Page 86 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

Piers had to force himself not to lock her in their rooms while he booked immediate passage back to Devonshire.

Where he could secure her in the tower of Castle Redmayne.

Something about the whiff of impending danger made a man want to cosset those closest to him in a fortress.

Until he could be certain she was safe. Until he could be certain she wasn’t with child.

So he could plant within her a child of his own.

The idea held a darker appeal than it ever had before. For darker reasons. This morning there’d been a shift, he noted, from his original motivations for siring an heir.

Rose and Patrick were no longer at the forefront of his mind.

This morning, as he watched his wife’s head bent toward Dr. Forsythe’s as the two passionately argued over the provenance of a bracelet they examined, his motivations had everything to do with possession.

If Alexandra were ripening with child, every man who’d dare to look upon her would know he’d put it there. Would understand she was taken. Claimed.

One would assume that a man with Dr. Forsythe’s ostensible intellect would know better than to trifle with the Terror of Torcliff’s wife. That he’d be more cautious about concealing his longing. More judicious with his smiles and lingering gazes.

Apparently, Thomas Forsythe wasn’t as intelligent as his reputation would lead one to believe.

Piers couldn’t blame the doctor. Not when Alexandra shone with such brilliance, even when surrounded by drab tents and the soiled bones of the ancient dead. The incident aboard the ship the prior morning might as well have been forgotten, her fear replaced by a radiant joy as she surveyed the artifacts splayed in organized disarray. Her umber eyes glowed a feral gold, lit by some inner glow ignited by her passionate appetite for the past.

A longing ignited within Piers, as well, one he fervently attempted to ignore.

What if she looked at him with half the joy as she did the iron torque in her hand? What if she stroked his skin, his live warm flesh, with a modicum of the reverence with which she handled the bones of the dead?

What if she smiled at him with the same warm delight glittering up at Dr. Forsythe as they shared their professional insights?

She’d claimed Forsythe had never been her lover. Could he trust her word?

Categorically not.

Piers studied the banked heat in the other man’s gaze, the barely leashed hunger of a predator sniffing about his next meal.

There was a chance she told the truth. Because he also believed that poor Dr. Forsythe wouldn’t be so entirely, pathetically famished for a woman whose charms he’d already sampled.

Alexandra signaled to the ancient skeletons laid out over neat rows of tables, gesturing with more enthusiasm than she ever had in his presence. “I can see why we are assuming that the Moor, the Persian, and the Viking were all buried here during roughly the same century,” she posited. “But then if this was a graveyard, or a crypt, where is the church? Inmyestimation, these men were not buried beforeA.D.1000, but Granville Priory was built in the ninth century and is in the town of Le Havre proper. Why not inter these obviously wealthy dead menon holy ground instead of a cryptic catacomb on a cliff so far out of town?”

Forsythe rubbed at the divot in his chin, his eyes twinkling down at her. “That very question is why I’ve been called back here, Dr. Lane—that is, Your Grace.” He spared a glance of chagrin for Piers.

The smarmy fucker didn’t fool him for one moment. Forsythe had not made a verbal mistake, but a calculation. Piers was sure of it.

Placing the bracelet next to the porous and scratched wrist bones of the skeleton laid out before them, Forsythe went to the tent’s entrance and pulled back the flap to gesture toward the ever-widening entrance to the catacombs. Workers smudged with mud and dust wheeled heaps of earth up planks laid over the five stone steps that led underground.

“The rumor is that the workers and archeology students will be bringing a Byzantine trader up from the catacombs tomorrow or the day after; that is, if they can finish excavating the final crypt, wherein two bodies are still in the final stages of being uncovered. I’d love for you to be there.” Remembering himself, Forsythe gave another casual nod toward Piers. “For both of you, of course.”

“I wouldn’t miss it!” Alexandra accepted enthusiastically. “Byzantium was my obsession at school. I daresay I was fanatical.”

“Who wasn’t?” Forsythe said with a solicitous chuckle.

“Oh, plenty of people!” she exclaimed. “Those students who were more interested in the Romans and the Greeks, for example.”

“Philistines.” Feigning disgust, the doctor winked.

“Them, as well!” She laughed.

Forsythe reached across her under the guise of retrieving a map.