Page 68 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

What a thing it was to be held. An odd and oddly ubiquitous, intrinsicallyhumanthing. A thing, she realized, she’d not experienced for ten years. And never by a man.

Until now. Until him.

She’d uncovered a grave in Pompeii where the bones of a man and a woman had been intertwined in just such an embrace. Alexandra had stared at them for incalculable hours, bereft at the idea of separating them. Wondering atwhat had driven them together like this, and if they’d clung to each other in life as they had in death.

And why.

This,she thought once more. This was why. A body, a heart, needed another nearby. An embrace fed an elemental physical need she’d never known she’d lacked until an abundance had been available.

And here was the physiological proof. His heart slowed against her ear, adopting a more reasonable rhythm. Incrementally, his muscles melted from steel to iron, his arms relaxing until his hands idly explored the length of her spine.

“Do you fear me, Alexandra Lane?” She heard the words as a resonant vibration in his chest.

His perceptivity was beginning to be problematic. “I do. I have,” she admitted carefully.

He hesitated, his chest hitching on a breath. “Does it frighten you to have to—look at me?”

“No,” she assured him. “No more than it frightens you to look in the mirror.”

“I don’t look in the mirror,” he rumbled.

Alexandra leaned back to see him, though his arms tightened at her waist as if he wasn’t ready to let her go.

“Why?” she asked gently. “Is it difficult to face who you are?”

He gazed down at her, his features stony and tense. The left side of his aspect turned slightly to her, as though daring her to face the parts of him she should fear. “I don’t always see the man I am, I see the man I could have become. He is difficult to look at.”

Despite herself, she reached up and shaped her palms to his jaw. “You’re going to think me silly, but when we met I fancied that ancient gods had done this to you out ofjealousy for your mortal perfection.” She grazed shy fingers through his beard, tracing the angry marks.

He tensed. Twitched, but he didn’t move.

“I’m sorry for your pain,” she continued earnestly. “But these are a part of you now, and this encounter altered you for the better.” She lifted onto her tiptoes, and nudged his head down, pressing her lips to the fissure on his cheek. “Both inside and out,” she amended. “I think you’re quite handsome. And, beyond that, I think you are good.”

Something lit in his eyes that sparked an answering ache in her heart. Half disbelief, half yearning. “Then why fear me?” he puzzled. “Because of what happened at the ruins? Because I killed a man?”

Alexandra didn’t say a word as her lashes swept down to cover her expression. She was the last person who could condemn him for that.

“Was that the first… person you’ve ever killed?” she queried, wishing she could tell him that they shared this kinship. Wondering if his hands were stained with the blood of others.

The length of his breath answered her before his words ever did. “No. I’ve been attacked before. In Argentina we hunted too closely to an American company’s gold mine. We’d a brutal encounter, I couldn’t tell you the body count. And, there have been other times, but I can promise you I’ve never taken a life that hasn’t been in defense of my own. Or that of another.”

They were silent in the dark for a few breaths before he pressed, “Can you forgive me that?”

“There’s nothing to forgive.” She ventured a look at him. “I know there are reasons to kill.”

Redmayne pulled her back into him, relief and regret lowering the timbre of his voice to a soothing depth. “Even so, I’m sorry you witnessed the savagery of which I amcapable. I want you to know I’ve never in my life used my strength against a woman.”

Alexandra relaxed into the dark, pleasant circle of his arms, groping for words. “What did—how did Rose—?”

“Marry me.”

Puzzled, she pulled back enough to look up at him. “I thought our engagement had already been established.”

The smile he gave her was full of infinite tenderness before he dropped his head to trail his lips against her temple. Her cheekbone. The corner of her mouth. His lips didn’t take hers, instead they indolently explored the soft, sensitive place where her neck met her jaw, his hands brushing her hair over her shoulders to give him better access.

“Tomorrow,” he whispered against her ear. “Not in a month’s time in some stuffy cathedral in London. Tomorrow in the old rectory.”

Alexandra’s heart assumed the frantic pace his had only just abandoned as she stepped away from his embrace. She needed to think, and she couldn’t while his mouth was doing…thatto her ear.