Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

  Jessica heard the bitterness and discerned the flush under his olive skin. For a few moments, she fretted that she’d done something to offend or disgust him. But halfway down the incline, he slowed to let her catch up with him. And when she took his hand—the crippled one—and squeezed it, he glanced at her, and said, “I hate crows. Noisy, filthy things.”

  She supposed that was as close to an explanation or apology as he could come. She glanced back at the ancient temple. “I collect it’s because you’re a high-strung thoroughbred. He was merely part of the atmosphere to me. I thought it all very romantic.”

  He gave a short laugh. “You mean ‘gothic,’ I think.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “There was I in the arms of a dark, dangerous hero, amid the ruins of Stonehenge, an ancient place of mystery. Byron himself could not have painted a more romantic scene. I’m sure you believe there isn’t a romantic bone in your body,” she added with a sidelong glance. “If you found one, you’d break it. But you needn’t worry. I shouldn’t dream of declaring otherwise to anyone else.”

  “I’m not romantic,” he said tightly. “And I most certainly am not high-strung. As to thorough-breds—you know very well I’m half-Italian.”

  “The Italian half is blue-blooded, too,” she said. “The Duc d’Abonville told me your mother’s line is very old Florentine nobility. That, apparently, reconciled him to our marriage.”

  He uttered a series of words she couldn’t understand, but guessed were curses in his mother’s tongue.

  “He means to marry Genevieve,” she said mollifyingly. “That’s what made him so overprotective of me. But there are benefits to the attachment. He’s taken Bertie in hand, which means you won’t be bothered with my brother’s financial difficulties in future.”

  Dain brooded silently until they’d reentered the carriage. Then, releasing a sigh, he leaned back and closed his eyes. “Romantic. High-strung. And you think it’s reassuring that your grandmother’s lover means to take your brainless brother in hand. I do believe, Jess, that you are as demented as every other member—and prospective member—of your entire lunatic family.”

  “Are you going to sleep?” she asked.

  “I might, if you could manage to hold your tongue for three minutes.”

  “I’m tired, too,” she said. “Do you mind if I lean on your arm? I can’t sleep sitting bolt upright.”

  “Take off that idiotic bonnet first,” he muttered.

  She took it off and rested her head on his brawny arm. After a moment, he shifted sideways a bit and tucked her head against his chest. That was more comfortable.

  It was also all the reassurance Jessica needed for now. Later, she’d try to figure out what had upset him during their embrace—and why he’d become so very tense when she spoke of his mother’s family. At present she was content to enjoy what felt delightfully like husbandly affection.

  They slept through most of the journey, until they reached the Devon border. Despite the delay in setting out, they reached Exeter by late afternoon. They crossed the River Teign shortly thereafter, then wended down to Bovey Tracey, and across the River Bovey. A few winding miles west, Jessica had her first glimpse of the strange rock formations of Dartmoor.

  “Haytor Rocks,” he said, pointing out his window at an immense stone outcropping at the top of a hill. She climbed onto his lap to get a better view.

  He laughed. “You needn’t worry about missing it. There are plenty more. Hundreds of those things, everywhere you look. Tors and cairns and barrows and bogs. You married me, only to wind up in precisely the ‘remote outpost of civilization’ you wished to avoid. Welcome, Lady Dain, to the howling wilderness of Dartmoor.”

  “I think it’s beautiful,” she said softly.

  Like you, she wanted to add. In the orange glow of the lowering sun, the rugged landscape was dark and harshly beautiful, as he was.

  “I’ll have to win another wager,” she said into the moody silence. “So that you’ll take me to those rocks.”

  “Where you’ll contract a lung fever,” he said. “It’s cold, windy, and wet, and the climate changes from brisk autumn to bitter winter and back again ten times in an hour.”

  “I never take ill,” she said. “I’m not a high-strung thoroughbred—unlike certain individuals who shall remain nameless.”

