Page 121 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days
Dressed in a simple ivory frock, she perched on the bed for as long as her discontent would allow.
When it became apparent a visit from him wasn’t forthcoming, she grudgingly admitted a thirst had awakened within her. One not easily slaked by water or wine. She needed to drink in the unparalleled sight of him, to absorb the scent and heat of him.
To remind herself she was alive, that he was well. Because, somehow, he’d become necessary to her.
Her riotous emotions had swung like the pendulum of a great clock. And with each passing minute she spent alone, she’d felt less in control. Of anything.
Her feelings.
Her destiny.
Her very existence.
She’d inquired of the desk clerk as to Redmayne’s whereabouts, and he directed her outside, where the porter pointed her toward the sea.
Breezes toyed with her hair like playful fingers, tossing it with soft but unruly chaos as she descended the switchback stairs to the beaches below.
Only to find the evening beaches mostly deserted.
Concerned, she begged the pardon of an elderly gentleman walking a white dog who resembled a puff of cotton. “Perhaps you can help me, monsieur, I’m looking for an extraordinarily tall bearded man. He’s…” She trailed off. How did one describe the Duke of Redmayne to a stranger? Especially today. Was he still attired as he’d been at the catacombs?
“There was just such a man, madame.” The kindly gentleman tipped his hat. “Swimming in the du Val cove tucked back next to Corbeau Noir Cliff behind the dunes.” He pointed to where the cliffs cut in sharply, the waterdisappearing behind shallow crests of sand waving with haphazard tufts of sea grasses. “I thought this man might be touched in the head to swim at such an hour, as the sun will soon be gone, and the wind grows chilly.”
“Merci!”she called, cursing the sand falling away from beneath her slippers as she lifted her skirts and hurried toward the cove.
Once she crested the dunes, she hurried across a gentle path through vibrant beach grasses, holding her hands out so the muted breezes encouraged the reeds to paint gentle things on her palms.
The small knoll crested next to the golden face of the cliff, and she found that the other side of the dune crawled down toward the high tide.
Alexandra froze, struggling to fully comprehend the visual cornucopia before her.
The sun’s final crescent barely peeked above the curvature of the sea, setting a multihued fire to the various striations of clouds batted around by a gathering evening wind. The summer air blew thick with an approaching storm, heavy and hostile with both heat and moisture.
Venerated by this crimson firmament, Redmayne rose like Neptune from the waves, slicking his wild hair to his scalp with a smooth lift of his chiseled arms.
The consequences of staring at the sun for too long were well documented. Even a glance was inadvisable.
One might go blind.
And yet she stared, unblinking, at a sight arguably more brilliant than that of the disappearing orb. What devastation might befall her, she wondered, if she gaped at him for too long?
The starch abandoned Alexandra’s knees and she stumbled to the side, reaching for the nearby cliff face to steady her.
She’d seen naked men before.
In anatomy books, granted, and paintings, and the plethora of sculptures she’d been unable to avoid studying at the Sorbonne.
But nothing could have prepared her for this… for him.
He hadn’t seen her yet, lurking as she was in the shadow of the cliff.
He’d paused for a moment in a waist-high tide, running his hands down his beard, removing the water.
As though answering an unspoken command, the sea ebbed from him, revealing his nude form with wet, glistening exactitude.
The rounded muscles of his chest, dusted with a fine fleece of ebony hair, flared into immense shoulders which ebbed and crested into long, thick arms. His frame could have been carved from marble before a pour of molten bronze was layered over it.
Another light trail of hair crawled between the obdurate ripples of muscle that made up his torso all the way down to his—
