Lord of Scoundrels

  “And I am not one of your stupid cows!” she snapped. “I am not paid to do exactly as you like, and no law on earth obliges me to do so. I shall say whatever I please, and at this moment, it pleases me exceedingly to infuriate you. Because that is precisely how I feel. You have ruined my evening. I should like nothing better than to ruin yours, you spoiled, selfish, spiteful brute!”

  She kicked him in the ankle.

  He was so astonished that he let go of her arm.

  He stared at her tiny, booted foot. “Good gad, did you actually think you could hurt me with that?” He laughed. “Are you mad, Jess?”

  “You great drunken jackass!” she cried. “How dare you?” She tore off her bonnet and whacked him in the chest with it.

  “I did not give you leave to use my Christian name.” She whacked him again. “And I am not a ha’pennyworth of a chit, you thickheaded ox!” Whack, whack, whack.

  Dain gazed down in profound puzzlement. He saw a flimsy wisp of a female attempting, apparently, to do him an injury with a bit of millinery.

  She seemed to be in a perfect fury. While tickling his chest with her ridiculous hat, she was ranting about some party and somebody’s picture and Mrs. Beaumont and how he had spoiled everything and he would be very sorry, because she no longer gave a damn about Bertie, who was no use on earth to anybody, and she was going straight back to England and open a shop and auction the icon herself and get ten thousand for it, and she hoped Dain choked on it.

  Dain was not certain what he was supposed to choke on, except perhaps laughter, because he was certain he’d never seen anything so vastly amusing in all his life as Miss Jessica Trent in a temper fit.

  Her cheeks were pink, her eyes flashed silver sparks, and her sleek black hair was tumbling about her shoulders.

  It was very black, the same pure jet as his own. But different. His was thick and coarse and curly. Hers was a rippling veil of silk.

  A few tresses shaken loose from their pins dangled teasingly against her bodice.

  And that was when he became distracted.

  Her apple green pelisse fastened all the way to her white throat. It was fastened very snugly, outlining the curve of her breasts.

  Measured against, say, Denise’s generous endowments, Miss Trent’s were negligible. In proportion to a slim, fine-boned frame and a whisper of a waist, however, the feminine curves abruptly became more than ample.

  Lord Dain’s fingers began to itch, and a snake of heat stirred and writhed in the pit of his belly.

  The tickling bonnet became an irritation. He grabbed it and crushed it in his hand and threw it down. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’re beginning to bother me.”

  “Bother you?” she cried. “Bother? I’ll bother you, you conceited clodpole.” Then she drew back, made a fist, and struck him square in the solar plexus.

  It was a good, solid blow, and had she directed it at a man less formidably built, that man would have staggered.

  Dain scarcely felt it. The lazy raindrops plopping on his head had about as much physical impact.

  But he saw her wince as she jerked her hand away, and realized she’d hurt herself, and that made him want to howl. He grabbed her hand, then hastily dropped it, terrified he’d crush it by accident.

  “Damn and blast and confound you to hell!” he roared. “Why won’t you leave me in peace, you plague and pestilence of a female!”

  A stray mongrel, sniffing at the lamppost, yelped and scurried away.

  Miss Trent did not even blink. She only stood gazing with a sulkily obstinate expression at the place she’d hit, as though she were waiting for something.

  He didn’t know what it was. All he knew—and he didn’t know how he knew, but it was a certainty as ineluctable as the storm swelling and roaring toward them—was that she hadn’t got it yet and she would not go away until she did.

  “What the devil do you want?” he shouted. “What in blazes is the matter with you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  The desultory plops of rain were building to a steady patter upon the trottoir. Droplets glistened on her hair and shimmered on her pink-washed cheeks. One drop skittered along the side of her nose and down to the corner of her mouth.

  “Damnation,” he said.

  And then he didn’t care what he crushed or broke. He reached out and wrapped his monster hands about her waist and lifted her straight up until her wet, sulky face was even with his own.

  And in the same heartbeat, before she could scream, he clamped his hard, dissolute mouth over hers.

