On the way to Calais, Dain had ridden with Bertie outside the coach. At the inns, Dain had retired to the taproom with Bertie while Jessica dined with her grandmother. During the Channel crossing, His Lordship had kept to the opposite end of the French steamer. En route to London, he had again ridden outside the luxurious carriage he’d hired. Once in London, he had deposited her, Bertie, and Genevieve at the door of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Louisa’s house. Jessica had not seen her betrothed since.
Now, a full fortnight after leaving Paris—fourteen days during which her affianced husband seemed determined to ignore her out of existence—he arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon and expected her to drop whatever she was doing to attend to him.
“He wants me to go for a drive?” Jessica said indignantly when her flustered aunt returned to the sitting room to relay Dain’s message. “Just like that? He has suddenly recollected my existence and expects me to come running at the snap of his fingers? Why didn’t you tell him to go to the devil?”
Aunt Louisa sank into a chair, pressing her fingers to her forehead. In the few minutes she’d spent with him, Dain had evidently managed to undermine even her autocratic composure.
“Jessica, pray look out the window,” she said.
Jessica set down her pen upon the writing desk where she’d been battling with the wedding breakfast menu, rose, and went to the window. Upon the street below she saw a handsome black curricle. It was attached to two very large, very temperamental black geldings, which Bertie was struggling mightily to hold. They were snorting and dancing restlessly about. Jessica had no doubt that in a very few minutes they’d be dancing on her brother’s head.
“His Almighty Lordship says he will not leave the house without you.” Aunt Louisa’s voice throbbed with outrage. “I advise you to hurry, before those murderous beasts of his kill your brother.”
In three minutes, a seething Jessica had a bonnet upon her head and her green pelisse snugly fastened over her day frock.
In another two, she was being helped onto the carriage seat. Or shoved was more like it, for Dain promptly flung his huge body onto the seat, and she had to wedge herself into a corner to avoid his brawny shoulder. Even so, in the narrow space it was impossible to escape physical contact. His useless left hand lay upon his thigh, and that muscled limb pressed brazenly against hers, as did the allegedly crippled left arm. Their warmth penetrated the thick fabric of her pelisse as well as the muslin frock beneath, to make her skin tingle.
“Comfortable?” he asked with mocking politeness.
“Dain, this curricle is not big enough for the two of us,” she said crossly. “You’re crushing me.”
“Maybe you’d better sit on my lap, then,” he said.
Suppressing the urge to slap the smirk off his face, she turned her attention to her brother, who was still fumbling about the horses’ heads. “Confound you, Bertie, get away from there!” she snapped. “Do you want them to mash your skull upon the paving stones?”
Dain laughed and gave the beasts leave to start, and Bertie hastily stumbled back to the safety of the sidewalk.
A moment later, the curricle was hurtling at a breakneck pace through the crowded West End streets. Jammed, however, between the high, cushioned side of the carriage seat and the rock-hard body of her demonic betrothed, Jessica knew she was in small danger of tumbling out. She leaned back and contemplated Dain’s Steeds from Hell.
They were the worst-tempered horses she’d ever encountered in her life. They fussed and snorted about and objected to everything and everybody that strayed into their path. They tried to trample pedestrians. They exchanged equine insults with every horse they met. They tried to knock over lampposts and curb posts, and strove to collide with every vehicle that had the effrontery to share the same street with them.
Even when they reached Hyde Park, the animals showed no signs of tiring. They tried to run down the workmen finishing the new archway at Hyde Park Corner. They threatened to stampede down Rotten Row—upon which no vehicle but the monarch’s was permitted.
They succeeded in none of their fiendish enterprises, however. Though he waited until the last minute, Dain quelled all attempts at mayhem. To Jessica’s mingled annoyance and admiration, he did so without seeming to make the slightest effort, despite having to drive with only one hand.
“I suppose there wouldn’t be any challenge in it,” she said, thinking aloud, “if your cattle behaved themselves.”
