Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

  She couldn’t keep herself from answering the fierce tenderness of his kiss, any more than she could keep her hands from straying over wool and linen, warm with his body’s warmth, until she found the place where his heart beat, fast and hard, like her own.

  He shuddered at her touch, and pushed between her thighs, pulling her closer while he dragged scorching kisses over her mouth and down, to her neck. She was aware of hot masculinity throbbing against her belly and of the pulsing heat that contact generated in the intimate place between her legs. She heard the rational voice in her head telling her matters were escalating too swiftly, and urging her to draw back, to retreat while she still could, but she couldn’t.

  She was wax in his hands, melting under the kisses simmering over the swell of her breast.

  She’d thought she understood what desire was: attraction, a potent magnetic current between male and female, drawing them together. She’d thought she understood lust: a hunger, a craving. She’d been feverish at night, dreaming of him, and restless and edgy by day, thinking of him. She’d called it animal attraction, primitive, mad.

  She found she’d understood nothing.

  Desire was a hot, black whirlpool, tearing her this way and that, and all the while, inevitably, and with perilous swiftness, dragging her down, beneath intellect, beneath will and shame.

  She felt the impatient tug at the ties of her bodice, felt the fastenings give way, and it only made her impatient, too, to yield, to give whatever he needed. She felt his fingers trembling as they slid over the skin he’d bared, and she trembled as well, aching under his shatteringly gentle touch.

  “Baciami.” His voice was rough, his touch a silken caress. “Kiss me, Jess. Again. As though you mean it.”

  She lifted her hands and slid her fingers into his thick, curling hair and brought his mouth to hers. She kissed him with all the shameless meaning she had in her. She answered the bold thrust of his tongue as eagerly as her body answered the gentler ravishment of his caress, lifting and arching into him to press her aching breast against his big, warm hand.

  This was what she’d needed, hungered for, from the moment she’d met him. He was a monster, but she’d missed him all the same. She’d missed every terrible thing about him…and every wonderful thing: the warm, massive, muscular body vibrating power, insolence, and animal grace…the bold, black eyes, stone-cold one moment and blazing hellfire the next…the low rumble of his voice, mocking, laughing, icy with contempt or throbbing with yearning.

  She had wanted him from the start, without understanding what desire was. Now he’d taught her what it was and made her want more.

  She broke away and, pulling his head down, kissed his beautiful, arrogant nose and his haughty brow and trailed her mouth over his hard jaw.

  “Oh, Jess.” His voice was a moan. “Sì. Ancora. Baciami. Abbracciami.”

  She heard nothing else, only the need in his voice. She felt nothing else, only the heat of desire pressed to her own heat. She was aware only of the taut power of his frame, and the warm hands moving over her while his mouth claimed hers again, and of the rustle of silk and cambric as he pushed up her skirts and slid his hand over her knee, and of the warmth of that hand grazing the skin above her stocking.

  Then his hand tightened and froze and his warm body turned to stone.

  His mouth jerked from hers, and startled, Jessica opened her eyes…in time to see the fire die in his, leaving them as cold as the onyx of his stickpin.

  Then, too late, she heard as well: the swish of a gown brushing against shrubbery…and muffled whispers.

  “It seems we have an audience, Miss Trent,” Dain said. His voice dripped scorn. Coolly he pulled her bodice back up, and yanked her skirts back down. There was nothing protective or gallant in the gesture. He made her feel as though, having had a look at and a sampling of what she had to offer, he’d decided it wasn’t worth having. She might have been a trumpery toy displayed upon Champtois’ counter, not worth a second glance.

  And that, Jessica understood as she took in the chilling expression on his countenance, was what he wanted those watching to think. He was going to throw her to the wolves. That was his revenge.

  “You know we’re equally to blame,” she said, keeping her voice low so that the onlookers couldn’t hear. “You helped get me into this, Dain. You can bloody well help get me out of it.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said in carrying tones. “I am to announce our betrothal, am I not? But why, Miss Trent, should I pay the price of a wedding ring for what I might have, gratis?”

