Page 27 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

Beneath the gray stone grandeur of Castle Redmayne, it had been easy to forget thatthiswas a power available to him.

Until the fucking warthog of a man beneath his blows had given him the perfect excuse to unleash it.

“There’s another on the hill!” someone warned.

Piers hauled the man around to use as a human shield, ducking to reclaim the pistol his victim had dropped in the moss. He sighted the figure on the hill, drew a bead, and fired.

The man dropped, taking two more bullets to the torso before he hit the ground.

Piers threw the sack of blood and rubbish on the stones of the ruins and pressed the burning end of the pistol against the assailant’s head, ignoring his cry of pain. “Tell me what you’re doing here before I send you to hell,” he demanded from between clenched teeth. An unholy fury thrummed beneath his skin, setting it ablaze.

A few garbled noises bubbled around blood and spittle escaping the blighter’s open mouth.

“It appears you’ve broken his jaw too inexorably for him to confess at the moment.” The clear, unperturbed voice of Lady Francesca pulled him around once more. “Thoughwe are lucky you stumbled upon us, if that is, in fact, what you did.”

At first, Piers thought it was the haze of red, which often accompanied violence, that touched the three women before him with such unparalleled brilliance.

He checked to make certain. Yes, the stones beneath his boots were gray, the moss clinging to them alternately umber and olive and russet. The ocean winds ruffled waves of verdant grass in the distance, and the sky stretched blue above them.

No, the scarlet hue of blood rage had receded. These women were simply… vibrant.

Vibrant redheads to the last one.

Piers blinked past Lady Francesca to Alexandra. His gaze slipped over her supple body, remembering every place his hands had been only yesterday.

Her fists curled tightly at the sides of her slim, midnight-blue skirts, and she gawked at him from eyes so owlish, he could see the whites all the way around the pupils. She wore some sort of stunning female equivalent to a man’s suit, complete with a silk cravat trimmed with lace, a high-necked blouse, and a fitted vest.

Inexplicably, he ached to rip away the starched, scholarly layers. To ascertain injury, if nothing else.

Her breasts rose and fell at double the rate of her companions’, and her eyes flashed gold in the dappled sunlight.

Piers told himself his cock was at attention because violence was sometimes just as physically arousing as vice.

He told himself that twice, before attempting to speak.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

Her features were ashen, her lips devoid of the lush color he’d so admired before.

Francesca gave him her usual tight-lipped smile. “We’re no worse for wear, Your Grace, I assure you.”

He had to remember that his question should have been directed at all of them.

At the Countess of Mont Claire, in particular.

“Francesca?” Alexandra whispered the unfinished question to Lady Francesca, but her eyes never left his bleeding knuckles, which had begun to smart like the very devil.

“Oh yes.” Francesca stepped closer, examining the roughshod figure writhing on the ground before she leveled an inscrutable cat-eyed gaze on him. “Ladies, allow me to introduce His Grace, Piers Gedrick Atherton, the Duke of Redmayne, and my fiancé.”

CHAPTERFIVE

Piers’s eyes narrowed as something meaningful passed between the three women he didn’t quite understand and liked even less.

“Your Grace.” Francesca continued her introductions as though they weren’t speaking over a man he’d only just beaten within an inch of his life. “These are my bridesmaids, Miss Cecelia Teague, of London, and Lady Alexandra Lane, daughter of the Earl of Bentham.”

“Pleased to meet Your Grace.” Miss Teague spread her lavender skirts and executed an elegant curtsy. Her spectacles hid maybe the most brilliant blue eyes he’d ever come across. The brilliance, he marked, had just as much to do with what shone from behind her gaze, as the hue of it.

A jab from Miss Teague’s elbow broke Alexandra from a rather worrisome stupor, and she did something with her knees so ridiculous, Piers couldn’t have found a curtsy in it if he’d a magnifying glass.