He smoothly drew the right one back from imminent collision with the statue of Achilles and turned the satanic beasts westward into the Drive. “Perhaps your ill temper has communicated itself to them, and they’re frightened. They don’t know where to run, what to do. Is that it, Nick, Harry? Afraid she’ll shoot you?”
The beasts tossed their heads and answered with evil horsey laughter.
Leave it to Dain, she thought, to give his horses Lucifer’s nicknames. And leave it to him to own animals who fully merited the names.
“You’d be ill tempered, too,” she said, “if you’d spent the last week wrestling with guest lists and wedding breakfast menus and fittings and a lot of pestering relatives. You’d be cross, too, if every tradesman in London were besieging your house, and if your drawing room had come to look like a warehouse, heaped with catalogs and samples. They have been plaguing me since the morning our betrothal announcement appeared in the paper.”
“I shouldn’t be ill tempered in the least,” he said, “because I should never be so cork-brained as to let myself be bothered.”
“You’re the one who insisted upon the grand wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square,” she said. “Then you left it all to me. You haven’t made the smallest pretense of helping.”
“I? Help?” he asked incredulously. “What the devil are servants for, you little nitwit? Did I not tell you to send the bills to me? If no one else in the household is competent to do the work, then hire somebody. If you want to be a wealthy marchioness, why don’t you act like one? The working classes work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “The upper classes tell them what to do. You should not upset the social order. Look at what happened in France. They overthrew the established order decades ago, and what have they to show for it? A king who dresses and behaves like a bourgeois, open sewers in their grandest neighborhoods, and not a decently lit street, except about the Palais Royal.”
She started at him. “I had no idea you were such a Tory snob. Certainly one couldn’t tell, given your choice of companions.”
He kept his gaze upon the horses. “If you’re referring to the tarts, may I remind you that they’re hired help.”
The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of his bed partners. Jessica did not want to think about how he’d amused himself at night while she lay sleepless in her bed, fretting about the wedding night and her lack of experience—not to mention her lack of the Rubenesque figure he was so revoltingly partial to.
Gloomily certain that her marriage would be a debacle—no matter what Genevieve said—Jessica did not want to care whether she pleased him in bed or not. She could not get the better of her pride, though, and that feminine vanity couldn’t bear the prospect of failing to captivate a husband. Any husband, even him. Neither of Genevieve’s spouses had ever dreamt of straying, nor had any of the lovers she’d discreetly taken during her long widowhood.
But now was hardly the time to wrestle with that daunting problem, Jessica told herself. It made more sense to take the opportunity to get some practical matters sorted out. Like the guest list.
“I know where your female companions fit on your social scale,” she said. “The men are another matter. Mr. Beaumont, for instance. Aunt Louisa says one may not invite him to the wedding breakfast because he isn’t good ton. But he is your friend.”
“You bloody well better not invite him,” Dain said, his jaw hardening. “Buggering sod tried to spy on me when I was with a whore. Invite him to the wedding and the swine will think he’s invited to attend the wedding night as well. What with the opium and drink, he probably can’t get his own rod to stand to attention—so he watches someone else do it.”
Jessica discovered that the image of Rubenesque trollops writhing in his lap wasn’t nearly so agitating as what now appeared in her mind’s eye: six and a half feet of dark, naked, aroused male.
She had a good idea of what arousal looked like. She’d seen some of Mr. Rowlandson’s erotic engravings. She wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want so vivid an image of Dain doing with a voluptuous whore what the men in Rowlandson’s pictures had been doing.
The picture hung in her mind, bold as the illuminations displayed during national celebrations, and it twisted her insides into knots and made her want to kill somebody.
She was not simply jealous, she was madly so—and he’d put her into this mortifying state with but a few careless words. Now she looked into the future, and saw him doing it again and again, until he made her completely insane.
She should not let him do it to her, Jessica knew. She should not be jealous of his tarts. She should thank her lucky stars for them, because he’d spend as little time as possible with her, while she would be a wealthy noblewoman, free to conduct her life as she wished. She’d told herself this a thousand times at least, since the day he’d so insolently proposed and she’d stupidly let her heart soften.
