The ruin of a time when these shores were invaded, by forces of strong, greedy men.
Until one family was powerful enough to stop them and waves of marauders and enemies broke upon Redmayne strength.
As Piers galloped closer, he noted movement among the white and gray stones. Curious, he dismounted to investigate, climbing the old steps to the fortress tower, which claimed no ceiling but the sky.
Who would wander up this far at such an early hour? Not the hunters, surely. They’d stick to the forests on the other side of Tormund’s Bluff, opposite the sea.
Puzzling patterns of colorful skirts twirled into the old courtyard as a trio of ladies, their chins all tilted to the sky, frolicked like a tumble of exuberant schoolgirls.
A feminine exclamation struck a chord of enthusiastic recognition in Piers that traveled all the way down to his sex. “Look at this place! It’s a thousand years if it’s a day. I’m itching to dig into the walls, to see what secrets are buried here.”
Alexandra Lane.
The sight of her took the rhythm from his step, and he nearly tripped on a barnacle-crusted stone.
The sound of her unselfconscious laugh pilfered the breath from his lungs.
And when she’d noticed his approach, something hot and guilty in her garnet eyes stole a full beat from his heart.
What a little thief she turned out to be.
Awareness pulsed through the brined air between them.
She sank into the safety of her compatriots, rousing them from their investigation of a nest residing in a crumbling embrasure.
He’d not recognized Lady Francesca Cavendish until he’d joined them in the old courtyard, which was now little more than a meadow.
“Your Grace,” the countess greeted in surprise. “I thought our appointment wasn’t for another hour or so.”
“Ladies.” He bowed.
Alexandra’s auburn brows drew together with an expression both astonished and troubled. “Your … Grace?”
Their gazes shifted in unison. They’d both noted the glint of metal from behind the old portcullis. The movement of a forearm. The unmistakable click of a hammer.
“Get down!” he bellowed.
Alexandra hurled her body toward the other two women, knocking them back just as a pistol blast joined the din of the hunting rifles in the distance.
Most of the guests awake at this hour were shooting pheasant in the forest beyond the grounds.
A brilliant time for a murder.
All three women had appeared to avoid injury. They scrambled to their feet and ran for what had once been the medieval armory, now a crumbling wall covered in ivy.
Piers launched himself at the gunman, breaking his firing arm before the volley had finished echoing through the stones.
The subsequent violence was, admittedly, self-indulgent, but Piers couldn’t stop his fists from slamming into the face of the assailant again and again.
And once more.
As the skin of his knuckles split against a stranger’s jaw, Piers tried to think of a more satisfying sensation than the impact of flesh and the crunch of bone beneath his fists.
Nothing came to mind.
There was fucking, he supposed. But he could think of no lover, mistress, nor whore who provided the kind of unadulterated release as did delivering a well-deserved beating.
Not these days, anyhow.
Power. In this arena, the physical one, he wielded it. He studied it. He became power. Primal and potent. It no longer had to be something he danced with. Something he was shackled to. Something to run to the farthest corners of Blighty to escape.
Strength gathered in his sinews and flowed through the arrangement of his motion. It bulged in the cords and ropes of muscle he’d built maneuvering through countries where the environs were just as lethal as the locals and the lions.
And almost as lethal as he.
Almost.
Beneath the gray stone grandeur of Castle Redmayne, it had been easy to forget that this was a power available to him.
Until the fucking warthog of a man beneath his blows had given him the perfect excuse to unleash it.
“There’s another on the hill!” someone warned.
Piers hauled the man around to use as a human shield, ducking to reclaim the pistol his victim had dropped in the moss. He sighted the figure on the hill, drew a bead, and fired.
The man dropped, taking two more bullets to the torso before he hit the ground.
Piers threw the sack of blood and rubbish on the stones of the ruins and pressed the burning end of the pistol against the assailant’s head, ignoring his cry of pain. “Tell me what you’re doing here before I send you to hell,” he demanded from between clenched teeth. An unholy fury thrummed beneath his skin, setting it ablaze.
A few garbled noises bubbled around blood and spittle escaping the blighter’s open mouth.
“It appears you’ve broken his jaw too inexorably for him to confess at the moment.” The clear, unperturbed voice of Lady Francesca pulled him around once more. “Though we are lucky you stumbled upon us, if that is, in fact, what you did.”
At first, Piers thought it was the haze of red, which often accompanied violence, that touched the three women before him with such unparalleled brilliance.
He checked to make certain. Yes, the stones beneath his boots were gray, the moss clinging to them alternately umber and olive and russet. The ocean winds ruffled waves of verdant grass in the distance, and the sky stretched blue above them.
No, the scarlet hue of blood rage had receded. These women were simply … vibrant.
Vibrant redheads to the last one.
Piers blinked past Lady Francesca to Alexandra. His gaze slipped over her supple body, remembering every place his hands had been only yesterday.
Her fists curled tightly at the sides of her slim, midnight-blue skirts, and she gawked at him from eyes so owlish, he could see the whites all the way around the pupils. She wore some sort of stunning female equivalent to a man’s suit, complete with a silk cravat trimmed with lace, a high-necked blouse, and a fitted vest.
Inexplicably, he ached to rip away the starched, scholarly layers. To ascertain injury, if nothing else.
Her breasts rose and fell at double the rate of her companions’, and her eyes flashed gold in the dappled sunlight.
Piers told himself his cock was at attention because violence was sometimes just as physically arousing as vice.
He told himself that twice, before attempting to speak.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Her features were ashen, her lips devoid of the lush color he’d so admired before.
Francesca gave him her usual tight-lipped smile. “We’re no worse for wear, Your Grace, I assure you.”
He had to remember that his question should have been directed at all of them.
At the Countess of Mont Claire, in particular.
“Francesca?” Alexandra whispered the unfinished question to Lady Francesca, but her eyes never left his bleeding knuckles, which had begun to smart like the very devil.
“Oh yes.” Francesca stepped closer, examining the roughshod figure writhing on the ground before she leveled an inscrutable cat-eyed gaze on him. “Ladies, allow me to introduce His Grace, Piers Gedrick Atherton, the Duke of Redmayne, and my fiancé.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Piers’s eyes narrowed as something meaningful passed between the three women he didn’t quite understand and liked even less.