Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

  “Indeed not. He sounds a clever fellow. What else does he have to say, dear?”

  There was a long pause while Bertie tried to decide whether or not she was being sarcastic. As usual, he decided wrong.

  “Well, he is clever, Jess. I should have realized you’d recognize it. The things he says—why, that brain of his is always working, a mile a minute. Don’t know what he fuels it with. Don’t eat a lot of fish, you know, so it can’t be that.”

  “I collect he fuels it with gin,” Jessica muttered.

  “Say again?”

  “I said, ‘I reckon his brain’s like a steam engine.’”

  “Must be,” said Bertie. “And not just for talking, either. He’s got the money sort of brains, too. Plays the ’Change like it was a fiddle, the fellows say. Only the music Dain makes come out is the ‘chink, chink, chink’ of sovereigns. And that’s a lot of chinks, Jess.”

  She had no doubt of that. By all accounts, the Marquess of Dain was one of England’s wealthiest men. He could well afford reckless extravagance. And poor Bertie, who couldn’t afford even modest extravagance, was bent on imitating his idol.

  For idolatry it surely was, as Withers had claimed in his barely coherent letter. That Bertie had exerted his limited faculties so far as to actually memorize what Dain said was incontrovertible proof that Withers hadn’t exaggerated.

  Lord Dain had become the lord of Bertie’s universe…and he was leading him straight to Hell.

  Lord Dain did not look up when the shop bell tinkled. He did not care who the new customer might be, and Champtois, purveyor of antiques and artistic curiosities, could not possibly care, because the most important customer in Paris had already entered his shop. Being the most important, Dain expected and received the shopkeeper’s exclusive attention. Champtois not only did not glance toward the door, but gave no sign of seeing, hearing, or thinking anything unrelated to the Marquess of Dain.

  Indifference, unfortunately, is not the same as deafness. The bell had no sooner ceased tinkling than Dain heard a familiar male voice muttering in English accents, and an unfamiliar, feminine one murmuring in response. He could not make out the words. For once, Bertie Trent managed to keep his voice below the alleged “whisper” that could be heard across a football field.

  Still, it was Bertie Trent, the greatest nitwit in the Northern Hemisphere, which meant that Lord Dain must postpone his own transaction. He had no intention of conducting a bargaining session while Trent was by, saying, doing, and looking everything calculated to drive the price up while under the delirious delusion he was shrewdly helping to drive it down.

  “I say,” came the rugby-field voice. “Isn’t that—Well, by Jupiter, it is.”

  Thud. Thud. Thud. Heavy approaching footsteps.

  Lord Dain suppressed a sigh, turned, and directed a hard stare at his accoster.

  Trent stopped short. “That is to say, don’t mean to interrupt, I’m sure, especially when a chap’s dickering with Champtois,” he said, jerking his head in the proprietor’s direction. “Like I was telling Jess a moment ago, a cove’s got to keep his wits about him and mind he don’t offer more than half what he’s willing to pay. Not to mention keeping track of what’s ‘half’ and what’s ‘twice’ when it’s all in confounded francs and sous and what you call ’em other gibberishy coins and multiplying and dividing again to tally it up in proper pounds, shillings, and pence—which I don’t know why they don’t do it proper in the first place except maybe to aggravate a fellow.”

  “I believe I’ve remarked before, Trent, that you might experience less aggravation if you did not upset the balance of your delicate constitution by attempting to count,” said Dain.

  He heard a rustle of movement and a muffled sound somewhere ahead and to his left. His gaze shifted thither. The female whose murmurs he’d heard was bent over a display case of jewelry. The shop was exceedingly ill lit—on purpose, to increase customers’ difficulty in properly evaluating what they were looking at. All Dain could ascertain was that the female wore a blue overgarment of some sort and one of the hideously overdecorated bonnets currently in fashion.

  “I particularly recommend,” he went on, his eyes upon the female, “that you resist the temptation to count if you are contemplating a gift for your chère amie. Women deal in a higher mathematical realm than men, especially when it comes to gifts.”