Lecturing herself didn’t do any good. She knew he was perfectly awful and he’d used her abominably and he was incapable of affection and he was wedding her mainly for revenge…and she wanted him to want only her, all the same.
“Have I finally shocked you?” Dain asked. “Or are you merely sulking? The silence has become deafening.”
“I am shocked,” she said tartly. “It would never occur to me that you would mind being watched. You seem to delight in public scenes.”
“Beaumont was watching through a peephole,” Dain said. “In the first place, I can’t abide sneaks. In the second, I paid for a whore—not to perform, gratis, for an audience. Third, there are certain activities I prefer to conduct in private.”
The carriage drive at this point began to veer northward, away from the banks of the Serpentine. The horses struggled to continue along the riverbank, aiming at a stand of trees. Dain smoothly corrected their direction without appearing to take any notice of what he was doing.
“At any rate, I felt obliged to clarify my rules with the aid of my fists,” he went on. “It’s more than possible Beaumont holds a grudge. I shouldn’t put it past him to take out his ill feeling on you. He’s a coward and a sneak and he has a nasty habit of…” He trailed off, frowning. “At any rate,” he went on, his expression grim, “you’re to have nothing to do with him.”
It took her a moment to grasp the implications of the command, and in that moment the world seemed to grow marginally brighter and her heart a cautious degree lighter. She shifted sideways to scrutinize his glowering profile. “That sounds shockingly…protective.”
“I paid for you,” he said coldly. “You’re mine. I look after what’s mine. I shouldn’t let Nick or Harry near him either.”
“By gad—do you mean to say I am as important a possession as your cattle?” She pressed her hand to her heart. “Oh, Dain, you are too devastatingly romantic. I am altogether overcome.”
He brought his full attention upon her for a moment, and his sullen gaze dropped to where her hand was. She hastily returned it to her lap.
Frowning, he turned back to the horses. “That overgarment thing, the what-you-call-it,” he said testily.
“My pelisse? What’s wrong with it?”
“You filled it better the last time I saw it,” he said. “In Paris. When you burst into my party and bothered me.” He steered the beasts right, into a tree-lined avenue a few yards south of the guardhouse. “When you assaulted my virtue. Surely you remember. Or did it merely seem to fit better because you were wet?”
She remembered. More important, he did—in sufficient detail to notice a few pounds’ shrinkage. Her mood lightened another several degrees.
“You could throw me into the Serpentine and find out,” she said.
The short avenue led to a small, thickly shaded circular drive. The trees ringing it shut out the rest of the park. In a short while, the five o’clock promenade would begin, and this secluded area, like the rest of Hyde Park, would be crammed with London’s fashionables. At present, however, it was deserted.
Dain drew the curricle to a halt and set the brake. “You two settle down,” he warned the horses. “Make the least bother, and you’ll find yourselves hauling barges in Yorkshire.”
His tone, though low, carried the clear signal of Obedience or Death. The animals responded to it just as though they were human. Instantly they became the most subdued, docile pair of geldings Jessica had ever seen.
Dain turned his moody black gaze upon her. “Now, as to you, Miss Termagant Trent—”
“I love these pet names,” she said, gazing soulfully up into his eyes. “Nitwit. Sapskull. Termagant. How they make my heart flutter!”
“Then you’ll be in raptures with a few other names I have in mind,” he said. “How can you be such an idiot? Or have you done it on purpose? Look at you!” He addressed this last to her bodice. “At this rate, there won’t be anything left of you by the wedding day. When was the last time you ate a proper meal?” he demanded.
Jessica supposed that, in Dain’s Dictionary, this qualified as an expression of concern.
“I did not do it on purpose,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like under Aunt Louisa’s roof. She conducts wedding preparations as generals conduct warfare. The household has been in pitched battle since the day we arrived. I could leave them to fight it out among themselves, but I should not care for the result—and you would detest it. My aunt’s taste is appalling. Which means I have no choice but to be involved, night and day. Then, because it takes all my will and energy to maintain control, I’m too tired and vexed to eat a proper meal—even if the servants were capable of making one, which they aren’t, because she’s worn them to a frazzle, too.”
