Or the groundskeeper.
Alexandra pried her clenched teeth apart and rubbed at her aching jaw. She glanced up from the crate of bones she’d classified and categorized in front of her to watch her husband dip a ladle into the water bucket.
Julia’s words had been running through her mind all afternoon.
De Marchand hadn’t been killed by a lover, but a victim. And buried by the groundskeeper.
Did Julia know? Or did her words exhume a whisper of truth Alexandra would rather remain buried?
That the groundskeeper wasn’t as trustworthy as they’d all suspected.
Jean-Yves had been among the workers at the tombs these past four days, watching her alertly and smiling when he caught her eye.
Just as he did now.
Alexandra did her best to smile back at him, though the attempt felt brittle and tense. It unnerved her to have the man touch elbows with her husband.
Could his expression of geniality hide a deeper greed or malevolence?
She would find out on the morrow.
With the tunnels and vaulted crypt completely secured, Redmayne and Forsythe hauled the crates she’d packed with various sundries, artifacts, armor, and, as soon as she could finish dusting and chipping away some remnants of the burial shroud, the bones of Ivar Redmayne.
She’d have worked a great deal faster if she’d not been plagued by infernal distractions all day, not the least of which had been her barbarian husband.
He’d been moving stones and earth all morning before aiding Forsythe and the engineers as they fortified the final tunnel into the Redmayne Crypt.
Sweat glistened at his hairline and painted his tawny neck with a lustrous gleam in the lanternlight. One more button of his smudged ivory shirt had come undone, revealing the dramatic swells of his pectorals.
Quite suddenly, she became aware of the dryness of her own mouth, now plagued with a powerful thirst. One the water might not quench.
She refused to watch. Refused to want.
There was simply too much to do. Too much at stake. Too much to ponder over and worry about beyond his diverting feats of unbridled masculine strength.
Besides, he’d been absolutely insufferable all afternoon, turning every burdened journey down the tunnel into a rivalry, insisting upon shouldering the heaviest load.
At one point he’d actually foisted upon Forsythe a crate of animal bones, with some snide remark about how bones were hollow and light. Then he’d promptly lifted a crate the size of a small horse packed with iron weapons and jogged—jogged!—down the tunnel.
Was it any wonder he nearly drank the entire bucket of spring water?
Alexandra couldn’t decide who she was more churlish toward. Him for acting like a self-important, teenaged ass, or her for being impressed by it.
On top of everything, Julia enjoyed the spectacle immensely. That is, when she wasn’t insisting upon wandering about the various rooms, touching everything, fiddling with mechanisms, and asking incessant, inane questions of both her and Forsythe.
And speaking of poor Dr. Forsythe, once his masculinity was called into question in front of his workers and two women, he’d done his best to match Redmayne lift for lift and load for load.
Between all of this, the responsibility for a delicate skeleton, and a blackmail letter scalding her through her skirt pockets, Alexandra thought she might expire from the rein she’d held on her temper. Tension coiled her muscles as tight as a springboard, and a headache had begun to crawl from her shoulders and into her neck, threatening to winch a vise around her temples.
Forsythe joined Redmayne at the water bucket, waiting his turn. At this late afternoon hour, he appeared nigh close to death, sweat-drenched and red-faced as she’d never seen him.
Taking pity on him, she offered a conciliatory smile, one he returned with a bit of his old winsome vigor before Julia distracted him.
Noticing their shared moment, Redmayne set his ladle down, stalking toward her with that loose-limbed, feral grace of his.
At the possessive heat in his gaze, Alexandra almost dropped the femur, so she returned her own gaze firmly to her work, refusing to mark his approach even as he leaned down to address her.
“You may offer him your pretty smiles, wife,” he growled low in her ear, “because your pretty moans and sighs are mine.”
Ignoring the burst of butterfly wings in her womb, Alexandra glanced up sharply to make certain Forsythe hadn’t heard his salacious comment on the other side of the cavern.
The doctor’s head was bent toward a cooing Julia, seemingly inured to them.
Alexandra whirled on her husband, shaking the femur at him like the finger of an impassioned politician.
And quite forgot what she was going to say.
