Page 153 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

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 ultimatelyyoufrom 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 yourhusband. It is my call—no—it is myrightto 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 threatenyour 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.”