There was a short silence. Then, “Well,” he said, shifting a bit in his place, as though he were not altogether comfortable.
“You told me I should hire help,” she said. “What good will that do, when she’ll interfere with them as well? I shall still be involved—and driven—”
“Yes, yes, I understand,” he said. “She’s bothering you. I’ll make her stop. You should have told me before.”
She smoothed her gloves. “Until now, I was unaware you had any inclinations to slay dragons for me.”
“I don’t,” he said. “But one must be practical. You’ll want all your strength for the wedding night.”
“I cannot think why I should need strength,” she said, ignoring a host of spine-tingling images rising in her mind’s eye. “All I have to do is lie there.”
“Naked,” he said grimly.
“Truly?” She shot him a glance from under her lashes. “Well, if I must, I must, for you have the advantage of experience in these matters. Still, I do wish you’d told me sooner. I should not have put the modiste to so much trouble about the negligee.”
“The what?”
“It was ghastly expensive,” she said, “but the silk is as fine as gossamer, and the eyelet work about the neckline is exquisite. Aunt Louisa was horrified. She said only Cyprians wear such things, and it leaves nothing to the imagination.”
Jessica heard him suck in his breath, felt the muscular thigh tense against hers.
“But if it were left to Aunt Louisa,” she went on, “I should be covered from my chin to my toes in thick cotton ruffled white monstrosities with little pink bows and rosebuds. Which is absurd, when an evening gown reveals far more, not to mention—”
“What color?” he asked. His low voice had roughened.
“Wine red,” she said. “With narrow black ribbons threaded through the neckline. Here.” She traced a plunging U over her bosom. “And there’s the loveliest openwork over my…well, here.” She drew her finger over the curve of her breast a bare inch above the nipple. “And openwork on the right side of the skirt. From here”—she pointed to her hip—“down to the hem. And I bought—”
“Jess.” Her name was a strangled whisper.
“—slippers to match,” she continued. “Black mules with—”
“Jess.” In one furious flurry of motion, he threw down the reins and hauled her into his lap.
The movement startled the horses, who tossed their heads and snorted and commenced an agitated dance. “Stop it!” Dain said sharply. They stilled.
His powerful right arm tightened round Jessica’s waist and he pulled her close.
It was like sitting in the throbbing heat of a furnace: Brick-hard and hot, his body pulsed with tension. He slid his hand down over her hip and clasped her thigh.
She looked up. He was scowling malevolently at his big, gloved hand. “You,” he growled. “Plague take you.”
She tilted her head back. “I’ll return it, if you wish. The nightgown.”
His furious black gaze moved up, to her mouth. His breathing was harsh. “No, you won’t,” he said.
Then his mouth, hard and hungry, fell upon hers, dragging over her lips as though to punish her.
But what Jessica tasted was victory. She felt it in the heat he couldn’t disguise, and in the pulsing tension of his frame, and she heard it clear as any declaration when his tongue pushed impatiently for entry.
He wanted her. Still.
Maybe he didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help it, any more than she could help wanting him.
And for this moment, she needn’t pretend otherwise. She squirmed up to wrap her arms round his neck, and held tightly while he ravaged her mouth. And while she ravaged his.
They might have been two furious armies, and the kiss a life-or-death battle. They both wanted the same: conquest, possession. He gave no quarter. She wanted none. She couldn’t get enough of the hot sin of his mouth, the scorching pressure of his hand, dragging over her hip, brazenly claiming her breast.
She claimed, too, her hands raking over his massive shoulders and down, digging her fingers into the powerful sinews of his arms. Mine, she thought, as the muscles bunched and flexed under her touch.
And mine, she vowed, as she splayed her hands over his broad, hard chest. She would have him and keep him if it killed her. A monster he may be, but he was her monster. She would not share his stormy kisses with anyone else. She would not share his big, splendid body with anyone else.
