Page 63 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

She liked… him.

Didn’t want him to stop.

Nor did she want what he was going to do next. She detested it. He’d become a revolting, thrusting, straining animal.

A true beast.

Gods, how she wished she didn’t have to see him like that.

I can do this,she reminded herself.

“Yes. Take me to—” She gasped as she found herself swept into his arms. He reached the bed in a few giant strides and set her next to it.

Time raced after that. Faster than her dazed thoughts could process. He kissed her again, drugging her with his potent concoction of scent, strength, and restrained need. His arms closed around her as before, and in a few jerking motions, her dress loosened.

His questing hands drifted into the unlaced bodice. Slowly, deliberately, they drew up her stiff spine, encountering the wrap she’d contained her torso in.

“What’s this?” he asked against her mouth.

“I don’t like corsets,” she explained.

“Mmm,” he acknowledged, his lips already ravishing hers again before they took a similar path as they had once before. Down her jaw, toward her neck, nuzzling beneath the loosened collar to find the delicate skin of her throat.

“I—I hope you don’t find that too scandalous,” she fretted.

“Exceedingly scandalous.” He nibbled at her ear with questing lips, and she forgot her name for a moment.

“It’ll take longer to undo, as it’s wrapped several times,”she explained in a husky voice she didn’t recognize as her own. “I suppose you don’t have to take that part off.”

“Oh, but I do.” He slid her bodice down a little, exposing her shoulders to his lips.

Panic flared, but she forced herself to focus on keeping her quivering knees intact. She gripped him as he dragged his lips over her shoulder.

The beard helped. It swept over untouched skin eliciting an eruption of delicious shivers, chasing away the ones caused by her fear.

She could do this. The mantra had grown stronger this time.

Emboldened, she drew her hands down the vast expanse of his chest. His skin pulsed hot beneath his shirt, enticing her to explore.

The sounds he made fascinated her, little hitches of breath and moans released as soft vibrations. She wanted to—

“I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it for myself.” A snide female voice permeated the clamor of her thoughts and the rush of blood in her ears. “The beast and the bluestocking.”

Alexandra stiffened as his fingers curled around her arms, stopping just short of painful.

His breath quickened, but when he pulled away from her, his eyes had become remote again. Frigid. His features, once melted to tender, fond warmth, now hardened to cold steel.

“Rose,” he growled before turning around to face the dark beauty standing in the shadows of a bookcase swung wide on well-oiled, invisible hinges.

Alexandra clutched her bodice to her as the Viscountess Carlisle raked her with a calculating estimation and quickly dismissed her in favor of Redmayne. Her newfound confidence drained from her as quickly as the blood drained from her extremities.

What had the woman seen? What had she heard?

Why was she here?

The heat leached from her limbs, scalded her cheeks with a vicious blush when she realized the woman stood in front of a secret passage from, presumably, her rooms to Redmayne’s.

Passages she’d quite obviously used before to gain entrance to his bedchamber.