  “That, Bertie, is a consequence of the feminine brain having reached a more advanced state of development,” said the female without looking up. “She recognizes that the selection of a gift requires the balancing of a profoundly complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic, and sentimental equation. I should not recommend that a mere male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of balancing it, especially by the primitive method of counting.”

  For one unsettling moment, it seemed to Lord Dain that someone had just shoved his head into a privy. His heart began to pound, and his skin broke out in clammy gooseflesh, much as it had on one unforgettable day at Eton five and twenty years ago.

  He told himself that his breakfast had not agreed with him. The butter must have been rancid.

  It was utterly unthinkable that the contemptuous feminine retort had overset him. He could not possibly be disconcerted by the discovery that this sharp-tongued female was not, as he’d assumed, a trollop Bertie had attached himself to the previous night.

  Her accents proclaimed her a lady. Worse—if there could be a worse species of humanity—she was, by the sounds of it, a bluestocking. Lord Dain had never before in his life met a female who’d even heard of an equation, let alone was aware that one balanced them.

  Bertie approached, and in his playing-field confidential whisper asked, “Any idea what she said, Dain?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “Men are ignorant brutes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Quite.”

  Bertie let out a sigh and turned to the female, who still appeared fascinated with the contents of the display case. “You promised you wouldn’t insult my friends, Jess.”

  “I don’t see how I could, when I haven’t met any.”

  She seemed to be fixed on something. The beribboned and beflowered bonnet tilted this way and that as she studied the object of her interest from various angles.

  “Well, do you want to meet one?” Trent asked impatiently. “Or do you mean to stand there gaping at that rubbish all day?”

  She straightened, but did not turn around.

  Bertie cleared his throat. “Jessica,” he said determinedly, “Dain. Dain—Drat you, Jess, can’t you take your eyes off that trash for one minute?”

  She turned.

  “Dain—m’sister.”

  She looked up.

  And a swift, fierce heat swept Lord Dain from the crown of his head to the toes in his champagne-buffed boots. The heat was immediately succeeded by a cold sweat.

  “My lord,” she said with a curt nod.

  “Miss Trent,” he said. Then he could not for the life of him produce another syllable.

  Under the monstrous bonnet was a perfect oval of a porcelain white, flawless countenance. Thick, sooty lashes framed silver-grey eyes with an upward slant that neatly harmonized with the slant of her high cheekbones. Her nose was straight and delicately slender, her mouth soft and pink and just a fraction overfull.

  She was not classic English perfection, but she was some sort of perfection and, being neither blind nor ignorant, Lord Dain generally recognized quality when he saw it.

  If she had been a piece of Sevres china or an oil painting or a tapestry, he would have bought her on the spot and not quibbled about the price.

  For one deranged instant, while he contemplated licking her from the top of her alabaster brow to the tips of her dainty toes, he wondered what her price was.

  But out of the corner of his eye, he glimpsed his reflection in the glass.

  His dark face was harsh and hard, the face of Beelzebub
himself. In Dain’s case, the book could be judged accurately by the cover, for he was dark and hard inside as well. His was a Dartmoor soul, where the wind blew fierce and the rain beat down upon grim, grey rocks, and where the pretty green patches of ground turned out to be mires that could suck down an ox.

  Anyone with half a brain could see the signs posted: “ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE” or, more to the point, “DANGER. QUICKSAND”

  Equally to the point, the creature before him was a lady, and no signs had to be posted about her to warn him off. Ladies, in his dictionary, were listed under Plague, Pestilence, and Famine.

  With the return of reason, Dain discovered that he must have been staring coldly at her for rather a while, because Bertie—bored, evidently—had turned away to study a set of wooden soldiers.

  Dain promptly collected his wits. “Was it not your turn to speak, Miss Trent?” he asked in mocking tones. “Were you not about to make a comment on the weather? I believe that’s considered the proper—that is, safe—way to commence a conversation.”