She squirmed closer. He tensed and, groaning deep in his throat, moved his hand down and clasped her bottom, pulling her closer still. Even through the leather driving gloves and several layers of fabric, his bold grasp sent sizzling ripples of sensation over her skin.
She wanted his touch upon her naked flesh: big, bare, dark hands moving over her, everywhere. Rough or gentle, she didn’t care. As long as he wanted her. As long as he kissed her and touched her like this…as though he were starving, as she was, as though he couldn’t get enough of her, as she couldn’t of him.
He dragged his mouth from hers and, muttering what sounded like Italian curses, took his warm hand off her buttock.
“Let go of me,” he said thickly.
Swallowing a cry of frustration, she brought her hands down, folded them upon her lap, and stared at a tree opposite.
Dain gazed at her in furious despair.
He should have known better than to come within a mile of her. They’d be wed in thirteen days, and he would have the wedding night and as many nights thereafter as he needed to slake his lust and be done with it. He had told himself it didn’t matter how much she haunted and plagued him meanwhile. He had endured worse, for smaller reward, and he could surely endure a few weeks of frustration.
He had to endure it, because he had a far too vivid image of the alternative: the Marquess of Dain hovering about and panting over his bride-to-be like a starving mongrel at a butcher’s cart. He would be fretting and yapping at her doorstep by day and howling at her window by night. He would be trotting after her to dressmakers and milliners and cobblers and haberdashers, and snarling and growling about her at parties.
He was used to getting what he wanted the instant he wanted it, and to wisely ignoring or rejecting what he couldn’t get that instant. He had found he could no more disregard her than a famished hound could disregard a slab of meat.
He should have realized that the day he met her, when he’d lingered in Champtois’ shop, unable to take his eyes off her. He should at least have discerned the problem the day he’d gone to pieces just taking off her damned glove.
In any case, there was no escaping the truth now, when he’d given himself—and her—so mortifyingly eloquent a display. All she had to do was describe a bit of lingerie, and he lost his mind and tried to devour her.
“Do you want me to get off your lap?” she asked politely, still gazing straight ahead.
“Do you want to?” he asked irritably.
“No, I am perfectly comfortable,” she said.
He wished he could say the same. Thanks to the small, round bottom perched so confounded comfortably upon his lap, his loins were experiencing the fiery torments of the damned. He was throbbingly aware that release was mere inches away. He had only to turn her toward him and lift her skirts and…
And she might as well have been in China, for all the chance there was of that happening, he thought bitterly. That was the trouble with ladies—one of the legion of troubles. You couldn’t just do the business when you wanted to. You had to court and persuade, and then you had to do it in a proper bed. In the dark.
“You may stay, then,” he said. “But don’t kiss me again. It’s…provoking. And don’t tell me about your sleeping apparel.”
“Very well,” she said, glancing idly about her, just as though she were sitting at a tea table. “Did you know that Shelley’s first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine?”
“Is my first wife considering the same?” he asked, eyeing her uneasily.
“Certainly not. Genevieve says that killing oneself on account of a man is inexcusably gauche. I was merely making conversation.”
He thought that, despite the torments, it was rather pleasant to have a soft, clean-smelling lady perched upon his knee, making idle conversation. He felt a smile tugging at his mouth. He quickly twisted it into a scowl. “Does that mean you’ve left off being cross for the moment?”
“Yes.” She glanced down at his useless left hand, which had slid onto the seat during their stormy embrace. “You really ought to wear a sling, Dain. So that it doesn’t bang into things. You could do it a serious injury, and never notice.”
“I’ve only banged it once or twice,” he said, frowning at it. “And I noticed, I assure you. I feel everything, just as though it worked. But it doesn’t. Won’t. Just lies there. Hangs there. Whatever.” He laughed. “Conscience bothering you?”
“Not in the least,” she said. “I thought of taking a horsewhip to you, but you wouldn’t have felt a thing, I daresay.”
