Alexandra was in the middle of recounting the events of that night to her enraptured friends when the door between the two rooms exploded open, startling them all.
Redmayne stalked inside, pulling up short when his eyes locked on hers with an alarming intensity.
He looked appropriately terrible, one side of his wild hair smashed to his head, as though he’d slept in one position the entire ten hours. The gashes of his scars appeared deeper, angrier, as did the grooves branching from his eyes. His beard was fuller, stretching down his neck, unchecked for a few days. His shirt was only halfway fastened, the swells of his tawny chest dark against the white garment.
Alexandra had never thought anyone so unutterably beautiful in her entire life.
An invisible thread of emotion wove through the space between them, propelling the tension to an acute peak. His face could have been chiseled from granite, his eyes swirling with the most intemperate of storms.
She wished she could say something, but the sight of him quite struck her dumb. Any words that came to mind seemed either trite or insufficient.
He speared her friends with that fearsome gaze of his, pointing to the door. “Out.”
Cecelia complied after kissing Alexandra’s cheek and giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.
Redmayne stopped Francesca at the door. “I’ll deal with you later.”
“That’s what you think.” Francesca shouldered past him, tossing a saucy wink over her shoulder.
He slammed the door behind them before turning back to her, his expression ravaged. Gutted.
Furious.
“Are you all right?” Alexandra cringed even as the words left her mouth. She’d always detested the question, and now she absolutely understood why people asked it.
Instead of answering, he dragged his eyes away from her, locking them on the gilded arabesque wall above the headboard as he visibly battled a plethora of emotions.
“I’ve had nearly two days to build up a temper against you,” he finally snapped. “You slip away to meet with a blackmailer—the sex and lethality of whom was unknown to you at the time—without a word to me? Of all the dangerous, witless, reckless—”
“I thought it was my blackmailer who was responsible for the attempts on your life. I was trying to protect my friends, myself, and ultimately you from what I’d done,” she explained.
That brought his gaze back down to clash with hers. “Protect. Me?” His features rearranged from bemused to disbeliving. “Alexandra, I am your husband. It is my call—no—it is my right to protect you. And if you ever deny me my right again, I’ll lock you in Redmayne Tower and lose the key, do you mark me?”
A spurt of defensiveness shot through her. This wasn’t the romantic reunion she’d expected to share with her so-called besotted husband. “What makes you think you can—”
“I cannot!” His sonorous voice cracked raw upon the word. “I cannot stand at your bedside and watch you struggle to breathe, wondering if you’ve enough blood left in your body to sustain you. Wishing I could tear my veins open and offer you mine. I cannot watch someone threaten your precious life. I cannot—will not—allow you out of my sight into a world where you might be taken from me.”
He stalked to her bed, dropping to his knees beside it, his features ardent and his eyes pinched with anguish. “You don’t know what it will cost me, Alexandra, to love you like this. It consumes me. It obsesses me. You’ve somehow, in less than a bloody fortnight, become more integral to my sustenance than the very air I breathe or the water I drink.”
He gathered her hand to his mouth, dragging his lips against her palm. “All I’m asking is for you to have mercy on me, wife. If there is a battle to fight, a villain to face, I beg you to allow me the honor. Because the cruelest thing you could do, is sentence me to a world without you in it.”
Moved beyond words, Alexandra drew her fingers through his beard and up the scar on his cheekbone before reaching to sift through the layers at his scalp. He leaned his head into her touch like a great cat receiving his due.
“I love you, too,” she finally managed.
His mouth tightened at the sides, compressing into a tight line. “Promise me, dammit.”
“I promise,” she said, welling with a devastating tenderness.
“No more secrets between us,” he amended, rising to perch on the bed next to her, threading his fingers through hers. “I want all of you, Alexandra. I want your pleasure and your pain. Your sins and your secrets. Your past and your passions, your opinions and your pretenses. I want to know everything. All of it. To be the only one with whom you share them. I’m a selfish bastard, wife, and I’ll thank you to indulge me. I want you without limitations and beyond suspicions.”
To her surprise, Alexandra found a similar desire within herself. “No more secrets,” she agreed. “Though you’ll have to share me somewhat, with them.” She tilted her chin toward the door through which the Rogues had gone …
… and were likely listening on the other side.
He frowned, pretending to consider it. “If they are essential to your happiness, then they are to mine, as well.”
“Kiss me, husband,” she said.
He bent over her, careful not to press or jostle, laying his mouth against hers with a fervent sound vibrating in his throat.
A surge of love trilled through her, not unlike the pleasures from his magical hands. But softer, spilling across her heart with an exquisite glow, bathing her in warmth and wholeness.
When he pulled back, she witnessed the same glow in his eyes.
“You’re perfect,” he whispered. “My brilliant, beautiful wife.”
She laid her hand against his scars. “So are you.”
She knew each of them to be deeply flawed, wounded, and imperfect beings, but she understood what he meant. They were perfect for each other. Two restless souls that would never be still.
And would no longer have to wander alone.
EPILOGUE
It’d taken Piers exactly two years to get to this moment.
“Are you sure?” he asked one last time, remembering her blanch as the Polynesian midwife had instructed her to make love with him like this to hasten the birth of their child.
He might have known something like this would happen, but when Alexandra had suggested that she give birth halfway around the world with a midwife she’d met while excavating an ancient aquifer, he’d readily agreed.
Neither of them had wished to suffer the boredom and isolation of an English confinement during her pregnancy. And her lively stories of paradise, of a tribe where pregnant women were respected, revered, and pampered—not to mention scantily dressed—sounded like a most capital idea.
For months now, it had been paradise. They slept in a raised open-walled hut, made luxurious by fluttering curtains and plush rugs. The ocean lulled them to sleep every night and bade them awake every morning.
They feasted on exotic fruits and coconuts, fresh fish, pork, and hearty grains harvested or butchered that day. They swam in crystalline coves and played beneath waterfalls. And, as she became weighted down by the child in her belly, he rubbed her feet while she floated in salt water.
A few days a week, Piers would hunt with the men, learning their skills and teaching them a few of his own. The tribe often had visitors from many foreign places, and they welcomed each with broad, beautiful smiles and vigorous trade.