Lord of Scoundrels

What he had done had been very exciting and surprising, especially the last part, when he’d made her have a little earthquake. She knew what that was, because Genevieve had told her. And thanks to her grandmother, Jessica was well aware that those extraordinary sensations did not always occur, especially early in marriage. Not all men took the trouble.

  She could not believe Dain had taken the trouble merely to score a point, like proving his power over her. According to Genevieve, it was extremely painful for an aroused male to deny himself release. Unless Dain had an esoteric way of relieving his arousal that Genevieve had failed to mention, he’d surely suffered acute discomfort.

  He must have had a compelling reason for doing so.

  Jessica could not begin to imagine what it was. He wanted her, beyond a doubt. He had tried to resist, but he couldn’t—not after she’d shamelessly bared her breasts and stuck them right under his arrogant Florentine nose…not after she’d hiked up her skirts and sat on his breeding organs.

  She flushed, recalling, but the heat she felt wasn’t embarrassment. At the time, she’d felt wonderfully free and wicked…and she’d been hotly, deliciously rewarded for her boldness.

  Even now, she felt he’d given her a gift. As though it were her birthday, not his. And after gifting his wife with a little earthquake and enduring acute physical discomfort, he had—with no small difficulty, she was sure—contrived to get her up the stairs without waking her.

  She found herself wishing he hadn’t done so. It would have been easier if he’d roughly wakened her and laughed at her and let her make her own way upstairs, dazed, stumbling…besotted. It would have been easier still if he had simply pushed her down, rammed into her, rolled away, and fallen asleep.

  Instead, he’d taken pains. He’d taught her pleasure and taken care of her after. Sweet and chivalrous he’d been, truly.

  Her husband was transforming simple animal attraction into something much more complicated.

  And soon, if she was not very careful, she might make the fatal error of falling in love with him.

  Midafternoon of the following day, Lady Dain discovered that Athcourt did have ghosts.

  She knelt on a threadbare carpet in the upper-most chamber of the North Tower. The room was one of Athcourt’s furnishings graveyards. About her were trunks filled with clothing of bygone eras, draperies, and linens, as well as assorted odds and ends of furniture, crates of mismatched dinnerware, and a number of household utensils of enigmatic function. Beside her knelt Mrs. Ingleby, the housekeeper.

  They were both gazing at a portrait of a young woman with curling black hair, coal black eyes, and a haughty Florentine nose. Jessica had found it in a dark corner of the room, hidden behind a stack of trunks, and thickly wrapped in velvet bed hangings.

  “This can be no one but His Lordship’s mother,” Jessica said, wondering why her heart hammered as though she were afraid, which she wasn’t. “The gown, the coiffure—last decade of the eighteenth century, no question.”

  There was no need to remark upon the physical resemblance. The lady was simply the feminine version of the present marquess.

  This was also the first portrait Jessica had seen that bore any resemblance to him.

  After Jessica’s solitary breakfast—Dain had eaten and vanished before she’d come down—Mrs. Ingleby had given her a partial tour of the immense house, including a leisurely stroll through the long second-floor gallery opposite their bedrooms, which housed the family portraits. Except for the first Earl of Blackmoor, whose heavy-lidded gaze had reminded her of Dain’s, Jessica had detected no likenesses.

  Nowhere among these worthies had she spied a female who could have been Dain’s mother. Mrs. Ingleby, when questioned, had told her there wasn’t such a portrait, not that she knew of. She’d been at Athcourt since the present marquess came into the title, when he’d replaced most of the previous staff.

  This portrait, then, had been hidden away during his father’s time. Out of grief? Jessica wondered. Had it been too painful for the late marquess to see his wife’s image? If so, he must have been a very different man from the one she’d seen in his portrait: a fair, middle-aged gentleman, garbed in somber Quaker-like simplicity. But the humble dress was in stark contrast to his expression. No gentle Friend had lived behind the stern countenance with its narrowed, wintry blue eyes.

  “I know nothing about her,” Jessica said, “except the date she was wed and the date she died. I hadn’t expected her to be so young. I had assumed the second wife was a more mature woman. This is little more than a girl.”

  And who, she wondered angrily, had shackled this ravishing child to the horrid, pious old block of ice?

  She drew back, startled by the vehemence of her reaction. Quickly she stood up.

  “Have it brought down to my sitting room,” she told the housekeeper. “You may have it lightly dusted before, but no further cleaning until I’ve had a chance to examine it in better light.”

  Mrs. Ingleby had been imported from Derby-shire. She’d heard nothing about old family scandals before she’d come and, because she would not tolerate belowstairs gossip, she’d heard nothing since. Lord Dain’s agent had hired her, not simply because of her sterling reputation as a housekeeper, but because of her strict principles: In her view, the care of a family was a sacred trust, which one did not abuse by whispering scandal behind one’s employers’ backs. Either the conditions were good or they were not. If they were not, one politely gave notice and departed.

  Her strict views did not, however, prevent the rest of the staff from gossiping when her back was turned. Consequently, most of them had heard about the previous Lady Dain. One of them was one of the footmen summoned to move the portrait to the present Lady Dain’s sitting room. He told Mr. Rodstock who the portrait subject was.

