How to Love a Duke in Ten Days (Devil You Know, #1)(2)

Some days she could focus on nothing else.

De Marchand said nothing; his gaze reached for her across the expanse of the desk until Alexandra became so unsettled her stomach curdled against something she couldn’t quite identify.

Something unseemly. An unconsecrated anticipation she should have feared.

Instead, she settled her notice in his hair, the lambent color of drenched sand at low tide. Darker than gold, lighter than brown. An unassuming color for such an insolent and powerful man.

“Do you think, Lady Alexandra, that if you are perfect during the day, no one will notice what you do in the dark?”

Alexandra’s fingers fisted in the folds of her dress, her breath drove into her lungs like a cold rail spike. She valiantly fought the instinct to flee. “I assure you, sir. I’m ignorant as to what you are referring.”

Splaying his fingers on the desk, he stood and loomed over her for a terse moment. A spiteful victory danced across his features. He moved to the sideboard next to the window overlooking Lake Geneva. The waxing moon gilded the mountains with silver, and the town below competed with their own metallic golden light. “Clever people have the most exasperating tendency. They spend so much time overestimating themselves, they underestimate everyone else.”

A frown weighted Alexandra’s mouth and pinched the skin beneath her brows. “Sir, if I’ve done something to offend someone, I—”

“Would you like some port?” De Marchand spun from the sideboard sporting a diamond-cut crystal decanter and two matching glasses.

The sight of it turned Alexandra’s tongue to the consistency of gravel.

She’d pilfered that selfsame decanter from him not two years ago, along with a bottle of port from his extensive collection of wine.

Which meant … he knew.

He’d discovered the cave.

The Ecole de Chardonne for girls had originally been built into the side of Mont Pèlerin as a clever chateau-fortress by a Frankish aristocrat in the eleventh century. In its depths, the boiler churned and roared, and during a night of exploration four years prior, Alexandra had chanced upon a labyrinthine walkway which, when bravely followed, became less of a hallway and more of a cave until it abruptly ended at a wall of ivy and thorn bushes.

Here, she and her dearest friends, Francesca Cavendish and Cecelia Teague, had created a haven for their Red Rogues Society. Red, because they all had hair of some variant shade of such. Rogues, because they spent every moment away from their so-called lady’s education, to learn all the things not allowed their sex. They read Poe and Dumas, war reports, and lascivious poetry. They taught themselves Latin and algebra. They’d even given each other masculine monikers which they used during their society gatherings and in correspondence. Frank, Cecil, and Alexander.

They’d become too bold over the years, Alexandra realized as she stared at the port decanter gripped in the headmaster’s hand. In their quest to discover and enjoy manly pleasures and pastimes denied ladies, they’d taken to occasionally pilfering a thing or two from the few male residents and employees at de Chardonne. Innocuous things, they thought. Things that would never be missed.

Like one of any dozen of decanters the headmaster possessed.

“Port is not a drink one offers a lady,” he started. “But I think you’ve developed a taste for forbidden things, have you not?” An almost giddy satisfaction dripped from de Marchand as he offered her the glass. “A hunger for pleasures only allowed to men.”

Dumbstruck, Alexandra could think of nothing else to say or do but accept the wine with white, trembling fingers. She dared not take a sip. She couldn’t have swallowed if she tried.

“You assumed no one knew about your little society all these years?” he scoffed gently. “Your trio of redheads. The fat one with all the wealth and no title. The scrawny, impertinent countess.”

Indignation flooded her at his valuation of her compatriots, enough to free her tongue. “I don’t at all consider that a fair assessment of—”

“And you,” he said with ungainly, almost accusatory heat. “The flawless balance of both. Slim, but supple. Delicate and desirable.”

Alexandra’s dinner roiled in her stomach.

De Marchand stepped back behind his desk and pulled open a drawer.

“It isn’t appropriate of you to say such things, sir. My father wouldn’t appreciate—”

The sight of the pearl-handled shaving razor halted her breathing, and as de Marchand began to produce the contraband she and her friends had acquired over the years, a strangling sensation paralyzed her.

A pair of braces, a top hat, cuff links, shirts, and several other incidentals. They hadn’t all been his, and many others had been castoffs.

Even so.

She hated that he’d been to their cave, that he’d defiled their sanctum with his odious presence. She resented him for touching things that, although not hers to begin with, had become treasures.

Treasures the Red Rogues had fully intended to return upon graduating.

“Four years.” The number seemed to impress him as he placed the items in a cluster at the edge of his desk in measured, meaningful motions. “You stole from me when you didn’t think anyone was watching. You delved into my intimate things. Forbidden things.”

A slither of oily disgust oozed through her insides, snaking around her guts and tightening them painfully.