Page 85 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

“Not if I install you somewhere else,” he muttered.

She decided now wasn’t the time to mention that she’d never remaininstalledanywhere. She would go where she pleased. “Is that your design? How will I bear you a bevy of heirs if I’m not accessible to you?”

He paused, his frown deepening to a scowl, as though she’d made a point he’d not considered. “What are you proposing, exactly?”

“Merely an appointed time every day where we share each other’s company,” she suggested. “A dinner, perhaps. Or a walk of some kind, like the one we took the other afternoon along the cliffs. Minus the assassin, of course.”

“You mean the walk when you threatened to shoot me?”

Alexandra bit her lips to suppress a grimace, or a smile. Perhaps both. “I only threatened to shoot you because you were on top of me.”

“I’d just saved your life, if you remember.”

She did remember being on the precipice of a cliff, in more ways than one.

“It wouldn’t do to spend our honeymoon apart,” she said, turning from him. “But if that is your wish—”

He seized her arm, pulling her back into their intimate posture, his breath hot against her ear as his body melded to hers. “Do you have any idea, wife, what tenminutesin your company does to me?” His whisper was almost like a snarl in its animalistic intensity. “Do you really think I can smell your scent, that I can watch you knowing what lies beneath your shapeless dresses, and keep myself from tasting what is mine?”

Alexandra surreptitiously glanced at the workmen on the deck, all of them doing their utmost tonotnotice them and succeeding superbly.

Too well, in her opinion.

“Now that I’ve explored your curves, tasted your breasts, and experienced your pleasure, I’ll think about nothing else until I have you naked once again, do you understand me? Our time together now is an agony, in more ways than one.”

Three days ago, his words would have frightened her beyond imagining.

Three days ago she’d not known what it was like to experience the ruthless patience of his passions. To be the object of his desire and to find that desire ignited in her own dormant soul.

“I don’t see why… we couldn’t make some sort of arrangement,” she offered breathlessly.

“Arrangement?” The word sounded indecent from his voice.

“We could… trade favors. Without intercourse. It could… help us to further our acquaintanceship.”

And, if they were lucky, they could teach each other a little about trust.

“I have one condition,” he murmured into her ear.

“What’s that?”

“You let me use my tongue.”

Alexandra’s reply was lost in a raucous crack from above. Men shouted. The grind of metal and splinter of wood was deafening.

Redmayne’s entire bulk moved in synchronous slow motion, as he seized her, effortlessly lifted her, and surged across the deck with his head ducked over hers.

Had he been a millisecond slower, the thousand-pound crate would have crushed them both.

CHAPTERFIFTEEN

Piers didn’t know which suspicion he detested the most, that someone might be trying to kill his wife, or that someone might be trying to fuck her.

It unsettled him greatly that he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off Alexandra. Not only because she was the most captivating woman, but because, no matter how many panicked maritime admiralties assured him that the incident on the ship the prior morning had been an accident, he couldn’t shake the suspicion that it had been anything but.

How could it be that even though the suspicions in his wary heart threatened to eat him alive, he felt the need to guard his new wife like a precious possession? As disenchanted as he was by their wedding night, as much distance as he’d vowed to maintain, he was unable to leave her side.

Not during their journey north to Seasons-sur-Mer, a little hamlet by the sea from which they could still admire the ancient rooftops of the port city of Le Havre. Not when they’d arrived at Hotel Fond du Val, and not even whenshe’d accepted Dr. Forsythe’s invitation to accompany him on an introductory tour of the dig site and catacombs the prior afternoon.