Must he insist on smelling so appealing all the time? Even his sweat was alluring. Clean and sharp with hints of leather, earth, and a salty, masculine musk.
Instead of castigating him for tormenting her thus for four days, she whispered curtly, “You’re being unkind.”
His large shoulder lifted in ambivalence as he bent to press his lips to her aching jaw. “I’m being honest,” he rumbled.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“Now who is unkind?” he teased, rooting into her hair to nuzzle at the downy skin behind her ear.
She swatted him away, not because she wanted to, but because she understood the dangers of his intoxicating touch.
“This is the last of it.” To distract him, she held out his umpteenth-great-grandfather’s impressive thigh bone to him. “I’ll admit, the men of the Redmayne line certainly share a remarkable physical structure. Down to their very bones. Ivar would have been mere inches shorter than you, but I’d wager he was equally thick and burly. Also, his teeth were healthy, as I’ve noted yours are.”
He ran his tongue over wolfish incisors, testing their health as his eyes twinkled the color of the Baltic Sea on a clear day. “A man might dine upon such poetic compliments from his lady wife.” He sighed dramatically.
She frowned, refusing to be charmed by his good humor. “I’ve found a few healed broken bones, likely suffered in battle,” she continued. “But for one on his tibia from when he was a child. Other than that, he was a robust man, even his knees were intact and his joints healthy. His cause of death would have had to have been something to do with his organs, because his bones show no signs of deterioration or disease. At least not upon initial inspection.”
“An impressive ancestor, indeed.” He nodded, duly impressed. “I’m fortunate for his bloodline.”
“He would have been an excessively strong man,” she said with unmistakable meaning. “A leader of men. It would have been unfair of him to expect any man to keep up. As to do so would be impossible.”
“I understand.” He smirked at her just as evocatively, eyes flicking to Forsythe. “I imagine other men were intelligent enough not to challenge him. And if they did, he broke not just their bodies, but their will.” He wiped at a smudge of dirt on her cheek, likely making it worse. “Be grateful, wife, that you’re married to a duke and not a barbarian, who, for the time being, is only intent upon breaking one and not the other.” He leaned in and gathered her lips for a loud, showy kiss that left her speechless before relieving her of Ivar’s femur, and carefully setting it in its place within the cushioned crate bound for the examination tent.
“Which one?” she asked, just to make certain she didn’t mistake his meaning.
“His body is still intact, is it not?”
Alexandra gaped at him, trying to decide if she were furious or flummoxed as he used his fist rather than the hammer to pound the crate’s lid securely tight.
Her first kiss in four days and he’d done it not for her benefit, or even his, but for that of a purely inconsequential man that only he considered a rival.
The nerve of him. The unmitigated gall.
“I’m taking tea with Julia,” she huffed. “Do be careful with your ancestor, though I recently learned bones are of negligible heft.”
She picked up her skirts and gathered Julia away from an exhausted Forsythe, who seemed content to saunter beside them, leaving her husband to haul the final crate.
Redmayne’s chuckle followed them down the long tunnel before a deep grunt told her he’d shouldered the blasted thing and ambled after them.
If he wanted the burden, he could take it.
Alexandra took a few deep breaths as she navigated the catacombs, calming her blood. It wasn’t that she was angry at him, per se. How could she be? He’d been nothing but indulgent of her. Especially this morning, capitulating to her financial suggestions.
No, she wasn’t angry. Simply … frustrated. Not even at him, exactly. Just at everything. The entire world. She’d spent the whole day railing at the past, dreading the future, and suspecting everyone in her vicinity of being or becoming an enemy.
It wore her down until her bones felt as though they belonged in the dank and dust of this place.
She’d make amends for being so surly at dinner this evening, she decided as she lifted her skirts to climb the handful of steps out of the catacombs and into the sunshine. Perhaps she’d even attempt another intimate overture. She could tell his tether was remarkably close to breaking. It was apparent in his scalding looks. In the whisky-soft depth of his conversations, his voice as silken as his tongue had been upon her.
She climbed past the entrance buttressed by incomprehensibly large beams of wood, squinting as the afternoon sun gleamed off the water below the cliffs of Normandy.