  She heard gasps behind him, and a giggle. “I shall be ruined,” she said tightly. “This is unworthy of you—and unforgivable.”

  He laughed. “Then shoot me.” And with one mocking glance at the figures standing in the shadows, he walked away.

  His mind roiling with humiliation and rage, Dain made his way blindly through the garden, wrenched the locked gate from its hinges, and marched through the narrow alleyway and on down the street, and down the next and the next.

  It wasn’t until he neared the Palais Royal that his breathing began to return to normal and black fury gave way to stormy thought.

  She was like all the others—like Susannah, but worse, a better actress, and more crafty in setting the self-same trap. And he, with years of experience behind him, had walked straight into it. Again. To be snared in worse circumstances.

  With Susannah, he’d simply stolen a peck on the cheek in view of her greedy family. This time, several of Paris’ most elite sophisticates had watched him make a cake of himself, heard him groaning and panting and babbling desire and devotion like a feverish schoolboy.

  Even as a schoolboy, at thirteen, he had not behaved like a moonstruck puppy. Even then, he had not nearly wept with longing.

  Oh, Jess.

  His throat tightened. He paused and ruthlessly swallowed the burning ache, composed himself, and walked on.

  At the Palais Royal, he collected a trio of plump tarts and an assortment of male comrades, and plunged into dissipation. Harlots and gambling hells and champagne: his world. Where he belonged, he told himself. Where he was happy, he assured himself.

  And so he gambled and drank and told bawdy jokes and, swallowing his revulsion at the familiar smell of perfume, powder, and paint, filled his lap with whores, and buried his grieving heart, as he always did, under laughter.

  Even before Dain’s laughter had faded and he’d disappeared into the garden’s shadows, Jessica was dragging herself from the black pit of humiliated despair into which he’d dropped her. There was no choice but to lift her chin and face the next moment and all the moments to come. She faced the onlookers, daring them to utter an insult. One by one, they turned their backs and silently retreated.

  Only one came forward. Vawtry was shrugging out of his coat as, clutching her bodice to cover herself, Jessica leapt down from the sarcophagus. He hastened toward her with the coat.

  “I tried,” he said unhappily, his eyes tactfully averted while she wrapped his coat about her. “I told them Dain had left alone and you had gone to look for your grandmother, but one of the servants had seen you enter the sun parlor…” He paused. “I’m sorry.”

  “I should like to make a discreet exit,” she said, keeping her voice expressionless. “Would you be kind enough to find Lady Pembury?”

  “I hate to leave you alone,” he said.

  “I don’t faint,” she said. “I don’t indulge in hysterics. I’ll be quite all right.”

  He gave her a worried glance, then hurried away.

  As soon as he was gone, Jessica pulled off his coat and restored her gown to rights as best she could without her maid. She couldn’t reach all the fastenings, most of which were in back, but she found enough to secure the bodice, so that she didn’t have to hold it up. While she struggled with the ties and hooks, she reviewed her situation with brutal objectivity.

  She knew it hardly mattered that Dain hadn’t ravished her. What mattered was that
it had been Dain with whom she’d been caught. That was enough to make her damaged goods in the eyes of all the world.

  Within less than twenty-four hours, the story would reach every corner of Paris. Within a week, it would reach London. She could see well enough what the future held.

  No self-respecting gentleman would sully his family name by marrying Dain’s leavings. After this, she wouldn’t have a prayer of attracting to her shop the hosts of rich, respectable people her success—and her own respectability—depended upon. Ladies would hold their skirts to keep from brushing against her when they passed, or cross the street to avoid contamination. Gentlemen would cease being gentlemen and subject her to the same indignities they offered the lowliest streetwalker.

  With a handful of words, in short, Dain had destroyed her life. On purpose.

  All he’d needed to do was sweep one of his deadly glances over them and tell them they’d seen nothing, and they would have decided it was healthiest to agree with him. All the world feared him, even his so-called friends. He could make them do and say and believe what he wanted.