  The heavens opened up then, loosing a torrent.

  Rain beat down upon his head, and a pair of small, gloved fists beat upon his shoulders and chest.

  These matters troubled him not a whit. He was Dain, Lord Beelzebub himself.

  He feared neither Nature’s wrath nor that of civilized society. He most certainly was not troubled by Miss Trent’s indignation.

  Sweet, was he? He was a gross, disgusting pig of a debauchee, and if she thought she’d get off with merely one repellent peck of his polluted lips, she had another think coming.

  There was nothing sweet or chivalrous about his kiss. It was a hard, brazen, take-no-prisoners assault that drove her head back.

  For one terrifying moment, he wondered if he’d broken her neck.

  But she couldn’t be dead, because she was still flailing at him and squirming. He wrapped one arm tightly about her waist and brought the other hand up to hold her head firmly in place.

  Instantly she stopped squirming and flailing. And in that instant her tightly compressed lips yielded to his assault with a suddenness that made him stagger backward, into the lamppost.

  Her arms lashed about his neck in a strangle-hold.

  Madonna in cielo.

  Sweet mother of Jesus, the demented female was kissing him back.

  Her mouth pressed eagerly against his, and that mouth was warm and soft and fresh as spring rain. She smelled of soap—chamomile soap—and wet wool and Woman.

  His legs wobbled.

  He leaned back against the lamppost and his crushing grasp loosened because his muscles were turning to rubber. Yet she clung to him, her slim, sweetly curved body sliding slowly down his length until her toes touched the pavement. And still she didn’t let go of his neck. Still she didn’t pull her mouth away from his. Her kiss was as sweet and innocently ardent as his had been bold and lustily demanding.

  He melted under that maidenly ardor as though it were rain and he a pillar of salt.

  In all the years since his father had packed him off to Eton, no woman had ever done anything to or for him until he’d put money in her hand. Or—as in the case of the one respectable female he’d been so misguided as to pursue nearly eight years ago—unless he signed papers putting his body, soul, and fortune into said hands.

  Miss Jessica Trent was holding on to him as though her life depended upon it and kissing him as though the world would come to an end if she stopped, and there was no “unless” or “until” about it.

  Bewildered and heated at once, he moved his big hands unsteadily over her back and shaped his trembling fingers to her deliciously dainty waist. He had never before held anything like her—so sweetly slim and supple and curved to delicate perfection. His chest tightened and ached and he wanted to weep.

  Sognavo di te.

  I’ve dreamed of you.

  Ti desideravo nelle mia braccia dal primo momento che ti vedi.

  I’ve wanted you in my arms since the moment I met you.

  He stood, helpless in the driving rain, unable to rule his needy mouth, his restless hands, while, within, his heart beat out the mortifying truth.

  Ho bisogno di te.

  I need you.

  As though that last were an outrage so monstrous that even the generally negligent Almighty could not let it pass, a blast of light rent the darkness, followed immediately by a violent crash that shook the pavement.

  She jerked away and stumbled b
ack, her hand clapped to her mouth.

  “Jess,” he said, reaching out to bring her back. “Cara, I—”

  “No. Oh, God.” She shoved her wet hair out of her face. “Damn you, Dain.” Then she turned and fled.

  Jessica Trent was a young woman who faced facts, and as she mounted, dripping, the stairs to her brother’s appartement, she faced them.

  First, she had leapt at the first excuse to hunt down Lord Dain.

  Second, she had sunk into a profound depression, succeeded almost instantly by jealous rage, because she’d found two women sitting in his lap.

  Third, she had very nearly wept when he’d spoken slightingly of her attractions and called her “a ha’pennyworth of a chit.”

  Fourth, she had goaded him into assaulting her.

  Fifth, she had very nearly choked him to death, demanding the assault continue.

  Sixth, it had taken a bolt of lightning to knock her loose.

  By the time she came to the appartement door, she was strongly tempted to dash her brains out against it.

  “Idiot, idiot, idiot,” she muttered, pounding on the portal.

  Withers opened it. His mouth fell open.

