Page 7 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

My fault.

The burning, aching tears finally arose, branding Alexandra with the same punishing heat as any fire of inquisition. Her friends were quarreling, and it was all because of her. She’d put dear old Jean-Yves in danger, not to mention Cecelia and Francesca.

My fault. My fault. My. Fault.

Those words repeated through her head like rifle shots in a terrible, terrible accelerating rhythm. Like that of flesh against flesh. She couldn’t have said how long Cecelia and Francesca bathed her, or how they disposed of the bathwater. She didn’t remember them dressing her. Braiding her hair. Nor could she tell when she ended up in bed.

But, eventually, Francesca’s commanding voice calling her name permeated the gray fog in which she’d been floating all night. “Alexandra!”

“My fault!” Her inner thoughts manifested in a raw cry even she didn’t recognize. “It’s all my fault.”

“Dear God, no!” Francesca settled in beside her beneath the wide canopy and rested her head on Alexandra’s shoulder. “Nothing that happened tonight is your responsibility.”

“Y-you’re now my accomplices,” she agonized, spreading her fingers in front of her. “I shouldn’t have brought this to you. It could ruin your entire lives. This shouldn’t be a secret you are forced to bear.”

Cecelia lay on her other side, drawing up the coverletand sharing her warmth and bosomy softness. “We all have secrets, Alexander. Ones that could ruin us.”

Alexandra shook her head, staring up at the white canopy, hating the color of purity almost as much as she hated herself. “Not like this. I—I murdered a man.”

“Your rapist.” Francesca tucked the quilt beneath Alexandra’s chin. “We all might have done the same if…” She didn’t finish her sentence, displaying a rare sensitivity she didn’t often possess.

“We all have secrets?” Alexandra turned her head toward Cecelia, her previous words only just permeating her numbness. “I’ve known you four years now… You’ve never mentioned a secret that could ruin you.”

Cecelia sobered, suddenly appearing so much younger than her eighteen years. “I don’t want to share, and yet.” She hesitated. “I don’t want you to feel alone…”

Francesca locked eyes with Alexandra, her elfin face a shade of pale Alexandra hadn’t considered anyone but a corpse could attain. “We should all share, then we’ll have something to carry that will forge an unbreakable bond of trust.”

The gesture touched Alexandra utterly. “Tell me,” she whispered. Anything to distract her from the horror of what would face her every day for the rest of her life

Cecelia inhaled for an eternity until she finally gathered the courage to speak through a voice made even huskier by emotion. “I’m a bastard. My mother had a lover. She died giving birth to me, you see, and my father… the man who raised me… has made it clear there isn’t a physical possibility that he sired me. He’s spent my entire life insisting that my mother died because of her infidelity.”

Francesca nodded, heaving a breath made weary by the weight of so much pain. “Oh, darling, is he cruel to you?”

“Unspeakably,” Cecelia whispered, blinking away an unwanted memory.

“Do you know your real father?” Alexandra asked, snuggling closer to Cecelia. “Is it this mysterious benefactor who finances your education?”

Cecelia shook her head and shrugged her shoulders, shame tinging her cheeks even more peach. “I wish I knew. I sometimes am certain it is. I’ve spent so many years at de Chardonne alone. Before I befriended you, Jean-Yves was the only comrade I’d ever known. And only then because I hid so often as a girl in his gardens and pestered him into eventual partiality to me.”

“Now I feel like such a dunce,” Francesca lamented. “If you trust him, we shall, as well.”

“The more people who know a secret, the more in peril it is. It is right that we are all cautious.” Cecelia dashed a few errant tears from her peachy-cream skin. “What about you, Frank? Do you have a secret?”

Francesca locked eyes with Alexandra. “I’m an impostor. My name isn’t Francesca Cavendish. It’s Pippa. Pippa Hargrave.”

Their mouths opened, slackened, then nearly unhinged with shock.

Francesca’s emerald eyes were made brilliant by the fire, but a dark veracity emanated from her that distracted Alexandra from her pain, if only for a moment.

“I was born to Charles and Hattie Hargrave in Yorkshire where they served as cook and underbutler to William and Theresa Cavendish, the Earl and Countess of Mont Claire. I grew up in paradise along with their children, Fernand and Francesca.”

Cecelia’s brow wrinkled in a frown. “I thought the Cavendishes all perished in a fire, but for…”

“No one died in the fire.”

Alexandra blinked, wondering if distress had made her a lackwit. “What? What are you saying?”

Francesca’s brilliant gaze dulled as she gazed into a past so tormented, it seemed to make her smaller, as though it could crush her into the dust. “Have you ever heard of a fire starting in a household of nearly one hundred people in the middle of the day, without one soul escaping it alive?”