  “You’d better get off my lap,” he said. “We’ll be at Athcourt very shortly, and the staff will be out in full battle regalia. I shall make a poor enough appearance as it is. You’ve rumpled and wrinkled me past repair. You squirm and fidget even more asleep than awake. I scarcely closed my eyes the entire way to Exeter.”

  “Then you must have been snoring with your eyes open,” she said as she returned to her place beside him.

  “I was not snoring.”

  “On my head,” she said. “And several times, straight into my ear.” She had found the deep, masculine rumble inexpressibly endearing.

  He scowled at her.

  Jessica ignored it, returning her gaze to the passing landscape. “Why is your home called Athcourt?” she asked. “After a great battle, like Blenheim?”

  “The Ballisters originally lived further north,” he said. “One of them took a fancy to the Dart-moor property as well as the daughter and sole surviving issue of Sir Guy de Ath, a powerful fellow in this area. The name, incidentally, was originally Death. It was changed for obvious reasons. My ancestor got the daughter and the estate on condition he keep the quaint name alive. That’s why the males of the family get Guy de Ath stuck on just before ‘Ballister.’”

  She’d read his name on countless marriage-related documents. “Sebastian Leslie Guy de Ath Ballister,” she said, smiling. “And here I thought you had all those names because there’s so much of you.”

  She felt his body stiffen. She looked up. His jaw was tight, too, his mouth set in a hard line.

  She wondered what nerve she’d struck inadvertently.

  She didn’t have time to work out the riddle, because Dain snatched up her forgotten bonnet and shoved it on her head backwards, and she had to right the hat and tie the ribbons. Then she had to try to make a dress she’d traveled in since early morning look presentable, because the carriage was turning in to a gateway, and Dain’s ill-concealed agitation told her the drive beyond led to his home.

  Chapter 12

  Despite the unplanned-for pause at Stonehenge, Dain’s carriage drew up at Athcourt’s front entrance at precisely eight o’clock, as scheduled. By twenty past eight, he and his bride had inspected the domestic army, all turned out in trim ceremonial array, and had been discreetly inspected in turn. With a very few exceptions, none of the present staff had ever clapped eyes on their master before. Nonetheless, they were too well trained and well paid to show any emotion, including curiosity.

  All was ready, exactly as Dain had ordered, and every requirement provided precisely to the minute, according to the schedule he’d sent ahead. Their baths had been readied while they reviewed the staff. Their dinner clothes were pressed and neatly laid out.

  The first course was served the instant lord and lady took their seats at opposite ends of the long table in the cavernous dining room. The cold dishes arrived cold, the warm, warm. Andrews, the valet, stood near His Lordship’s chair throughout the meal and assisted with all tasks requiring two hands.

  Jessica did not appear in the least daunted by a dining room the size of Westminster Abbey, or the dozen liveried footmen waiting at attention near the sideboard while each course was consumed.

  At a quarter to eleven she rose from the table to leave Dain to his port. As coolly as though she’d been mistress there for centuries, she informed the house steward, Rodstock, that she would have tea in the library.

  The table had been cleared before she was through the door, and the decanter appeared before Dain almost in the same instant. His glass was filled with the same silent unobtrusiveness, and his host of attendants vanished in the same ghostly quiet and quick way w
hen he said, “That will be all.”

  It was the first time Dain had had anything like privacy for two days, and the first chance to think properly about the problem of deflowering his bride since he’d realized it was a problem.

  What he thought was that it had been a long day and his paralyzed arm was throbbing and the dining room was too quiet and he didn’t like the color of the drapes and the landscape hanging over the mantle was too small for the location.

  At five minutes to eleven, he pushed away his untouched wineglass, rose, and went to the library.

  Jessica stood at a book stand, where the immense family Bible lay open to a page containing the customary entries of weddings, births, and deaths. When her husband entered, she threw him a reproachful look. “Today is your birthday,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He approached, and his stony expression settled into the usual mocking mask as he glanced down at the place she pointed to. “Fancy that. My estimable sire didn’t black my name out. I’m all amazement.”

