Page 87 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days

Piers noted that she avoided physical contact with her colleague, always keeping proper distance. She never reached for the man. Didn’t flirt, coo, or bat her amber lashes. Not onlydidn’tshe return Forsythe’s longing looks, it was as if she didn’t take notice of them.

The only shadow over Piers’s triumph in that regard was that she didn’t payhimany more feminine attention than she did Forsythe.

It was the dead men who held her consideration the longest.

And Piers refused to be jealous of a man who’d been departed from this world for nearly a thousand years.

“Ancient Egyptians are distressingly popular these days,” she lamented, carefully examining a scrap of woven robe laid out next to the body. “But they aren’t the only ancient civilization worth such obsession.”

Piers moved closer to the tables, cataloguing the bones of the departed, imagining the matching ones in Forsythe’s body equally broken and dismantled.

By his bare hands.

He’d never learned much about exhuming corpses, but he certainly knew how to make them.

Alexandra turned to Piers, distracting him from his black impulses with an attractive idea brightening her expression to ecstatic. “Do you really think your Redmayne ancestor might be among those buried here?” she postulated. “Perhaps even that Viking over there? Wouldn’t that be something?” She clenched her fists in front of her like a child who’d been offered a surprise gift.

The brilliance of her smile turned Piers’s soul all the way over, imparting a cool balm to his bitterness and exposing his shadows to the light.

In moments when she looked at him as she did now, he forgot all his reasons for being suspicious of her. He forgotwhat he looked like. Who he was. What she might want from him.

But not what he wanted from her.

Which—goddammit—was more than just her incomparable body.

Unsettled by the strength of his desire, he glanced away, inspecting the skeleton of the Viking on the far table. “This man was buried with a blue sigil.” He pointed to the scrap of heraldry laid out beside him along with the splinters of a blue shield. “Redmayne’s colors were always crimson, for obvious reasons.”

“An excellent observation.” The condescension in Forsythe’s tone set Piers’s teeth on edge. “Though I don’t think your father was too far off when he suspected that the Redmaynes launched with William the Bastard from these shores. William Malet built his fortifications here, and he was instrumental in winning the Battle of Hastings alongside William the Bastard-turned-Conqueror.

“Malet wrote about red-haired Norsemen rather extensively, a father and a son. One died on these shores, the other, Magnus, built your Castle Redmayne. Or at least the fortress turned ruin. I’d love to talk with you about an excavation on your grounds someday.”

“What a capital idea!” Alexandra agreed, turning a hopeful gaze to Piers.

The polite thing to do would be to extend an invitation to Forsythe, but it would be a cold day in hell before he allowed Forsythe anywhere near Castle Redmayne.

Piers emitted a noncommittal grunt, letting those gathered interpret it however they would.

His stare locked with Forsythe’s; a current of understanding passed between them. They disliked each other equally.

Too absorbed by her specimens to notice the undercurrent of masculine tension, Alexandra stepped around the Persian’s table to examine the Moorish skeleton and the neat piles of pots, baskets, and finery next to him. “If the Redmayne elder was so instrumental in helping William the Conqueror unite the empire, why would they possibly bury him in an unmarked pauper’s grave on a hill outside of town?”

Forsythe moved to join her, but Piers placed himself next to his wife, forcing the other man to take his place opposite the Moor’s examination table. He picked up a ring of crude yet masterful workmanship and examined it, enjoying Forsythe’s anxious intake of breath.

“Forgive my uneducated opinion,” he said dryly. “But very few of these men appear to have been paupers.”

“You’re right, of course,” Forsythe reluctantly agreed. “While they’re often wealthy traders from distant lands, I initially assumed that this place had been sanctioned for the burial of foreigners. However, there are outsiders interred at the priory on holy ground.”

“I’ve got it!” Alexandra reached out and gripped Piers’s bicep, her fingers becoming claws as she shook his arm, unable to contain her enthusiasm. “Pagans!” she exclaimed.

“By Jove,” Forsythe breathed.

“These men, the Viking, the Moor, and the Persian, they were none of them Christian, and therefore not considered fit for burial at the priory.” She turned to Piers, whose entire being focused on the feel of her hand gripping his arm.

There it was. The sparkle in her eye. The unmitigated gleam of intellectual brilliance and girlish glee. A thoroughly heady concoction that settled an ache somewhere south of his gut.

“Your ancestors, the Redmaynes, were they Christian or pagan?” she asked.

Piers struggled to consider as he stared down at his wife. Could he really make it ten days without bedding her?