He studied her slim arm. “That would want a good deal more muscle than you could hope for,” he said. “And you’d never be quick enough. I’d skip out of your way and laugh.”
She looked up. “You’d laugh even if I managed to strike. You’d laugh if your back were torn to shreds. Did you laugh after I shot you?”
“Had to,” he answered lightly. “Because I swooned. Ridiculous.”
It had been ridiculous, he realized now, as he searched the cool grey depths of her eyes. It had been absurd to be outraged with her. The scene in the Wallingdons’ garden hadn’t been her doing. He was beginning to suspect whose it had been. If the suspicion was correct, he had not only behaved abominably, but had been unforgivably stupid.
He’d deserved to be shot. And she’d done it well. Dramatically. He smiled, recollecting. “It was neatly done, Jess. I’ll give you that.”
“It was splendidly done,” she said. “Admit it: brilliantly planned and executed.”
He looked away, toward Nick and Harry, who were pretending to be sleepily at peace with the world. “It was very well done,” he said. “Now I think of it. The red and black garments. The Lady Macbeth voice.” He chuckled. “The way my courageous comrades bolted up in terror at the sight of you. Like a lot of ladies at a tea party invaded by a mouse.”
His amused gaze came back to her. “Maybe it was worth being shot, just to see that. Sellowby—Goodridge—in a panic over a little female in a temper fit.”
“I am not little,” she said sharply. “Just because you are a great gawk of a lummox, you needn’t make me out to be negligible. For your information, my lord Goliath, I happen to be taller than average.”
He patted her arm. “You needn’t worry, Jess. I’m still going to marry you, and I’ll manage to make do somehow. You are not to be anxious on that score. In fact, I’ve brought proof.”
He slid his hand into the deep carriage pocket. It took him a moment to find the package he’d hidden there, and the moment was enough to set his heart pounding with anxiety.
He’d spent three agitated hours selecting the gift. He’d rather be stretched upon a rack than return to Number Thirty-two, Ludgate Hill, and endure that hellish experience again. At last his fingers closed upon the tiny box.
Still, his heart didn’t stop pounding, even when he drew it out and clumsily pressed it into her hand. “You’d better open it yourself,” he said tightly. “It’s a deuced awkward business with one hand.”
Her grey glance darting from him to the package, she opened it.
There was a short silence. His insides knotted and his skin grew clammy with sweat.
Then, “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Dain.”
His helpless panic eased a fraction.
“We’re betrothed,” he said stiffly. “It’s a betrothal ring.”
The clerk at Rundell and Bridge had made appalling suggestions. A birthstone—when Dain had no idea when her birthday was. A stone to match her eyes—when there was no such stone, no such object in existence.
The obsequious worm had even dared to suggest a row of gems whose initials formed a message: Diamond-Emerald-Amethyst-Ruby-Epidote-Sapphire-Turquoise…for DEAREST. Dain had very nearly lost his breakfast.
Then, finally, when he’d been driven to the last stage of desperation, poring over emeralds and amethysts and pearls and opals and aquamarines and every other curst mineral a craftsman could clamp onto a ring…then, in the last of what seemed like a thousand velvet-padded trays, Dain had found it.
A single cabochon ruby, so smoothly polished that it seemed liquid, surrounded by heartbreakingly perfect diamonds.
He had told himself he didn’t care whether she liked it or not. She’d have to wear it anyway.
He’d found it a great deal easier to pretend when she wasn’t near. Easier to make believe he’d chosen that particular ring simply because it was the finest. Easier to hide in his dark wasteland of a heart the real reason: that it was a tribute, its symbolism as mawkish as any the jeweler’s clerk had proposed.
A bloodred stone for the brave girl who’d shed his blood. And diamonds flashing fiery sparks, because lightning had flashed the first time she’d kissed him.
Her gazed lifted to his. Silver mist shimmered in her eyes. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly. “Thank you.” She pulled off her glove and took the ring from the box. “You must put it on my finger.”