  Mr. Rodstock was much too dignified to dash his head against the chimneypiece as he wished to. All he did was blink, once, and order his minions to alert him the instant His Lordship returned.

  Lord Dain had spent most of the day in Chudleigh. At the Star and Garter, he’d met up with Lord Sherburne, who was making his meandering way south to Devonport for a wrestling match.

  Sherburne, who’d been wed less than a year, had left his young wife in London. He was the last person in the world to find anything odd about a very recently married man’s deserting his bride for the bar parlor of a coaching inn several miles from home. On the contrary, he invited Dain to journey with him to Devonport. Sherburne was awaiting a few other fellows, who were to arrive this evening. He suggested Dain pack, collect his valet, and join them for dinner. Then they could all leave together first thing tomorrow morning.

  Dain had accepted the invitation without hesitation, ignoring the skull-splitting shriek of his conscience. Hesitation was always a sign of weakness and, in this case, Sherburne might think Beelzebub needed his wife’s permission first, or that he couldn’t bear to be away from her for a few days.

  He could bear it easily, Dain thought now, as he hurried up the north staircase to his room. Furthermore, she needed to be taught that she could not manipulate him, and this lesson would be considerably less painful for him than the one he’d given her last night. He’d rather let carrion crows feast on his privates than go through that horrific experience again.

  He would go away, and calm down, and put matters into perspective, and when he returned he would…

  Well, he didn’t know precisely what he would do, but that was because he wasn’t calm. When he was, he would figure it out. He was certain there must be a simple solution, but he could not contemplate the problem coolly and objectively while she was nearby, bothering him.

  “My lord.”

  Dain paused at the head of the stairs and looked down. Rodstock was hurrying up after him. “My lord,” he repeated breathlessly. “A word, if you please.”

  What the steward had to say was more than a word, yet no more than what was needed. Her Ladyship had been exploring the North Tower storage room. She had
found a portrait. Of the previous marchioness. Rodstock thought His Lordship would wish to be informed.

  Rodstock was a paragon, the soul of discretion and tact. Nothing in his tone or demeanor indicated any consciousness of the bomb he had just dropped at his master’s feet.

  His master, likewise, evidenced no awareness of any explosion whatsoever.

  “I see,” Dain said. “That is interesting. I had no idea we had one about. Where is it?”

  “In Her Ladyship’s sitting room, my lord.”

  “Well, then, I might as well look at it.” Dain turned and headed down the Long Gallery. His heart was beating unsteadily. Other than that, he felt nothing. He saw nothing, either, during the endless walk past the portraits of the noble line of men and women he had never felt a part of.

  He walked on blindly to the end of the hall, opened the last door on the left, and turned left again into the narrow passageway. He continued past one door, and on to the next, then through it, and on through the second passage to the door at its end, which stood open.

  The portrait that wasn’t supposed to exist stood before the sitting room’s east-facing window on a battered easel, which must have been unearthed from the schoolroom.

  Dain walked up to the painting and gazed at it for a long while, though it hurt, badly—more than he could have guessed—to look into the beautiful, cruel face. His throat burned and his eyes as well. If he could, he would have wept then.

  But he couldn’t because he wasn’t alone. He did not have to take his eyes from the portrait to know his wife was in the room.

  “Another of your finds,” he said, choking a short laugh past his seared throat. “And on your first treasure hunt here, too.”

  “Luckily, the North Tower is cool and dry,” she said. Her voice was cool and dry as well. “And the painting was well wrapped. It will need minimal cleaning, but I should prefer another frame. This one is much too dark and overornate. Also, I had rather not put her in the portrait gallery, if you don’t mind. I’d prefer she had a place to herself. Over the dining room mantel, I think. In place of the landscape.”

  She came nearer, pausing a few paces to his right. “The landscape wants a smaller room. Even if it didn’t, I’d much rather look at her.”

  He would, too, though it was eating him alive to do so.

  He would have been content merely to look at his beautiful, impossible mother. He would have asked nothing…or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…

  Mawkish nonsense, he angrily reproached himself. It was only a damned piece of canvas daubed with paint. It was a painting of a whore, as all the household, all of Devon, and most of the world beyond knew. All except his wife, with her fiendish gift for turning the world upside down.

  “She was a whore,” he said harshly. And quickly and brutally, to have it said and done and over with, he went on. “She ran away with the son of a Dartmouth merchant. She lived openly with him for two years and died with him, on a fever-plagued island in the West Indies.”

  He turned and looked down into his wife’s pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening…with tears.

  “How dare you?” she said, angrily blinking the tears back. “How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son.”

  “I might have known you could make even this romantic,” he said mockingly. “Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to—to what, Jess? Love?”

  He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream, Why? Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him—or pitied him at least, if she could not love him—she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.

  “You don’t know what her life was like,” she said. “You were a child. You couldn’t know what she felt. She was a foreigner, and her husband was old enough to be her father.”

