Francesca leaned forward intently. “The real question is, why does it matter so much to you?”
Alexandra hesitated, pressing her fingertips to lips still tingling with sensation from his vital, gentle kisses. Why did it matter? She wasn’t jealous, was she? Of a woman she loathed and a man she didn’t love? Lord, she’d only known him two days. Only encountered him a handful of times.
And now they were to be married. He would be her husband.
Given her circumstances, her past, any woman might welcome a mistress into their situation to avoid a distasteful act.
And yet …
“I wouldn’t surrender a shawl I was passing fond of to Rose,” she muttered bitterly. “Let alone a husband.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Francesca agreed.
Cecelia lifted her glass. “Hear. Hear.”
A sharp knock surprised Alexandra into gulping her whisky rather than sipping it. She set the glass down on the table, her eyes watering at the burn.
I’ll come find you.
“It’s for me.” She stood, making certain her friends were out of sight of the door before she went to it. She pressed her hand to her belly as though to contain the riot of moths within.
He’d come. And it had only been minutes.
But, as she was well aware, the act could only take minutes, and one needn’t disrobe.
Gathering her courage, she opened the door.
Redmayne’s eyes touched her everywhere, absorbing her features from the dimly lit alcove.
He’d donned his waistcoat and tamed his hair but left his necktie off. There was no way to tell whether or not he’d only just finished an interlude of a physical nature.
“You are not alone.” His voice pulsed with the familiar fury.
Perhaps she’d also identified its source. Rose.
“I’m not alone,” she confirmed.
“Might I speak to you?” He gestured to the empty bartizan alcove. It would afford them a modicum of privacy, at least.
“Of course.”
He didn’t step back to make room for her, and the moment the door closed behind her, Alexandra found herself enfolded against a solid wall of heated steel.
Once, she might have panicked. Or struggled. He didn’t warn her, and she’d not prepared herself for the physical contact.
But as he gathered her against him, one of his large hands pressing against her back and the other cupping her head, she found that her limbs didn’t seize with the familiar instinct to thrash or flee.
A strong, rhythmic thump against her cheek held her in thrall. His heart raced, pounded, and the sound of it hypnotized her, lulled her into a sense of contentment
He held her closer than he had before. With less deference and more desperation, as though he’d been half afraid he’d find her gone.
Breathing deeply, Alexandra searched for a foreign or female scent but found nothing but his distinctive, alluring essence.
She smiled at this. Rose had been drenched in a floral French perfume. Surely if they’d embraced—if they’d been intimate—he’d reek of her.
Indulging in a sigh of relief, Alexandra relaxed against him. She even slid her hands around his ribs to his back, attempting to encircle the great, big whole of him and found it almost impossible.
She burned to know what had happened, but she sensed he needed this. Needed her for another silent moment.
Silence she could give him. Silence she had in spades.
What a thing it was to be held. An odd and oddly ubiquitous, intrinsically human thing. A thing, she realized, she’d not experienced for ten years. And never by a man.
Until now. Until him.
She’d uncovered a grave in Pompeii where the bones of a man and a woman had been intertwined in just such an embrace. Alexandra had stared at them for incalculable hours, bereft at the idea of separating them. Wondering at what had driven them together like this, and if they’d clung to each other in life as they had in death.
And why.
This, she thought once more. This was why. A body, a heart, needed another nearby. An embrace fed an elemental physical need she’d never known she’d lacked until an abundance had been available.
And here was the physiological proof. His heart slowed against her ear, adopting a more reasonable rhythm. Incrementally, his muscles melted from steel to iron, his arms relaxing until his hands idly explored the length of her spine.
“Do you fear me, Alexandra Lane?” She heard the words as a resonant vibration in his chest.
His perceptivity was beginning to be problematic. “I do. I have,” she admitted carefully.
He hesitated, his chest hitching on a breath. “Does it frighten you to have to—look at me?”
“No,” she assured him. “No more than it frightens you to look in the mirror.”
“I don’t look in the mirror,” he rumbled.
Alexandra leaned back to see him, though his arms tightened at her waist as if he wasn’t ready to let her go.
“Why?” she asked gently. “Is it difficult to face who you are?”
He gazed down at her, his features stony and tense. The left side of his aspect turned slightly to her, as though daring her to face the parts of him she should fear. “I don’t always see the man I am, I see the man I could have become. He is difficult to look at.”
Despite herself, she reached up and shaped her palms to his jaw. “You’re going to think me silly, but when we met I fancied that ancient gods had done this to you out of jealousy for your mortal perfection.” She grazed shy fingers through his beard, tracing the angry marks.
He tensed. Twitched, but he didn’t move.
“I’m sorry for your pain,” she continued earnestly. “But these are a part of you now, and this encounter altered you for the better.” She lifted onto her tiptoes, and nudged his head down, pressing her lips to the fissure on his cheek. “Both inside and out,” she amended. “I think you’re quite handsome. And, beyond that, I think you are good.”
Something lit in his eyes that sparked an answering ache in her heart. Half disbelief, half yearning. “Then why fear me?” he puzzled. “Because of what happened at the ruins? Because I killed a man?”
Alexandra didn’t say a word as her lashes swept down to cover her expression. She was the last person who could condemn him for that.
“Was that the first … person you’ve ever killed?” she queried, wishing she could tell him that they shared this kinship. Wondering if his hands were stained with the blood of others.
The length of his breath answered her before his words ever did. “No. I’ve been attacked before. In Argentina we hunted too closely to an American company’s gold mine. We’d a brutal encounter, I couldn’t tell you the body count. And, there have been other times, but I can promise you I’ve never taken a life that hasn’t been in defense of my own. Or that of another.”
They were silent in the dark for a few breaths before he pressed, “Can you forgive me that?”
“There’s nothing to forgive.” She ventured a look at him. “I know there are reasons to kill.”
Redmayne pulled her back into him, relief and regret lowering the timbre of his voice to a soothing depth. “Even so, I’m sorry you witnessed the savagery of which I am capable. I want you to know I’ve never in my life used my strength against a woman.”