Page 56 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

“I won’t let them have you,” he whispered against her ear. “You belong only to me.”

CHAPTERTEN

Alexandra squinted down at her notepaper, trying to ignore the fact that she stood in a duke’s bedroom about to make one of the most ludicrous decisions of her life.

Perhaps she’d brought entirely too many notes for a proper seduction.

She worried at her lip as she stared down at the rows of her neat, precise scrawl, the product of painstaking research from hundreds of texts. Resources ranging from epistolic to medical, scientific to fiction.

Alongside her academic pursuits, she’d devoured all writing she could find on anatomy, physiology, biology, mating habits of ancient and contemporary cultures, ritual, conception, childbearing, and the odd romantic novel. The most pertinent ones she’d read over and over in her desperate search to understand men. Or herself. Or the act.

To understand what had happened to her.

Now that she’d completed the research theory phase, she needed to move to the next step.

And quickly. Before she lost her nerve.

At the ball, once the initial fervor after Redmayne’s declaration had died down, Alexandra had accepted felicitations from what had seemed to her every person in attendance.

But one. His former fiancée, Lady Rose Atherton, Viscountess Carlisle. The petulant woman had disappeared, and Alexandra couldn’t say that she was sorry.

There’d been toasts, another dance, and not a little hovering from Frank and Cecil.

Alexandra had detected the entire scope of artifice in her interactions with theton,from gentle curiosity to outright hostility. Who was she to become the next Duchess of Redmayne? A spinster and a bluestocking? Where were her parents? What was her pedigree? How had she and Redmayne courted?

Redmayne had been her bulwark. His arm, corded with strength beneath his fine suit, remained firmly attached to hers, sometimes quite literally holding her up as she stuttered and stumbled through social dictates she’d taken for granted as a young and well-adjusted girl of noble birth.

She’d been among scholars and skeletons for too long.

He had been the perfect paradox of charm and menace, his interactions ending either with delighted pleasantries or a victim struggling to recover from his caustic rejoinders.

He’d been quick to jump to her defense when necessary, and Alexandra couldn’t have been more grateful.

Just as soon as she could politely do so, she’d escaped to her rooms, snatching her notebook as another idea had taken her hostage.

Their wedding would take place in a month’s time. Which gave her thirty nights to lie awake and dread the wedding night, building nightmarish scenarios in her minduntil it drove her mad and she leaped from the tower rather than go through with it.

Most distasteful duties, she’d discovered, were worse in the anticipation than the application. Also, if she could control the… thesituationas much as possible, perhaps she could endure it more readily. If the worst of it was behind her, she could maybe stop obsessing about it.

With this in mind, she’d slipped through the dark back to the east wing and let herself into Redmayne’s chamber. And here she sat, awaiting him like an executioner at dawn.

She had used her tiptoes to perch on the tall, cavernous bed situated on a raised stone dais in the center of the room. It was odd, surely, not to have a headboard against a wall. But the duke’s chambers were situated in a round, grand tower at the top of resplendent spiral stairs. Besides, the proximity to the fireplace was lovely during winters or sea storms, and the two enormous windows afforded a breathtaking view of the sea beyond Maynemouth Moor.

From here, one could use the moonlight to spot the very tip of the fortress ruins peeking over the crest of Tormund’s Bluff.

Alexandra contemplated the view as she idly picked at the tassels of the cord restraining the cobalt velvet curtains to the bedposts. She was a Red Rogue in a blue room. Blue, like his eyes. Like the blood in their veins that made this marriage feasible.

She clutched her list, stamping down the instinct to flee.

Her thoughts were doing the thing again. Where they became too loud, too fast, and disjointed. Where every shadow hid a dragon and every sound contained unseen dangers.

Her heart paused every third beat, then kicked againsther ribs most disconcertingly. Her stomach rolled and her limbs were as steady as a moored dinghy in a hurricane.

But she could do this. Shemustdo this.

She simply needed to focus. To think through the entire act so she could shed this unholy trepidation and finally sleep.

He’d kissed her and it had been… almost entirely lovely. Until his tongue had attempted to invade her mouth, and the soft bloom of warmth his kiss cultivated had been doused by the icy shards of her memory.