  “Withers,” she said, “I have failed you.” She marched into the apartment. “Where is Flora?”

  “Oh, dear.” Withers looked helplessly about him.

  “Ah, then she hasn’t returned. Not that I am the least surprised.” Jessica headed for her grandmother’s room. “In fact, if my poor maid makes the driver take her direct to Calais and row her across the Channel, I should not blame her a whit.” She rapped at Genevieve’s door.

  Her grandmother opened it, gazed at her for a long moment, then turned to Withers. “Miss Trent requires a hot bath,” she said. “Have someone see to it—quickly—if you please.”

  Then she took Jessica’s arm, tugged her inside, sat her down, and pulled off her sodden boots.

  “I will go to that party,” said Jessica, fumbling with her pelisse buckles. “Dain can make a fool of me if he likes, but he will not ruin my evening. I don’t care if all of Paris saw. He’s the one who ought to be embarrassed—running half-naked down the street. And when I reminded him that he was half-naked, what do you think he did?”

  “My dear, I cannot imagine.” Genevieve quickly worked the silk stockings off.

  Jessica told her about the leisurely trouser unbuttoning.

  Genevieve went into whoops of laughter.

  Jessica frowned at her. “It was very difficult to keep a straight face—but that wasn’t the hardest part. The hardest part was—” She let out a sigh. “Oh, Genevieve. He was so adorable. I wanted to kiss him. Right on his big, beautiful nose. And then everywhere else. It was so frustrating. I had made up my mind not to lose my temper, but I did. And so I beat him and beat him until he kissed me. And then I kept on beating him until he did it properly. And I had better tell you, mortifying as it is to admit, that if we had not been struck by lightning—or very nearly—I should be utterly ruined. Against a lamppost. On the Rue de Provence. And the horrible part is”—she groaned—“I wish I had been.”

  “I know,” Genevieve said soothingly. “Believe me, dear, I know.” She stripped off the rest of the garments—Jessica being incapable of doing much besides babbling and staring stupidly at the furniture—wrapped her in a dressing gown, planted her in a chair by the fire, and ordered brandy.

  About half an hour after Jessica Trent had fled him, Lord Dain, drenched to the skin and clutching a mangled bonnet, stalked through the door a trembling Herbert opened for him. Ignoring the footman, the marquess marched down the hall and up the stairs and down another hall to his bedroom. He threw the bonnet onto a chair, stripped off his dripping garments, toweled himself dry, donned fresh attire, and rejoined his guests.

  No one, including the tarts, was audacious or drunk enough to seek an accounting of his whereabouts and doings. Dain seldom troubled to explain his actions. He was accountable to nobody.

  All he told them was that he was hungry and was going out to dinner, and they were at liberty to do as they pleased. All but Trent, who was incapable of any action beyond breathing—which he did with a great deal of noise—accompanied Dain to a restaurant at the Palais Royal. Thence they proceeded to Vingt-Huit, and discovered it had closed down that very day. Since no other establishment offered Vingt-Huit’s variety, the party broke up into smaller groups, each seeking its own choice of entertainment. Dain went to a gambling hell with his pair of…cows and Vawtry and his cow.

  At three o’clock in the morning, Dain left, alone, and wandered the streets.

  His wanderings took him to Madame Vraisses’, just as the guests were beginning to leave.

  He stood under a tree, well beyond the feeble glimmer of a lonely streetlamp, and watched.

  He’d brooded there for nearly twenty minutes when he saw Esmond emerge, with Jessica Trent upon his arm. They were talking and laughing.

  She was not wearing a ridiculous bonnet, but a lunatic hair arrangement even more ludicrous. Shiny knots and coils sprouted from the top of her head, and pearls and plumes waved from the knots and coils. The coiffure, in Dain’s opinion, was silly.

  That was why he wanted to rip out the pearls and plumes and pins…and watch the silky black veil ripple over her shoulders…white, gleaming in the lamplight.

