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 when she’d accepted Dr. Forsythe’s invitation to accompany him on an introductory tour of the dig site and catacombs the prior afternoon.
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? In my estimation, these men were not buried before A.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 men on 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.
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 only didn’t she 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 pay him any 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 forgot what 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?
“Magnus Redmayne, the son, built Trinity Priory on Redmayne land almost immediately after the fortress,” he recalled. “However, by all accounts, he insisted upon a traditional Viking burial.”
“He was burned on a barge at sea?” Her face shone with an almost romantic rapture and some of the queer chill Piers had been holding in his heart thawed.
“That he was.” He flashed her a teasing smile, aware the effect was somewhat lost due to his deformity. “In the old days, it is said, their wives were burned with them, so the women could accompany their husbands to Valhalla.”
“What tripe.” Alexandra rolled her eyes. “I’m certainly glad of our more modern sensibilities.” Her eyes narrowed, then rounded as something struck her. “Don’t tell me Magnus Redmayne’s wife was burned with him?”
Piers chuckled, finding her outrage adorable. He caught at a ringlet that escaped from beneath her sensible hat. “No, my bride, she lived to a ripe old age with her three unruly sons, always favored by the new English court.”
“Oh. Well … good.” Appeased, she tilted a lopsided smile up at him.
The atmosphere between them shifted, warmed. Piers read in her eyes unspoken and uncertain apologies.
Was he going to remain angry with her? She’d been obscure, but had she been dishonest?
Was she deceitful now?
The look she gave him whispered of earnest emotion; half hope, half despair. All day she’d seemed as though something cataclysmic perched on her tongue, ready to spring forth and further decimate the fragile bond they’d forged.
Without meaning to, Piers leaned down toward her. Closer. The fresh scent of linens and citrus enveloped him; he silently willed her to whisper it to him. To put them both out of their misery.
What are you hiding? he wondered. What secrets lie behind those pools of whisky and honey?
With a polite clearing of the throat, Forsythe announced himself, breaking the moment. “I’ll just … go and garner updates from the workmen on how the excavation of the catacombs is coming along since I was here last.” He tipped his hat uncomfortably and left them alone with the dead.
Piers looked down at the silken lock curled in his finger. Falt Ruadh. Such lovely red hair. Such a unique and lovely wife.
What if she was taken from him?
The concern that had been churning beneath his skin all day boiled to the surface. How could he be so elementally troubled by the loss of something—someone—he’d only known, only desired, for four days?
Why couldn’t he shake the feeling that someone was trying to take her from him?
“Was it you?” he wondered, not realizing he’d spoken aloud until her lips pursed in puzzlement.
“To what do you refer?” she queried, all wide-eyed innocence and incomprehension
But that couldn’t be. He’d only just witnessed firsthand her unique intelligence. He’d trailed after her all day like a sentinel, observing her in her element.
His wife, it seemed, was never more alive than when surrounded by the dead.
Something had his hackles up like a wolf scenting danger in the forest. Too many strange and dangerous things had occurred since they’d met. Mercury’s escape. The gunmen in the ruins. The incident on the ship.
“Falt Ruadh,” he murmured. “Can you think of any reason anyone would have to harm you?”
“I—couldn’t tell you.” She didn’t look guilty, but neither did her denial seem particularly convincing.
The canvas made a thick sound as a burly worker punched it open, storming inside. “Your Graces!” he exclaimed, the outline of his eyes extraordinarily white against the grime covering the rest of him. “They’ve found his sigil! They’ve found the tomb of Redmayne in the catacombs!”
With a exclamation of pure delight, Alexandra drove herself into his arms.
Stunned, Piers looked down at her, struck by the realization that this might have been the first time she’d ever initiated such physical contact.
He folded his arms over her, disconcerted by how well—how easily—she fit within them.
“Let us go have a look, shall we?” he suggested, and was unable to finish the sentence before she was all but dragging him bodily out of the tent.