  “Am I to believe you’ve never once looked in this book?” she asked. “That you weren’t interested in your forebears—when you knew all about Guy de Ath?”

  “My tutor told me about my ancestors,” he said. “He tried to enliven the history curriculum with regular strolls through the portrait galley. ‘The first Earl of Blackmoor,’ he would solemnly announce as he paused before a portrait of a chevalier with long golden curls. ‘Created during the reign of King Charles II,’ I would be informed. Then my tutor would expound upon the events of that reign and explain how my noble ancestor fit in and what he’d done to win his earldom.”

  His tutor had told him, not his father.

  “I should like to be tutored in the same way,” she said. “Perhaps tomorrow you will take me for a stroll through the portrait gallery. I collect it must be about ten or twelve miles long.”

  “One hundred eighty feet,” he said, his eye returning to the page. “You seem to have an exaggerated view of the size of Athcourt.”

  “I’ll get used to it,” she said. “I managed not to gape and gawk too much when introduced to the cathedral village otherwise known as Her Ladyship’s Apartments.”

  He was still staring at the page where his birth had been recorded. His sardonic expression hadn’t changed, but there was turmoil in his dark eyes. Jessica wondered whether it was the entry directly below that troubled him. It had saddened her, and she had grieved for him.

  “I lost my parents in the year after you lost your mother,” she said. “They were killed in a carriage accident.”

  “Fever,” he said. “She died of fever. He entered that event, too.” Dain sounded surprised.

  “Who entered your father’s death?” she asked. “That isn’t your hand.”

  He shrugged. “His secretary, I suppose. Or the vicar. Or some officious busybody.” He pushed her hand away and slammed the ancient Bible shut. “If you want family history, we’ve volumes of it on the shelves at the far end of this room. It’s recorded in tedious detail, going back to the Roman conquest, I daresay.”

  She opened the Bible again. “You are the head of the family and you must put me in it now,” she said gently. “You’ve acquired a wife, and you must write it down.”

  “Must I, indeed, this very minute?” He lifted an eyebrow. “And suppose I decide not to keep you after all? Then I should have to go back and blot out your name.”

  She left the bookstand, crossed to a study table, took up a pen and inkwell, and returned to him. “I should like to see you try to get rid of me,” she said.

  “I could get an annulment,” he said. “On grounds that I was of unsound mind when the marriage was contracted. Lord Portsmouth’s marriage was annulled on those grounds, only the day before yesterday.”

  He took the pen from her all the same, and made a grand ceremony of recording their marriage in his bold script, with a few flourishes to heighten the effect.

  “Ah, handsomely done,” she said, leaning over his arm to look at the entry. “Thank you, Dain. Now I shall be part of the Ballisters’ history.” She was aware that her breasts were resting on his arm.

  So was he. He jerked away as though they’d been a pair of hot coals.

  “Yes, you have been immortalized in the Bible,” he said. “I expect you’ll be demanding a portrait next, and I shall have to move a famous ancestor into storage to make room for you.”

  Jessica had hoped that a bath, dinner, and a glass or two of port would calm him down, but he was as skittish now as he’d been when they’d entered Athcourt’s gates.

  “Is Athcourt haunted?” she asked, strolling with studied casualness to a tall set of bookshelves. “Should I be prepared for clanking chains or hideous wails at midnight or quaintly attired ladies and gentlemen wandering the corridors?”

  “Gad, no. Who put such an idea into your head?”

  “You.” She stood on tiptoe to examine a shelf of poetic works. “I cannot tell whether you’re bracing yourself to tell me something ghastly, or you’re in expectation of something ghastly. I thought the something might be Ballister ghosts popping out of the woodwork.”

  “I’m not bracing myself for anything.” He stalked to the fireplace. “I am not braced. I am perfectly at ease. As I should be, in my own damned house.”