Redmayne had assisted with the installation of those beams not two days prior, after expressing his dissatisfaction with the previous fortifications.
It pleased her that he worried after the workers and their safety.
Every part of her could feel him behind her, and it took a herculean effort, and more than a dose of her feminine pride, not to turn and—
An echo of faint pops and a familiar hiss preceded a deafening splinter of wood and stone.
What the devil—?
“Run!” Forsythe shoved both Alexandra and Julia forward just as the thunderous sound of falling stones drowned out the dismayed cries and calls of the workmen taking their afternoon tea in a tent above.
An explosion of ghostly dust engulfed them all, and the momentum of it pushed Alexandra to her hands and knees as she fought for breath, her chest spasming with bone-rattling coughs.
Chaos overwhelmed her at once. Hands dragged her farther from the tunnel entrance as students, archeologists, and workmen shouted orders at each other.
The chalky sounds of smaller rocks settling between the boulders filled her with such dread, she surged away from whoever was attempting to help her from the wreckage.
What section of the catacombs had caved in? Had everyone made it out?
Had anyone made it out?
Where was Redmayne? He’d been right behind her, and she’d been a good several paces out of the tunnel. Surely he’d crossed the threshold before—
Julia stumbled toward her, her entire yellow day dress now an ethereal shade of white. She collapsed into Alexandra’s arms shuddering with irrepressible sobs.
“Are you hurt?” Alexandra demanded, searching her for injures with unsteady hands.
“He saved me,” Julia wailed. “Forsythe saved me, and now I cannot find him. Is he dead?”
Alexandra handed Julia off to an awaiting student. Swamped with a grave sense of foreboding, she tripped back toward the catacombs’ entrance.
Now an impenetrable wall of stone.
Men were already digging at the rocks, yelling and creating a line to pull the earth away from the blocked archway.
Which meant …
“No.” She lurched faster, attempting to run on legs as steady as a newborn fawn’s.
Redmayne. He’d have been the last one out. Where was her husband?
She expected his wide shoulders to melt out of the cloud of settling dust, white as an archangel and just as merciless. He was the Terror of Torcliff. The Amazon hadn’t conquered him, nor had the Nile. He’d tamed jungles and forged across pitiless deserts.
A simple cave couldn’t possibly defeat him.
The very thought was categorically impossible.
Now that the air had become less choked with stone and dirt, Alexandra found Forsythe as he dragged himself out of the rubble looking dazed. The pallid substance caked in his sweat darkened to take on the appearance of dried blood.
Alexandra helped him to his feet only to shake him. “Where is Redmayne?” she cried, not caring that she sounded just as hysterical as Julia. “Where is my husband?”
Slowly, as though he had trouble understanding her, Forsythe looked to the man-sized pile of stones at his back. “He … was right behind us. Wasn’t he?”
“No,” she whispered. Or screamed. “No, no, no. No!”
Forsythe caught her as she shot past him, gripping at her arms. “Alexandra, don’t. It’s too dangerous.”
She struggled against his grip. “He is still in there. I have to get him out.”
Forsythe held fast. “If I know Redmayne, I know he wouldn’t want you to put yourself in harm’s way, not on his account.”
“You don’t know him. I do. He’s my husband!” She wrenched away from him. “Either get a shovel and help, or get out of my way!”
She joined the men, grabbing and shoving at a rock she had no hope of budging.
A gentle hand landed on her shoulder, and she turned with her teeth bared, ready to do battle with anyone who might drag her away from the catacombs.
Jean-Yves’s concerned gaze didn’t hold the comfort it might once have, but she didn’t have time to dwell on her suspicions about him.
“I must find him,” she panted, unsure of why her lungs still felt tight, or why her heart might burst open. “I must. He’s my husband. He’s my … husband.”
Sobs drowned the word she could no longer say. A foreign word only a week ago … Husband. And now, she’d the luxury of one. A good husband. A kind husband. A wounded heart and a generous man. Over the course of eight days, he’d become so much more to her than she’d ever imagined. A mentor. A protector. A knight in tarnished armor. One who rode an unruly, disobedient horse and tamed both predator and prey alike.