  There was too much gleaming white, he noted with a surge of irritation. The oversize ballooning sleeves of her silver-blue gown didn’t even have shoulders. They started about halfway to her elbow, primly covering everything from there down—and leaving what should have been concealed brazenly exposed to the view of every slavering hound in Paris.

  Every man at the party had examined, at leisure and close quarters, that curving whiteness.

  While Dain, like the Prince of Darkness they all believed him to be, stood outside lurking in the shadows.

  He did not feel very satanic at the moment. He felt, if the humiliating truth be told, like a starving beggar boy with his nose pressed to the window of a pastry shop.

  He watched her climb into the carriage. The door closed and the vehicle lumbered away.

  Though no one was by to see or hear, he laughed under his breath. He had laughed a great deal this night, but he couldn’t laugh the truth away.

  He’d known she was trouble—had to be, as every respectable female was.

  “Wife or mistress, it’s all the same,” he’d told his friends often enough. “Once you let a lady—virtuous or not—fasten upon you, you become the owner of a piece of troublesome property, where the tenants are forever in revolt and into which you are endlessly pouring money and labor. All for the occasional privilege—at her whim—of getting what you could get from any streetwalker for a few shillings.”

  He’d wanted her, yes, but this was hardly the first time in his life the unacceptable sort of female had stirred his lust. He lusted, but he was always aware of the miry trap into which such women must—because they’d been born and bred for that purpose—lure him.

  And the hateful truth was, he’d walked straight into it, and somehow deluded himself he hadn’t—or if he had, it was nothing Dain need fear, because by now there was no pit deep enough, no mire thick enough, to hold him.

  Then what holds you here? he asked himself. What mighty force dragged you here, to gaze stupidly, like a moonstruck puppy, at a house, because she was in it? And what chains held you here, waiting for a glimpse of her?

  A touch. A kiss.

  That’s revolting, he told himself.

  So it was, but it was the truth, and he hated it and hated her for making it true.

  He should have dragged her from the carriage, he thought, and pulled those ladylike fripperies from her hair, and taken what he wanted and walked away, laughing, like the conscienceless monster he was.

  What or who was there to stop him? Before the Revolution, countless corrupt aristocrats had done the same. Even now, who would blame him? Everyone knew what he was. They would say it was her
own fault for straying into his path. The law would not avenge her honor. It would be left to Bertie Trent…at pistol point at twenty paces.

  With a grim smile, Dain left his gloomy post and sauntered down the street. Trapped he was, but he’d been trapped before, he reminded himself. He’d stood outside before, too, aching and lonely because he would not be let in. But always, in the end, Dain won. He had made his schoolboy tormentors respect and envy him. He had paid his father back tenfold for every humiliation and hurt. He’d become the old bastard’s worst nightmare of hell in this life and, one hoped, his most bitter torment in the hereafter.

  Even Susannah, who’d led him about by the nose for six wretched months, had spent every waking minute thereafter having her own pretty nose rubbed in the consequences.

  True, Dain hadn’t seen it that way at the time, but a man couldn’t see anything properly while a woman was digging her claws into him and tearing him to pieces.

  He could see now, clearly: a summer day in 1820, and another funeral, nearly a year after his father’s.

  This time it was Wardell inside the gleaming casket heaped with flowers. During a drunken fight over a whore in the stable yard of an inn, he had fallen onto the cobblestones and cracked his skull.

  After the funeral, Susannah, the eldest of Wardell’s five younger sisters, had drawn the Marquess of Dain aside and thanked him for coming all the way from Paris. Her poor brother—she’d bravely wiped away a tear—had thought the world of him. She’d laid her hand over his. Then, coloring, she’d snatched it away.

  “Ah, yes, my blushing rosebud,” Dain murmured cynically. “That was neatly done.”

  And it had been, for with that touch Susannah had drawn him in. She’d lured him into her world—polite Society—which he’d years earlier learned to shun, because there he had only to glance at a young lady to turn her complexion ashen and send her chaperons into hysterics. The only girls who’d ever danced with him were his friends’ sisters, and that was a disagreeable duty they dispatched as quickly as possible.