  “Your eyes,” she said, her gaze perfectly steady, “are very black. Intellect tells me they must be merely a very dark brown. Yet the illusion is…overpowering.”

  There was a quick, stabbing sensation in the environs of his diaphragm, or his belly, he couldn’t tell.

  His composure faltered not a whit. He had learned composure in hard school.

  “The conversation has progressed with astonishing rapidity to the personal,” he drawled. “You are fascinated by my eyes.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said. “They are extraordinary. So very black. But I do not wish to make you uncomfortable.”

  With a very faint smile, she turned back to the jewelry case.

  Dain wasn’t certain what exactly was wrong with her, but he had no doubt something was. He was Lord Beelzebub, wasn’t he? She was supposed to faint, or recoil in horrified revulsion at the very least. Yet she had gazed at him as bold as brass, and it had seemed for a moment as though the creature were actually flirting with him.

  He decided to leave. He could just as well wrestle with this incongruity out of doors. He was heading for the door when Bertie turned and hurried after him.

  “You got off easy,” Trent whispered, loud enough to be heard at Notre Dame. “I was sure she’d rip into you—and she will rip if she’s a mind to, and don’t care who it is, either. Not but what you could handle her, but she does give a fellow a headache, and if you was thinking of going for a drink—”

  “Champtois has just come into possession of an automaton you will find intriguing,” Dain told him. “Why don’t you ask him to wind it up so that you can watch it perform?”

  Bertie’s square face lit with delight. “One of them what-you-call-’ems? Truly? What does it do?”

  “Why don’t you go look?” Dain suggested.

  Bertie trotted off to the shopkeeper and promptly commenced babbling in accents any right-thinking Parisian would have considered grounds for homicide.

  Having distracted Bertie from his apparent intention of following him, Lord Dain had only to take another few steps to be out the door. But his gaze drifted to Miss Trent, who was again entranced with something in the jewel case, and eaten by curiosity, he hesitated.

  Chapter 2

  Above the whirring and clicking of the automaton, Jessica heard the marquess’s hesitation as clearly as if it had been a trumpet’s blare at the start of battle. Then he marched. Bold, arrogant strides. He’d made up his mind and he was coming in with heavy artillery.

  Dain was heavy artillery, she thought. Nothing Bertie or anyone else could have told her could have prepared her. Coal black hair and bold, black eyes and a great, conquering Caesar of a nose and a sullen sensuality of a mouth—the face alone entitled him to direct lineage with Lucifer, as Withers had claimed.

  As to the body…

  Bertie had told her Dain was a very large man. She had half expected a hulking gorilla. She had not been prepared for a stallion: big and splendidly proportioned—and powerfully muscled, if what his snug trousers outlined was any indication. She should not have been looking there, even if it was only an instant’s glance, but a physique like that demanded one’s attention and drew it…everywhere. After that unladylike instant, it had taken every iota of her stubborn willpower to keep her gaze upon his face. Even then, she’d only managed the feat because she was afraid that otherwise she’d lose what little remained of her reason, and do something horribly shocking.

  “Very well, Miss Trent,” came his deep voice, from somewhere about a mile above her right shoulder. “You have piqued my curiosity. What the devil have you found there that’s so mesmerizing?”

  His head might be a mile above her, but the rest of his hard physique was improperly close. She could smell the cigar he had smoked a short time ago. And a subtle—and outrageously expensive—masculine cologne. Her body commenced a repeat of the slow simmer she had first experienced moments earlier and had not yet fully recovered from.

  She would have to have a long talk with Genevieve, she told herself. These sensations could not possibly be what Jessica suspected they were.

  “The watch,” she said composedly. “The one with the picture of the woman in the pink gown.”

  He leaned closer to peer into the case. “She’s standing under a tree? Is that the one?”

  He set his expensively gloved left hand upon the case, and all the saliva evaporated from her mouth. It was a very large, powerful hand. She was rivetingly aware that one hand could lift her straight off the floor.