“Must I?” He tried to sound disgusted. “Some sentimental twaddle, I suppose.”
“There’s no one to see,” she said.
He took the ring from her and slipped it over her finger, then quickly drew his hand away, afraid she’d discern the trembling.
She turned her hand this way and that, and the diamonds took fire.
She smiled.
“At least it fits,” he said.
“Perfectly.” Turning her head, she darted one quick kiss at his cheek, then hastily returned to her seat. “Thank you, Beelzebub,” she said very softly.
His heart constricted painfully. He snatched up the reins. “We’d better get out of here, before the fashionable stampede begins,” he said, his voice very gruff. “Nick! Harry! You can stop playing dead now.”
They could play anything. They’d been trained by a circus equestrian, and they loved to perform, responding instantly to the subtle cues Dain had spent three full days learning from their former master. Though he knew how it was done, even he sometimes had trouble remembering that it was a certain flick of the reins or a change in tone they reacted to, and not his words.
At any rate, they were fondest of the role they’d played en route to Hyde Park, and he let them play it again, all the way back. That took his betrothed’s attention away from him, and fixed it on praying she’d arrive alive at her aunt’s doorstep.
With Jessica preoccupied, Dain had leisure to collect his shattered composure, and address his intelligence to putting two and two together, as he should have done weeks ago.
There had been six onlookers, Herriard had said.
Now Dain tried to remember the faces. Vawtry, yes, looking utterly thunderstruck. Rouvier, the man Dain had publicly embarrassed. Two Frenchmen he recalled having seen many times at Vingt-Huit. And two Frenchwomen, one unfamiliar. The other had been Isobel Callon, one of Paris’ most vicious gossips…and one of Francis Beaumont’s favorite female companions.
What had Jessica said that night? Something about how the gossip would have died down if she hadn’t burst into his house.
But maybe it wouldn’t have died down, Dain reflected. Maybe public interest in his relations with Miss Trent had swelled to insane proportions because someone had fed the rumor mill. Maybe someone had kept the gossip stirred and encouraged the wagers, knowing the rumors would drive Beelzebub wild.
All Beaumont would have needed to do was drop a word to the right party. Isobel Callon, for instance. She’d seize the delicious tidbit and make a campaign of it. She wouldn’t need much encouragement to do so, because she hated Dain. Then, having sown the seeds, Beaumont could retire to England and enjoy his revenge at a safe distance…and laugh himself sick when letters arrived from his friends, detailing the latest events in the Dain-versus-Trent drama.
When the suspicion had first arisen, Dain had thought it far-fetched, the product of an agitated mind.
Now it made a good deal more sense than any other explanation. It did explain at least why jaded Paris had become so obsessed with one ugly Englishman’s handful of encounters with one pretty English female.
He glanced at Jessica.
She was trying to ignore Nick and Harry’s Steeds of Death performance by concentrating on her betrothal ring. She hadn’t put her glove back on. She turned her hand this way and that, making the diamonds spark rainbow fire.
She liked the ring.
She had bought a red silk nightgown, trimmed with black. For her wedding night.
She had kissed him back and touched him. And she hadn’t seemed to mind being kissed and touched.
Beauty and the Beast. That’s what Beaumont would call it, the poison-tongued sod.
But in thirteen days, this Beauty would be the Marchioness of Dain. And she would lie in the Beast’s bed. Naked.
Then Dain would do everything he’d been dying to do for what seemed an eternity. Then she would be his, and no other man could touch her, because she belonged to him exclusively.
True, he could have bought Portugal for what “exclusive ownership” was costing him.
On the other hand, she was prime quality. A lady. His lady.
And it was very possible Dain owed it all to the sneaking, corrupt, cowardly, spiteful Francis Beaumont.
In which case, Dain decided, it would be pointless—as well as a waste of energy better saved for the wedding night—to take Beaumont apart and break him into very small pieces.
By rights, Dain ought to thank him instead.
But then, the Marquess of Dain was not very polite.
He decided the swine wasn’t worth the bother.