He was supposed to father her children.
He’d teased her only seconds ago. Twinkled playful blue eyes at her. Dear God, if she never saw those eyes again. If she never … what if he…?
A little despondent noise escaped her, warning of a deeper hysteria threatening to overflow her barely contained panic.
“Petite duchesse.” Jean-Yves used the voice one did with the enraged or the infirm as he squeezed her shoulder. “Mon petit oiseau blessé.” My little wounded bird. “Cecelia led me to believe … that is…” His face twisted uncomfortably. “I was not given to think this man, your husband, means anything to you.”
Alexandra shook her head violently. “I … I can’t lose him, Jean-Yves,” she sobbed. “He brought me to Normandy to be kind. Because he thought I’d find it enjoyable. I can’t be the reason he … Oh, God … He can’t die…”
Jean-Yves gazed at her with sheer disbelief crinkling the deep groves branching out from his weathered eyes. “This hard man you have only known for days. This duke with a terrible name. You would remain married to him, even after all that has happened to you? You … care for him?”
“I … I do!” She did. God help her, but she did.
“Then.” He ripped off his jacket, trading it for a shovel someone was handing to the laborers. “Let us dig.”
Alexandra let out a grateful sob, snatching a shovel of her own.
How could she suspect dear Jean-Yves? When he was so good. So steadfast. He always seemed to be there in her darkest hours, this enigmatic Frenchman.
Digging into the earth for her.
This time, not to bury a body, but to reclaim one.
Alexandra pried as many boulders away from the entrance as she could, digging trenches beneath them so larger men could roll them away. She broke her nails clawing at the smaller stones that acted like mortar between the large ones. Eventually the straining and burning in her arms gave way to exhausted trembling. Sweat curled the wisps of hair at her temples, trickled down her back and between her breasts. Stones crushed her toes. Blisters smarted her palms. And still she would not stop digging.
Not until she reached him.
Someone called his name. Chanted it. Sobbed it at a frantic decibel that threatened to break her heart. It took her several moments, not to mention the astonished stares of the other laborers, to realize that someone was her.
Beside her, right in front of where Jean-Yves toiled, a stone, triple the size of any man’s head, shuddered as though a great weight slammed against it. The masculine bellow from behind it was like a beam of sunlight piercing her panicked desolation.
“Piers?” she called, clawing at the boulder. “Piers, is that you? Answer me. Are you there?”
The earth muffled his reply, as did the sound of her pulse pounding in her ears, but she was certain he’d barked a surly directive of some sort.
Swamped by an unholy elation, she ineffectually chipped at the edge of the boulder, hoping to dislodge it, unable to cognate well enough to translate the words being hurled at her in rapid French.
Jean-Yves seized her, pulling her aside just in time before the boulder gave way and rolled down the mound of smaller stones, bringing a great deal of the blockage with it.
She called his name once more, this time it escaped as a pathetic moan.
Frantic, aware of how humiliatingly agitated she was, Alexandra yanked and pulled at rock and debris, aware that someone worked just as frenetically on the other side.
More so.
Her husband.
His voice reached her. Spouting commands at first. And then his tone gentled with a concerned intonation. And still, she couldn’t process the words. Not exactly. All she knew was that she had to get to him.
Finally, it was as though the rock wall between them disintegrated into dust, the smaller stones clattering down the mound as it gave way beneath their collective need.
They clawed only at each other then, driving their bodies together with a wild fusion. As though making certain no barrier of any kind could come between them again.
Alexandra was vaguely aware of a hearty applause. Of voices and cheers and more chaos.
It didn’t matter. She didn’t care. She heard nothing but the strong, sure beat of his heart beneath her ear. She felt nothing but the molten heat of his skin poured over swells and mounds of steely muscle as he cocooned her in his strength. She didn’t breathe air anymore, but she filled her lungs with his scent, took it deep within herself until he overwhelmed every sense she could think of but for taste.
And that could come when they were alone.
She would kiss him. And, dammit, he would kiss her back.