  But all he’d wanted was revenge—for whatever it was his twisted mind believed Jessica had done to him. He’d taken her to this garden with no other purpose. She wouldn’t have put it past him to have dropped a hint beforehand to somebody, to make sure the discovery would take place at the most humiliating moment: her bodice undone and sagging to her waist, his tongue down her throat, his filthy hand up her skirt.

  Though her face heated at the recollection, she refused to feel ashamed of what she’d done. Her behavior might be accounted indecent by Society’s rules, and misguided according to her own, but it wasn’t evil. She was a healthy young woman who had simply yielded to feelings countless other women yielded to—and might do with impunity if they were married or widowed and discreet about it.

  Even though she wasn’t married or widowed, and by normal rules should have been considered out of bounds, she couldn’t, in all fairness, blame him for taking advantage of what was offered so willingly.

  But she could and would blame him for refusing to shield her. He had nothing to lose, and he’d known very well that she had everything to lose. He could have helped her. It would have cost him nothing, scarcely an effort. Instead, he’d insulted and abandoned her.

  That was the evil. That was the base, unforgivable act.

  And that, she resolved, was what he’d pay for.

  At half past four in the morning, Dain was holding court in Antoine’s, a restaurant in the Palais Royal. His circle of companions had by this time widened to include a handful of Lady Wallingdon’s guests: Sellowby, Goodridge, Vawtry, and Esmond. The subject of Jessica Trent was scrupulously avoided. Instead, the fight in the cardroom, which Dain had missed—between a drunken Prussian officer and a French republican—and the ensuing mayhem were discussed in detail and at argumentative length.

  Even the tarts felt obliged to express their opinions, the one on Dain’s right knee taking the republican side, while the one on the left was squarely with the Prussian. Both argued with a level of ignorance, both political and grammatical, that would have made Bertie Trent seem an intellectual prodigy.

  Dain wished he hadn’t thought of Trent. The instant the brother’s image flickered in Dain’s mind, the sister’s arose: Jessica gazing up into his eyes from under an overdecorated bonnet…watching his face while he unbuttoned her glove…hitting him with her bonnet and her small gloved fist…kissing him while lightning flashed and thunder crashed…whirling round a dance floor with him, her skirts rustling about his legs, her face glowing with excitement. And later, in his arms…a fire-storm of images, feelings, and one sweet, anguished moment…when she had kissed his big, loathsome nose…and cut his heart to pieces and put it back together again and made him believe he was not a monster to her. She had made him believe he was beautiful.

  Lies, he told himself.

  They were all lies and tricks, to trap him. He’d ruined her brother. She had nothing left. Thus, like Susannah, whose brother had gambled away the family fortune, Jessica Trent was desperate enough to set the oldest trap in history to catch herself a rich, titled husband.

  But now Dain found himself considering the circle of men about him. All were better prospects altogether.

  His gaze lingered upon Esmond, who sat beside him, and was the most beautiful man on three continents, and also very possibly—though no one knew for sure—even wealthier than the Marquess of Dain.

  Why not Esmond? Dain asked himself. If she needed a rich spouse, why should a quick-witted female like Jessica Trent choose Beelzebub over the Angel Gabriel, hell rather than heaven?

  Esmond’s blue gaze met his. “Amore è cieco,” he murmured in perfect Florentine accents.

  Love is blind.

  Dain recollected Esmond telling him a few weeks ago about “bad feelings” regarding Vingt-Huit, and recalled the events that had taken place almost immediately thereafter. Gazing at him now, Dain had an uncomfortable feeling of his own: that the angelic count was reading his mind, just as he’d read clues, invisible to everyone else, about the now defunct palace of sin.

  Dain was opening his mouth to deliver a crushing setdown when Esmond stiffened, and his head turned slightly, his gaze fixing elsewhere while his smile faded.

  Dain looked that way, too—toward the door—but at first he could see nothing, because Sellowby had leaned over to refill his glass.

