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—
She only caught a glimpse, before he turned in such a way that he was backlit by the sun, casting a shadow over his … particulars.
She’d seen enough, though. His lean, tapered hips framed his sex, giving way to long legs carved with a wealth of crests and grooves that shaped and changed as he moved.
She frowned when she noted the bandage on his left thigh had been abandoned, and a small stitched seam marred the muscle there. The wound didn’t seem to bother him at all as he fought the receding water toward the shore.
The shadow on his body shifted, offering her another unfiltered view of him. His entire form was like some magnificent sort of machinery, each tendon, muscle, and joint flexing and fluid with both refined movement and unthinkable power.
Pulse fluttering, Alexandra tried not to look. She really did. She endeavored to afford him the same respect and modesty she’d desire.
But then, she’d never bathed nude in the sea with nothing but a small cliff wall and a shallow sand dune for privacy. Modesty seemed to be the least of his concerns as he conquered the stretch of beach and veered toward the cliff.
Toward her.
Or, rather, toward the basket she’d just barely noticed, full of pressed clothing and boots his valet had no doubt left resting against the cliff wall for him.
When he saw her, he scowled. “What the bloody hell are you doing out here on your own?” he barked.
Drat. He’d caught her spying. Wincing, Alexandra met the censure sharpening his blunt features with a pretense of calm.
“I—I came to find you,” she explained, inching toward the basket of his clothing and bending to fetch him a towel. “When you didn’t return, I worried—”
“You should be at the hotel resting,” he clipped, prowling closer with his singular dark grace.
“I don’t want to rest.” Not when there was so much to say. Not when she’d a million questions perched on her tongue, the first of which being …
Why had he left her alone?
He snatched the towel from her, securing it around his hips.
Stung, Alexandra retreated a step, and then another. Realizing she was as unused to his irritation as she was his unabashed nudity. She watched water sluice distracting trails down the grooves of his neck to his shoulders and chest, disappearing into the towel.
“It’s not safe here.” His veins rolled and flexed above his muscles, larger than before, pulsing with something she didn’t quite understand. He seemed impossibly more titanic. His scars, the ones she barely even noticed anymore, stood out in stark relief from features hardened with that well-contained rage she’d always sensed just below the surface.
The girl in her screamed at her to turn. To run. To hide from his displeasure and his strength and the heat he was throwing off in waves, regardless of the chilly swim he’d taken.
The woman in her propelled her feet forward, daring to approach the surly beast. “I know there is danger,” she ventured. “It’s why I came…” Her lashes fluttered low, unable to meet his tiger-sharp glare as she confessed, “Lately, I only feel safe when I’m with you.”
“Alexandra.” Her name escaped him as a pleading groan before he wet his full lower lip with his tongue. “You could have been hurt today, or worse. It never occurred to me this might be the life we shared. That by making you a duchess, I also marked you for days like this. I don’t stay still for long, and I don’t always travel the safe roads. I’ve enemies, and if you remain married to me, they’ll become yours as well.”
“We both have enem—” She cut off, her puzzlement giving way to astonishment as she digested what he’d just said. “What do you mean, if I remain married to you?”
“We’ve not yet consummated our union.” He bit out the words as though they offended him. “You … have a choice.”
Was he referring to annulment? “You want me to leave you?” she gasped.
“Tell me, wife, is all this worth a life bound to me? The filth, the adversaries, the notoriety. I’m the reason toda—”
“It is worth it,” she rushed. “I—I know it hasn’t been long, but I’ve felt more alive in the last nine days I’ve known you than I have in the past nine years. This life is what I love, what I’ve always wanted, don’t you understand that? Dig sites and dirt and the dead. I crave travel, knowledge, and adventure, like you. I think we can both find that together, can’t we? Granted, fewer attempts on our lives would be preferable. But that’s all my…” She pressed her lips together just in time.
My fault.
Stunned, she blinked up at him. He still didn’t know. He didn’t know that every time he’d saved her from a threat, it was one her own past had wrought upon them both. Today, her friends and her husband might have been crushed in the tunnels.
Unless one of them had perpetrated the incident.
My fault.
The familiar verdict ripped through her with the strength of a tidal wave.
What could she confess? What should she withhold? He could have been killed. He deserved to know … something.
If not everything.
But it wasn’t only her secret to tell. Jean-Yves was on his own native soil for the first time in years. They could arrest him right away should his part in de Marchand’s death be revealed. Francesca and Cecelia were who-knew-where, and she didn’t know how to get word to them should things go awry.
If she told now … Redmayne could protect her. He might know what to do.
If she told him now … he could react like any number of men would. He’d take control from her. He’d stampede over a situation she’d balanced so carefully and tear it wide open, dooming her friends and damning himself in the process.
And the worst scenario of all …
If she told him now … he could condemn her. Turn her in to the authorities and be done with her. Pick another wife, a virgin one, and get as many heirs as he needed upon someone else.
Alexandra searched his face, watching a storm build in his eyes as similar clouds gathered in the north sky.
Surely he wouldn’t. Not after the vows he’d made, after the intimacies they’d shared.
She couldn’t deny the bond threading through the space between them. She wanted to trust that he wouldn’t turn on her.
They were going into Le Havre tomorrow to get her money. Hopefully she could negotiate new terms with her tormentor. She could find out what her blackmailer ultimately wanted from her.
If it came down to it, she’d sacrifice herself for them. For him.