the bedside table as though prepared to give her medical opinion.

  “How long have I been asleep?” Alexandra wondered.

  “Oh, a few hours, not to worry.” Cecelia picked up a hairbrush. “Would you like me to untangle your hair?”

  “A few hours?” Alexandra looked to Francesca for the truth.

  “A few dozen hours.” Francesca sighed. “One and forty, to be exact, if you count the time it took your husband to get you here.”

  Almost two days? Alexandra marveled as she drank in the sight of her lovely friends and did her best to push herself into a seated position. Pain incised her, and she hissed a foul word.

  “Oh, no, you mustn’t move,” Cecelia admonished. “Your stitches might tear, and then poor Redmayne would—”

  “Where is he?” Alexandra asked, wishing for him with an ache that surpassed the one in her side.

  “Oh, in the next room.” Cecelia threw a flippant gesture to Redmayne’s suite as she lowered herself to the mattress and began a cautious unknotting of Alexandra’s braid. “Francesca poisoned him.”

  “What?”

  “I did not,” Francesca insisted. “He’s still breathing, or was, when I checked an hour ago.”

  “She slipped a sleeping tonic into his tea,” Cecelia tattled, running the silver brush over Alexandra’s tangled tresses. “But I think she gave him too much as he’s been unconscious for nigh on ten hours.”

  “That had nothing to do with the draught I gave him,” Francesca argued. “And everything to do with the fact that he hadn’t rested for the thirty hours prior.” Dropping into the chair beside the bed, Francesca smirked. “He forced my hand, I’ll have you know. If he’d not have been pacing like a caged lion, growling at the staff and interrogating the surgeon every twenty minutes, making a general nuisance of himself, I’d have let him be. But the longer he stayed awake—the longer you remained unconscious—the more insufferable he became.”

  Cecelia leaned in conspiratorially, her blueberry eyes sparkling with rapture. “He’s hopelessly besotted with you, Alexander. Now that I’m not terrified for your life, I find his behavior rather romantic.”

  It buoyed Alexandra to no end to hear it. For she would have been the same. Insensible. Incoherent with worry for him. That’s what love did to a person.

  “Yes, the poor lummox,” Francesca agreed. “What the devil did you do to him? You’ve only known each other ten days.”

  “And yet I love him,” Alexandra admitted, meaning it with every part of her soul. “I love him so terribly much.”

  They regarded her with identical expressions of disbelief.

  Francesca snatched the tincture from the bedside table once again. “How much of this did they administer to you?”

  “I mean it,” Alexandra said around a laugh, cut short by a searing pain. “I’m as hopelessly besotted as you say he is.”

  Cecelia seized her hand, holding it to her abundant bosom. “Oh, Alexander, I’m relieved—no—thrilled to hear it. You deserve such a love. Such a man. He might be fearsome and more than a bit … untamed for a duke, but I feel that he’d find a way to snatch a star from the firmament if you requested it of him.”

  Francesca leaned forward intently. “Did everything—I mean the wedding night—when you two— Blast it all, I’m wondering if he is kind?”

  Alexandra had to smile. It wasn’t often Francesca found herself without words, and the obvious care in her friend’s discomfiture warmed the cockles of her heart.

  “He’s kind.” She smiled, remembering their lovemaking with a tinge of a blush. He was not only kind, but carnal and wicked and sensitive and so much more he hadn’t shown her yet. “He’s … rather marvelous.”

  “Good.” Francesca sat back like a queen reclining in her throne, appeased for the time being.

  “To think it was Julia blackmailing you all this time.” Cecelia brought a hand to her décolletage, toying with the pearls there as a melancholy touched her gaze. “Jean-Yves tells me she didn’t survive.”

  Alexandra was in the middle of recounting the events of that night to her enraptured friends when the door between the two rooms exploded open, startling them all.

  Redmayne stalked inside, pulling up short when his eyes locked on hers with an alarming intensity.

  He looked appropriately terrible, one side of his wild hair smashed to his head, as though he’d slept in one position the entire ten hours. The gashes of his scars appeared deeper, angrier, as did the grooves branching from his eyes. His beard was fuller, stretching down his neck, unchecked for a few days. His shirt was only halfway fastened, the swells of his tawny chest dark against the white garment.

  Alexandra had never thought anyone so unutterably beautiful in her entire life.