  Then Sellowby lounged back again in his chair.

  Then Dain saw her.

  She wore a dark red gown, buttoned up to the throat, and a black shawl draped like a mantilla over her head and shoulders. Her face was white and hard. She strode toward the large table, chin high, silver eyes flashing, and paused a few feet away.

  His heart crashed and thundered into a hectic gallop that made it impossible to breathe, let alone speak.

  Her glance flicked over his companions.

  “Go away,” she said in a low, hard voice.

  The whores leapt from his lap, knocking over glasses in their haste. His friends bolted up from their places and backed away. A chair toppled and crashed to the floor unheeded.

  Only Esmond kept his head. “Mademoiselle,” he began, his tones gentle, mollifying.

  She flung back the shawl and lifted her right hand. There was a pistol in it, the barrel aimed straight at Dain’s heart. “Go away,” she told Esmond.

  Dain heard the click as she cocked the weapon and the scrape of a chair as Esmond rose. “Mademoiselle,” he tried again.

  “Say your prayers, Dain,” she said.

  His gaze lifted from the pistol to her glittering, furious eyes. “Jess,” he whispered.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 8

  The shot threw Dain back against his chair, which crashed to the floor with him.

  Jessica brought the pistol down, let out the breath she’d been holding, then turned and walked away.

  It took the onlookers a few moments to make their brains comprehend what their eyes and ears told them. In those moments, she made her way unhindered across the restaurant, out the door, and down the stairs.

  A short time later, she found the hackney she’d ordered to wait for her, and told the driver to take her to the nearest police station.

  There, she asked for the officer in charge. She turned over the pistol and told what she had done. The officer did not believe her. He sent two gendarmes to Antoine’s, and gave her a glass of wine. The men returned an hour later, with copious notes they’d taken at the scene of the crime, and the Comte d’Esmond.

  Esmond had come to release her, he said. It was all a misunderstanding, and accident. The Marquess of Dain’s wound was not mortal. A scratch, that was all. He would not bring charges against Mademoiselle Trent.

  Naturally not, Jessica thought. He would lose a court battle against her. This was Paris, after all.

  “Then I shall bring charges against myself,” she said, chin high. “And you may tell
your friend—”

  “Mademoiselle, I shall be honored to convey any message you wish,” Esmond said smoothly. “But you will communicate more comfortably in my carriage, I think.”

  “Certainly not,” she said. “I insist upon being jailed, for my own protection, so that he can’t kill me to keep me quiet. Because, monsieur, that is the only way anyone is going to keep me quiet.”

  She turned to the officer in charge. “I shall be happy to write a full and detailed confession for you. I have nothing to hide. I shall be delighted to speak with the reporters who will no doubt be mobbing the place in the next half hour.”

  “Mademoiselle, I am sure the matter can be settled to your satisfaction,” said Esmond. “But I recommend you let your temper cool before you speak to anyone.”

  “Very wise,” said the officer in charge. “You are agitated. It is understandable. An affair of the heart.”

  “Quite,” she said, meeting Esmond’s enigmatic blue gaze. “A crime of passion.”

  “Yes, mademoiselle, as everyone will deduce,” said Esmond. “If the police do not release you immediately, there will be more than reporters storming the place. All of Paris will rise up to rescue you, and the city will be plunged into riot. You do not wish innocent people to be killed on your account, I am sure.”

  There was a clamor outside—the first contingent of reporters, she guessed. She drew out the moment, letting tension build in the room.

  Then she shrugged. “Very well. I shall go home. For the sake of the endangered innocents.”

  By midmorning, the Comte d’Esmond was with Dain, who lay upon a sofa in the library.

  The wound was nothing, Dain was sure. He’d scarcely felt it. The bullet had gone clean through. Though his arm had bled a great deal, Dain was used to the sight of blood, including his own, and should not have swooned.

  But he had, several times, and each time he’d come to, he’d felt hotter. A physician had come and examined the wound and treated it and bandaged it and told Dain he was very lucky.