Page 115 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

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 thehandful 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?

Hadanyonemade 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—

Julia stumbled toward her, her entire yellow day dress now an ethereal shade of white. She collapsed into Alexandra’s arms shuddering with irrepressible sobs.

“Are you hurt?” Alexandra demanded, searching her for injures with unsteady hands.

“He saved me,” Julia wailed. “Forsythe saved me, and now I cannot find him. Is he dead?”

Alexandra handed Julia off to an awaiting student. Swamped with a grave sense of foreboding, she tripped back toward the catacombs’ entrance.

Now an impenetrable wall of stone.

Men were already digging at the rocks, yelling and creating a line to pull the earth away from the blocked archway.

Which meant…

“No.” She lurched faster, attempting to run on legs as steady as a newborn fawn’s.

Redmayne. He’d have been the last one out. Where was her husband?

She expected his wide shoulders to melt out of the cloud of settling dust, white as an archangel and just as merciless. He was the Terror of Torcliff. The Amazon hadn’t conquered him, nor had the Nile. He’d tamed jungles and forged across pitiless deserts.

A simple cave couldn’t possibly defeat him.

The very thought was categorically impossible.

Now that the air had become less choked with stone and dirt, Alexandra found Forsythe as he dragged himself outof the rubble looking dazed. The pallid substance caked in his sweat darkened to take on the appearance of dried blood.