  “Yes,” she said, resisting the urge to lick her dry lips.

  “You’ll want to examine it more closely, I’m sure,” he said.

  He reached up, removed a key from a nail on the rafter, moved to the back of the case, unlocked it, and took out the watch.

  Champtois could not have failed to notice this audacity. He uttered not a syllable. Jessica glanced back. He seemed to be deep in conversation with Bertie. “Seemed” was the significant word. What one generally meant by conversation was, with Bertie, barely within the realms of probability. Deep conversation—and in French—was out of the question.

  “Perhaps I had better demonstrate how the thing operates,” said Dain, yanking her attention back to him.

  In his low voice, Jessica recognized the too innocent tones that inevitably preceded a male’s typically idiotic idea of a joke. She could have explained that, not having been born yesterday, she knew very well how the timepiece operated. But the glint in his black eyes told her he was mightily amused, and she didn’t want to spoil his fun. Yet.

  “How kind,” she murmured.

  “When you turn this knob,” he said, demonstrating, “as you see, her skirts divide and there, between her legs, is a—” He pretended to look more closely. “Good heavens, how shocking. I do believe that’s a fellow kneeling there.” He held the watch closer to her face.

  “I’m not shortsighted, my lord,” she said, taking the watch from him. “You are quite right. It is a fellow—her lover apparently, for he seems to be performing a lover’s service for her.”

  She opened her reticule, took out a small magnifying glass, and subjected the watch to very narrow study, all the while aware that she was undergoing a similar scrutiny.

  “A bit of the enamel has worn off the gentleman’s wig and there is a minute scratch on the left side of the lady’s skirt,” she said. “Apart from that, I would say the watch is in excellent condition, considering its age, though I strongly doubt it will keep precise time. It is not a Breguet, after all.”

  She put away the magnifying glass and looked up to meet his heavy-lidded gaze. “What do you think Champtois will ask for it?”

  “You want to buy it, Miss Trent?” he asked. “I strongly doubt your elders will approve of such a purchase. Or have English notions of propriety undergone a revolution while I’ve been away?”

  “Oh, it isn’t for me,” she said. “It’s for my grandmot
her.”

  She had to give him credit. He never turned a hair.

  “Ah, well, then,” he said. “That’s different.”

  “For her birthday,” Jessica explained. “Now, if you’ll pardon me, I had better extract Bertie from his negotiations. The tone of his voice tells me he’s trying to count and, as you so perceptively remarked, that isn’t good for him.”

  He could pick her up with one hand, Dain thought as he watched her saunter across the shop. Her head scarcely reached his breastbone, and even with the overloaded bonnet, she couldn’t weigh eight stone.

  He was used to towering over women—over mostly everybody—and he had learned to feel comfortable in his oversize body. Sports—boxing and fencing, especially—had taught him to be light on his feet.

  Next to her, he had felt like a great lummox. A great, ugly, stupid lummox. She had known perfectly well what sort of watch the curst thing was all along. The question was, What sort of curst thing was she? The chit had stared straight into his blackguard’s face and not batted an eye. He had stood much too close to her and she had not budged.

  Then she had taken out a magnifying glass, of all things, and evaluated the lewd timepiece as calmly as though it were a rare edition of Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

  He wished now he had paid more attention to Trent’s references to his sister. The trouble was, if a man paid attention to anything Bertie Trent said, that man was certain to go howling mad.

  Lord Dain had scarcely completed the thought when Bertie shouted, “No! Absolutely not! You just encourage her, Jess. I won’t have it! You ain’t to sell it to her, Champtois.”

  “Yes, you will, Champtois,” Miss Trent said in very competent French. “There is no need to regard my little brother. He has no authority over me whatsoever.” She obligingly translated for her brother, whose face turned a vivid red.

  “I ain’t little! And I’m head of the curst family. And I—”

  “Go play with the drummer boy, Bertie,” she said. “Or better yet, why don’t you take your charming friend out for a drink?”