Page 126 of How to Love a Duke in Ten Days
Turning to avoid shattering the mirror with his fist, he caught sight of some of his clothes folded neatly on a table, and several garments hanging on a line, a few of them belonging to Alexandra.
He drifted toward her intimate undergarments, remembering a frustration from the night on the veranda with asick clench in his belly. He’d tried to touch her through the slit in her drawers, and was unable to.
His fingers shook as he took the delicate item down from the pins, opening the beribboned legs to uncover a row of curious stitches at the seam.
A surge of furious heat overtook him with such force, he thought he might breathe fire rather than give credence to the word battering at every mental wall he could possibly erect.
A figure froze in the doorway. “I’m sorry, Your Grace.” Constance Murphy’s gentle voice still grated like wind-whipped sand, chipping away his paper-thin veneer of civility. “I—I’ll come back.”
Recognizing her as someone whose family had worked for the Redmaynes for generations, as someone he’d selected as his wife’s lady’s maid, he held up a hand to stay her. He didn’t look away from the little stitches as he forced the words through his lips. “Did she bid you stitch these, thus?”
She paused so long, he fought the urge to throttle an answer from her. “Nay, Your Grace, my lady does it, herself.”
“It is wonderous odd, don’t you think?” He finally looked over at her, meeting her young, solemn gaze.
“Wonderous odd,” she agreed, staring at what he gripped in his hands with a stark sort of sadness.
“What do you make of it?”
She looked back at him as though he were daft.
As well she should.
Piers begged her with his eyes, pleaded with her to give him some explanation other than the black, ugly conclusion now amalgamating in his mind, adhering like tar and pitch.
“Your Grace?” she breathed.
“Why would a woman do this?” he bit out through clenched teeth.
He already knew. Of course he did. Before Constance’s chin wobbled. Before her eyes welled, turning an unflattering shade of pink. He knew what she would say, because he’d been rejecting the gut-wrenching, unthinkable truth with every step he’d taken toward the hotel.
It was why he hadn’t chased Alexandra when she’d fled.
Abruptly, he changed his mind. He didn’t want the girl to answer his question anymore, but she did, goddamn her.
“Mayhap, Your Grace, her only worry in regard to her”—she gestured to the garment, unable to find the words—“inn’t convenience, but protection.”
Protection.
A wave of emotion inundated him, threatening to pull him under a violent tide of grief and fury. He flushed hot, then cold, shivers of goose pimples breaking out on his skin even as he thought he might burst into flames when a brilliant, almost luminescent rage surged through every fiber of his being.
Was he fire? Or was he ice?
What he was, was an idiot. A blind, selfish, fucking worthless rutting imbecile.
“I’ll… come back, Your Grace.”
He barely marked the maid’s watery offer, nor her exit as he examined the painstakingly perfect rows sewn into Alexandra’s undergarments.
She’d never taken a lover.
But a man had takenher.Against her will.
Everything about her, since the first moment they’d met, clicked into place like a terrible, blood-chilling puzzle.
When Mercury had almost crushed her, she’d winced away from Piers’s touch. Not because he was the Terror of Torcliff, ugly and scarred, but because he was aman.
Alexandra had kept the gun at her side while they’d walked together on Maynemouth Moor, her finger close to the trigger.
