Rolling to the side in a controlled collapse, he brought her with him. Draping her over his chest and spreading her hair along his torso, unworried by their sweat-slicked skin or the leavings of their pleasure.
They breathed together in the silence, allowing the wind to cool their bodies as they each took a moment to contemplate the cataclysmic enormity of what had just happened between them.
After a moment, chill bumps began to ripple along her skin. Redmayne kissed her shoulder and heaved himself off the bed, dipped a cloth in the basin of clean water, and returned to minister gently to her.
That accomplished, he gathered her beneath the blankets to face him on her side, creating a cocoon with his body before drugging her with lavish kisses.
He gave her a long, searching gaze, “Alexandra, tell me honestly. Are you all r—”
“I think it’s possible that I love you.” One might think she’d gone and blurted something without thinking. But she hadn’t. Not this time. She simply didn’t want to answer the question he was about to ask. Because the answer would be both yes, and no.
He couldn’t have appeared more stunned if she’d stabbed him in the heart. “You think … it’s possible…”
She sighed, looking heavenward. They were back to the repeating again.
“I’ve never had a definition of love before.” She brushed her hand through the fine fleece of hair on his chest, finding the quick, strong beat of the organ beneath it. The one she wasn’t certain belonged to her. Or ever would. “But I think if I can’t imagine my life without you. If I feel so attached—so dedicated to you. So powerfully possessive of you. That must mean something, mustn’t it? If I trust you like this. To do this.” She let out a wry laugh. “I’ve only known you nine days. Ten come midnight. But I have ceased being able to imagine my subsequent days without you in them. Doesn’t that seem like love to you?”
“Alexandra, I…”
She placed three fingers over his lips, one against the seam of her favorite scar, silencing his reply. “You don’t have to say anything. In fact, I wish you wouldn’t. Not tonight. I just needed you to know.”
She burrowed into his body, and was heartened when he pulled her close without hesitation. A new emotion had likewise seeped into his embrace.
Possession, she liked to think.
Alexandra watched the arms of his mantel clock, content to time the rhythm of his slowing breaths. Just over an hour before she had to go.
She fought a sense of doom at the thought of leaving the safety of his arms.
The sensation of his limbs became lush and heavier upon her, twitching with dreams. A quiet, masculine snore rumbled through him. Just the one.
She smiled, glad he could sleep.
At least one of them should.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A portent of dread sang through Redmayne’s blood, yanking him from a blissful, languorous sleep. He clutched at his head, feeling like the very devil had woken him.
Needing comfort, he reached for his wife, disconcerted to find himself alone in bed.
He sat up, calling her name as the covers drifted away from his naked body.
The wind no longer cooled his fevered skin but added an insidious chill to a gathering sense of doom.
Don’t be a melodramatic fool, he admonished himself. He mustn’t allow the events of the past fortnight to weaken his constitution. He needed to remain sharp. Self-assured. To enhance his instincts and keep his wits about him.
It was the only way to keep his wife safe until he dealt with the threat.
Her sheets were cold enough to have been empty for some time. Too long for a visit to the washroom. The fact pierced him with no small amount of displeasure, and something eminently darker.
He stood, intent upon finding her.
Perhaps she’d gone back to her own room, unused to sleeping with another. Certainly, they’d made strides toward healing, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t require a great deal of space and patience. She was so used to her own sovereignty, and he’d no mind to take that from her.
Most noble couples slept apart; perhaps that was her preference.
Well, it bloody well wasn’t his. He’d do what he could to change her mind forthwith.
He reached out to close the window, lost in his thoughts.
His hand froze on the pane, the other joining it as he watched a cloaked figure haloed by a lantern scurry through the intemperate night. The wind blew the hood away from her head, uncovering a long braid of the most extraordinary color.
He’d known who it was before he saw her hair. Of course he had. He’d memorized her walk, her height, her movements. He’d studied everything about her without even meaning to.
He wanted to fling the window wide and call after her.
In his drowsy stupefaction, he almost did.
But the facts immobilized him. She’d left his bed at—he checked his clock—nearly midnight, dressed, and now made her way toward the catacombs alone.
Catacombs he’d meant to scour for clues as to who was trying to kill him.
Mind racing with a million thoughts, suspicions, and subsequent denials, he yanked on trousers, a shirt, a dark jacket, and his boots.
What the veritable fuck was she up to? At this hour, she could only be about one of a few things, and each scenario that filtered through his thoughts was more sinister and offensive than the last.
He’d given her a fortune in cash this morning. Could she possibly be leaving him? Could their mind-altering sex have been nothing more than a grateful fare-thee-well?
Had she meant to abandon him all this time?
A bleak thought sent him reaching for his pistol and tucking his knife into his boot.
She might be meeting someone.
A friend in need? A coconspirator?
A lover?
A growl ripped its way out of his chest. He’d been so careful, so suspicious.
He sifted through their every interaction since they’d met, searching for a clue, stopping to stare at the bed as his breath sawed in and out of him.
She could have pretended a great many things. Her affection, her story, her kindness.
But not this. A woman’s affectation could falsify her pleasure, but not her body. The trembling. The need. The wide-eyed awe of it. The wet, pulsating releases.
But what of everything else? What about …
I think it’s possible that I love you.
Why would she say that, if she’d meant to leave? If she was meeting another man?
Was it possible she wanted to throw him so completely off course she’d stoop to such a heartless confession?
She’d been a weakness of his since the moment he’d met her. A dazzling, alluring, infuriating, confounding woman. One he’d been so desperate to claim as his own.
All this time, could her heart have belonged to another?
He refused to believe it, that she would break him so thoroughly.
Icy fingers of doubt and dread slithered their way around his heart, freezing it, turning it brittle and still.
Women did what they had to do, didn’t they? In lieu of honorable duels, lucrative vocations, and socially sanctioned means of survival, they had to find a way to seize their power through any means necessary, didn’t they? They were adrift and prisoners of the social mores of men, and so to get what they wanted, they often stooped to stunning feats of brutal manipulation.