Page 151 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

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 bullethadn’tmissed, 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.

CHAPTERTWENTY-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 abovethe 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.