  An invisible thread of emotion wove through the space between them, propelling the tension to an acute peak. His face could have been chiseled from granite, his eyes swirling with the most intemperate of storms.

  She wished she could say something, but the sight of him quite struck her dumb. Any words that came to mind seemed either trite or insufficient.

  He speared her friends with that fearsome gaze of his, pointing to the door. “Out.”

  Cecelia complied after kissing Alexandra’s cheek and giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

  Redmayne stopped Francesca at the door. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  “That’s what you think.” Francesca shouldered past him, tossing a saucy wink over her shoulder.

  He slammed the door behind them before turning back to her, his expression ravaged. Gutted.

  Furious.

  “Are you all right?” Alexandra cringed even as the words left her mouth. She’d always detested the question, and now she absolutely understood why people asked it.

  Instead of answering, he dragged his eyes away from her, locking them on the gilded arabesque wall above the headboard as he visibly battled a plethora of emotions.

  “I’ve had nearly two days to build up a temper against you,” he finally snapped. “You slip away to meet with a blackmailer—the sex and lethality of whom was unknown to you at the time—without a word to me? Of all the dangerous, witless, reckless—”

  “I thought it was my blackmailer who was responsible for the attempts on your life. I was trying to protect my friends, myself, and ultimately you from what I’d done,” she explained.

  That brought his gaze back down to clash with hers. “Protect. Me?” His features rearranged from bemused to disbeliving. “Alexandra, I am your husband. It is my call—no—it is my right to protect you. And if you ever deny me my right again, I’ll lock you in Redmayne Tower and lose the key, do you mark me?”

  A spurt of defensiveness shot through her. This wasn’t the romantic reunion she’d expected to share with her so-called besotted husband. “What makes you think you can—”

  “I cannot!” His sonorous voice cracked raw upon the word. “I cannot stand at your bedside and watch you struggle to breathe, wondering if you’ve enough blood left in your body to sustain you. Wishing I could tear my veins open and offer you mine. I cannot watch someone threaten your precious life. I cannot—will not—allow you out of my sight into a world where you might be taken from me.”

  He stalked to her bed, dropping to his knees beside it, his features ardent and his eyes pinched with anguish. “You don’t know what it will cost me, Alexandra, to love you like this. It consumes me. It obsesses me. You’ve somehow, in less than a bloody fortnight, become more integral to my sustenance than the very air I breathe or the water I drink.”

  He gathered her hand to his mouth, dragging his lips against her palm. “All I’m asking is for you to have mercy on me, wife. If there is a battle to fight, a villain to face, I beg you to allow me the honor. Because the cruelest thing you could do, is sentence me to a world without you in it.”

  Moved beyond
words, Alexandra drew her fingers through his beard and up the scar on his cheekbone before reaching to sift through the layers at his scalp. He leaned his head into her touch like a great cat receiving his due.

  “I love you, too,” she finally managed.

  His mouth tightened at the sides, compressing into a tight line. “Promise me, dammit.”

  “I promise,” she said, welling with a devastating tenderness.

  “No more secrets between us,” he amended, rising to perch on the bed next to her, threading his fingers through hers. “I want all of you, Alexandra. I want your pleasure and your pain. Your sins and your secrets. Your past and your passions, your opinions and your pretenses. I want to know everything. All of it. To be the only one with whom you share them. I’m a selfish bastard, wife, and I’ll thank you to indulge me. I want you without limitations and beyond suspicions.”

  To her surprise, Alexandra found a similar desire within herself. “No more secrets,” she agreed. “Though you’ll have to share me somewhat, with them.” She tilted her chin toward the door through which the Rogues had gone …

  … and were likely listening on the other side.

  He frowned, pretending to consider it. “If they are essential to your happiness, then they are to mine, as well.”

  “Kiss me, husband,” she said.

  He bent over her, careful not to press or jostle, laying his mouth against hers with a fervent sound vibrating in his throat.

  A surge of love trilled through her, not unlike the pleasures from his magical hands. But softer, spilling across her heart with an exquisite glow, bathing her in warmth and wholeness.

  When he pulled back, she witnessed the same glow in his eyes.

  “You’re perfect,” he whispered. “My brilliant, beautiful wife.”

  She laid her hand against his scars. “So are you.”

  She knew each of them to be deeply flawed, wounded, and imperfect beings, but she understood what he meant. They were perfect for each other. Two restless souls that would never be still.

  And would no longer have to wander alone.