“Alexandra.” She heard his voice both from his lips and from deep in the chest beneath her ear. It calmed her. Soothed the uncharacteristically feverish hysterics threatening to overwhelm her logic. “Are you hurt?” He ran his hands down her arms, and up her back, searching for injury. “Sweet Christ. I couldn’t tell if you’d climbed the stairs in time. I feared you didn’t make it out.”
“I thought you’d been crushed.” Her voice sounded small and plaintive against the wide planes of his chest.
Gentle hands pried them apart. Jean-Yves and another worker guided Redmayne to a rock upon which he could sit and catch his breath. Alexandra trailed after them, anxiously taking in every detail.
He was a mountain of dust and mud. It caked in the thick layers of his hair and even his beard, settling into the shallow grooves of his scars and the slight lines branching from his eyes.
In all her vast and exotic experiences, he had to be the most beautiful sight she’d ever witnessed.
He took the water someone offered and swished the dust from his mouth, spitting it onto the earth before taking another swig.
Alexandra hovered, drinking in the sight of him just as deeply until she noted one of the dirt-caked stains on his thigh was darker than the others caused by sweat.
She dropped to her knees beside him, reaching for the torn part of his trousers. “Oh, blast, you’re injured!”
He shrugged. “A rock landed on my leg, but it’s of no consequence.” He brushed a palm over her shoulder and down her elbow. “Did you sustain any injuries? Your hands, they’re raw—”
“Someone fetch me some water,” she ordered. “I’ll clean the cut and assess—”
“That’s not necessary, darling.” The patina of dirt caused his piercing eyes to appear otherworldly as they glimmered down at her, containing both censure, and something softer. “It smarts like the devil, but it’s not serious. What I want to know is why you put yourself in harm’s way trying to dig me—”
“But you’re bleeding!” she interrupted. Nothing else mattered at the moment.
“Hardly.” He waved a hand over the wound, declaring it inconsequential.
Alexandra wouldn’t allow herself to be appeased. There was too much dirt caked around the tear in his trousers to tell if the wound was deep or not.
“Let me see,” she insisted.
“You’re not a medical doctor,” he reminded her mildly.
“It might need to be stitched.” She peeled back one side of the torn material. “I’ve stitched a wound bef—”
He caught both of her trembling hands in his, engulfing them in familiar, rough-skinned warmth. “Leave it, wife,” he crooned gently. “You needn’t upset yourself over me. Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself.”
At that, she surged to her feet, wrenching her hands away from his as she fought to fill her lungs fast enough. “I am calm,” she declared. “I’m the very essence of calm. If I were any calmer, I’d be asleep!”
Even though he was sitting, he didn’t have to reach up very far to place his palms on either side of her face. “I understand, Alexandra. Being spared a terrible death can set anyone’s nerves on edge—”
She made a sound of immense frustration at his condescending tone. “That isn’t it. I’ve been nearly missed by death before.”
“Then…” He frowned, the puzzled lines in his forehead creating cracks in the mud drying there. “I was able to save the bones, you needn’t worry that you lost—”
“I thought I’d lost you, you enormous Neanderthal!” She knew she sounded shrill, but at this point, she was beyond caring. “Hang the bones! Must you insist on hefting the largest box? Upon turning everything into a competition? You could have left it for … for tomorrow … You could have escorted me out. You … You … You could have died!”
Dammit, sobs crawled up from her chest and crowded her throat, demanding every part of self-control she had left to grapple them back down again.
“Come now,” he soothed with a crooked smirk, rubbing a thumb over her cheek. “Would that really have been so bad? You’d be a wealthy widow. Your problems would have been solved.”
Alexandra’s hand lashed out and connected with his cheek before she’d realized what she’d done.
In the stunned silence that followed, she seized his face and kissed him brutally. Crushing her mouth to his with enough force to feel his teeth. Hard enough for him to feel her rage and taste her terror.
That done, she slapped him again.
Never in the recorded history of mankind had twenty men been so utterly quiet and still for so long.
Redmayne stared at her, stone-faced and eyes glinting. With what, she couldn’t tell.
For once in her life, she didn’t care.
Then, her husband did something she’d never seen him do before.
He grinned.