  Where he’d learned his family’s history from a tutor, instead of his father, she thought. Where his mother had died when he was ten years old…a loss that still seemed to hurt him deeply. Where there was an immense, ancient family Bible he’d never looked into.

  She wondered if he’d known his dead half-siblings’ names, or whether he’d read them this day, as she had, for the first time.

  She took out a handsome, very expensively bound volume of Don Juan.

  “This must have been your purchase,” she said. “The last cantos of Don Juan were published scarcely four years ago. I didn’t know you had a taste for Byron’s work.”

  He had wandered to the fireplace. “I don’t. I met him during a trip to Italy. I bought the thing because its author was a wicked fellow and its contents were reputedly indecent.”

  “Which is to say, you haven’t read it.” She opened the book and selected a stanza from the first canto. “‘Wedded she was, some years, and to a man / of fifty, and such husbands are in plenty; / And yet, I think, instead of such a ONE / ’T were better to have TWO of five and twenty.’”

  Dain’s hard mouth quirked up. Jessica flipped through the pages. “‘A little she strove, and much repented, / And whispering “I will ne’er consent”—consented.’”

  A stifled chuckle. But she had him, Jessica knew. She settled down onto the sofa and skipped ahead to the second canto, where she’d left off reading the night before.

  The sixteen-year-old Don Juan, she explained, was being sent away because of his affair with the beautiful Donna Julia, wife of the fifty-year-old gentleman.

  Then Jessica began to read aloud.

  At Stanza III, Dain left the fireplace.

  By the eighth stanza, he was sitting beside her. By the fourteenth, he had arranged himself into an indolent sprawl, with a sofa pillow under his head and a padded footstool under his feet. In the process, his crippled left hand had in some mysterious manner managed to land on her right knee. Jessica pretended not to notice, but read on—about Don Juan’s grief as his ship sailed from his native land, and of his resolve to reform, and of his undying love for Julia, and how he would never forget her or think of anything but her.

  “‘“A mind diseased no remedy can physic—” / Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.”’”

  Dain snickered.

  “‘“Sooner shall Heaven kiss earth—”(here he fell sicker) / “Oh Julia! What is every other woe?—(For God’s sake let me have a glass of liquor; Pedro, Battista, help me down below.)”’”

  If she’d been reading alone, Jessica would have giggled, as she’d done last night. But for Dain’s benefit, she spouted Don Juan’s loves
ick declarations with a melodramatic anguish that grew increasingly distracted as the hero’s mal de mer got the better of undying love.

  She pretended not to notice the large body shaking with silent laughter, so close to hers, or the occasional half-smothered chuckle that sent a tickling breeze over her scalp.

  “‘“Beloved Julia, hear me still beseeching!” / (Here he grew inarticulate with retching.)’”

  The breeze tickled the top of her ear, and she did not have to look up to be aware of her husband leaning nearer, looking over her shoulder at the page. She read on into the next stanza, conscious of his warm breath on her ear and of the vibrations his low, rumbling chuckle set off inside her.

  “‘No doubt he would have been more pathetic,—’”

  “‘But the sea acted as a strong emetic,’” he gravely finished the stanza. Then she let herself look up, but his gaze slipped away in the same instant and the expression on his harshly handsome face was inscrutable.

  “I can’t believe you bought it and never read it,” she said. “You had no idea what you were missing, did you?”

  “I’m sure it was more amusing hearing it read in a ladylike voice,” he said. “Certainly it’s less work.”

  “Then I’ll read to you regularly,” she said. “I shall make a romantic of you yet.”

  He drew back, and his inert hand slid to the sofa. “You call that romantic? Byron’s a complete cynic.”

  “In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”

  “Adjustments?” he echoed, stiffening. “Adjust me?”

  “Certainly.” She patted the hand lying beside her. “Marriage requires adjustments, on both sides.”

  “Not this marriage, madam. I paid—and through the nose—for blind obedience, and that is precisely—”