  “Like Byron’s Donna Julia, you mean?” His voice dripped acid irony. “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps Mama would have done better with two husbands, of five and twenty.”

  “You don’t know whether your father treated her well or ill,” his wife persisted, like a teacher with a stubborn student. “You don’t know whether he made the way easy for her or impossible. For all you know, he may have made her wretched—which is more than likely, if his portrait offers an accurate indication of his character.”

  And what of me? he wanted to cry. You don’t know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left…to endure…and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman’s soft hand.

  He was appalled at his own inner rage and grief, the hysteria of a child…who had died five and twenty years ago.

  He made himself laugh and meet her steady grey gaze with the mocking mask he wore so well. “If you’ve taken my sire in dislike, feel free to exile him to the North Tower. You may hang her in his place. Or in the chapel, for all I care.”

  He headed for the door. “You needn’t consult me about redecorating. I know no female can live two days in a house and leave anything as it was. I shall be much astonished if I can find my way about when I return.”

  “You’re going away?” Her tones remained steady. When he paused and turned at the threshold, she was looking out the window, her color back to normal, her countenance composed.

  “To Devonport,” he said, wondering why her composure chilled him so. “A wrestling match. Sherburne and some other fellows. I’m to meet them at nine o’clock. I need to pack.”

  “Then I must change orders for dinner,” she said. “I think I’ll dine in the morning room. But I had better have a nap before then, or I shall fall asleep into my plate. I have been over only about one quarter of the house, yet I feel as though I had walked from Dover to Land’s End.”

  He wanted to ask what she thought of the house, what she liked—apart from the soul-shattering portrait of his mother—and what she didn’t like—besides the offensive landscape in the dining room, which he hadn’t liked, either, he recalled.

  If he were not going away, he could have found out over dinner, in the cozy intimacy of the morning room.

  Intimacy, he told himself, was the last thing he needed now. What he needed was to get away, where she could not turn him upside down and inside out with her heart-stopping “discoveries”…or torment him with her scent, her silken skin, the soft curves of her slender body.

  It took all his self-control to walk, not run, from the room.

  Jessica spent ten minutes trying to calm down. It didn’t work.

  Unwilling to cope with Bridget or anyone else, she ran her own bath. Athcourt, fortunately, boasted the rare luxury of hot and cold running water, even on the second floor.

  Neither solitude nor the bath calmed her down, and napping was impossible. Jessica lay on her large, lonely bed, stiff as a poker, glaring up at the canopy.

  Barely three days wed, and the great jackass was abandoning her. For his friends. For a wrestling match.

  She got up, pulled off her modest cotton night-gown, and stalked, naked, to her dressing room. She found the wine red and black silk negligee and put it on. She slipped into the black mules. She shrugged into a heavy black and gold silk dressing gown, tied the sash, and loosely draped the neckline so that a bit of the negligee peeped above it.

  After running a brush through her hair, she returned to her bedchamber and exited through the door that opened into what Mrs. Ingleby had called the Withdrawing Chamber. At present, it housed part of Dain’s collection of artistic curios. It also adjoined His Lordship’s apartments.

  She crossed the huge, dim room to the door that led to Dain’s rooms. She rapped. The muffled voices she’d heard
while approaching abruptly ceased. After a moment, Andrews opened the door. As he took in her dishabille, he let out a gasp, which he quickly turned into a small, polite cough.

  She turned a sweet, artless smile upon him. “Ah, you haven’t gone yet. I am so relieved. If His Lordship can spare a minute, I need to ask him something.”

  Andrews glanced to his left. “My lord, Her Ladyship wishes—”

  “I’m not deaf,” came Dain’s cross voice. “Get away from there and let her in.”

  Andrews backed away and Jessica strolled in, glancing idly about her while she made her way slowly into the room and around the immense seventeenth-century bed to her husband. The bed was even larger than hers, about ten feet square.

  Dain, in shirt, trousers, and stockinged feet, stood near the window. He was glaring down at his traveling case. It stood open upon a heavily carved table which she guessed had been built about the same time as the bed. He would not look at her.

  “It is a…delicate matter,” she said, her voice hesitant, shy. She wished she could command a blush as well, but blushes did not come easily to her. “If we might be…private?”

  He shot a glance at her, and back to the valise almost in the same instant. Then he blinked, and turned his head toward her once more, stiffly this time. Slowly he surveyed her, up and down and up again, pausing at the revealing neckline of her dressing gown. A muscle jumped in his cheek.

  Then his face set, hard as granite. “Ready for your nap, I see.” He glowered past her at Andrews. “What are you waiting for? ‘Private,’ Her Ladyship said. Are you deaf?”

  Andrews left, closing the door after him.

  “Thank you, Dain,” Jessica said, smiling up at him. Then she stepped closer, took a handful of starched and neatly folded neckcloths from the valise, and dropped them on the floor.

  He looked at her. He looked at the linen upon the floor.

  She took out a stack of pristine white handkerchiefs and, still smiling, threw them down, too.

  “Jessica, I don’t know what game you’re at, but it is not amusing,” he said very quietly.