Then he nearly trampled her down because, for some insane reason, Miss Trent wasn’t fleeing down the street, but marching back toward his house.
“Confound his insolence!” she cried, making for the door. “I shall break his nose. First the porter, now my maid—and the hackney. It is the outside of enough.”
Dain stepped in her way, his massive body shielding the entrance. “Oh, no, you don’t. I don’t know or care what your game is—”
“My game?” She stepped back, planted her hands on her hips, and glared up at him. At least she seemed to be glaring. It was difficult to tell, given the large bonnet brim and the failing light.
The sun had not quite set, but massive grey clouds were submerging Paris in a heavy gloom. From a distance came the low boom of thunder.
“My game?” she repeated. “It’s your bully of a footman, following his master’s example, I collect—taking out his vexation on innocent parties. Doubtless he thought it a great joke to frighten away the hackney—with my maid inside the vehicle—and leave me stranded—after stealing my umbrella.”
She turned on her heel and stalked off.
If Dain was interpreting this ranting correctly, Herbert had frightened away Miss Trent’s maid as well as the hired vehicle that had brought her here.
A thunderstorm was rapidly approaching, Herbert had taken her umbrella, and the chances of locating an unoccupied hackney at this hour in bad weather were about nil.
Dain smiled. “Adieu, then, Miss Trent,” he said. “Have a pleasant promenade home.”
“Adieu, Lord Dain,” she answered without turning her head. “Have a pleasant evening with your cows.”
Cows?
She was merely trying to provoke him, Dain told himself. The remark was a pathetic attempt at a setdown. To take offense was to admit he’d felt the sting. He told himself to laugh and return to his…cows.
A few furious strides brought him to her side. “Is that prudery, I wonder, or envy?” he demanded. “Is it their trade which offends you—or merely their being more generously endowed?”
She kept on walking. “When Bertie told me how much you paid, I thought it was their services which were so horrifically expensive,” she said. “Now, however, I comprehend my error. Obviously you pay by volume.”
“Perhaps the price is exorbitant,” he said, while his hands itched to shake her. “But then, I am not so shrewd at haggling as you. Perhaps, in future, you would like to conduct negotiations for me. In which case, I ought to describe my requirements. What I like—”
“You like them big, buxom, and stupid,” she said.
“Intelligence is hardly relevant,” he said, suppressing a ferocious urge to tear her bonnet from her head and stomp on it. “I do not hire them to debate metaphysics. But since you understand what I want them to look like, I should hasten to explain what I like them to do.”
“I know you like to have them take off your clothes,” she said. “Or perhaps put them on again. At the time, it was difficult to determine whether they were at the beginning or the end of the performance.”
“I like both,” he said, jaw clenched. “And in between, I like them to—”
“I recommend you try to fasten your buttons by yourself at present,” she said. “Your trousers are beginning to bunch up in an unsightly way over the tops of your boots.”
It was not until this moment that Dain recollected his state of dress—or undress, rather. He now discovered that his shirt cuffs were flapping at his wrists, while the body of the garment billowed in the gusting wind.
While the words “shy” and “modest” did appear in Dain’s Dictionary, they had no connection with him. On the other hand, his attire, unlike his character, was always comme il faut. Not to mention that he was marching through the streets of the most sartorially critical city in the world.
Heat crawled up his neck. “Thank you, Miss Trent,” he said coolly, “for calling the matter to my attention.” Then, just as coolly, and walking at her side all the while, he unbuttoned all the trouser buttons, tucked the shirt inside, and leisurely buttoned up again.
Miss Trent made a small choked sound.
Dain gave her a sharp glance. He could not be sure, given the bonnet and the rapidly deepening darkness, but he thought her color had risen.
“Do you feel faint, Miss Trent?” he asked. “Is that why you have walked straight past what should have been your next turning?”
She stopped. “I walked past it,” she said in a muffled voice, “because I didn’t know that was it.”
He smiled. “You don’t know the way home.”
She began moving again, toward the street he’d indicated. “I shall figure it out.”
He followed her round the corner. “You were going to simply walk back, in the dead of night, to your brother’s house—though you haven’t the vaguest notion how to get there. You’re rather a henwit, aren’t you?”
“I agree that it’s growing dark, though hardly the dead of night,” she said. “In any case, I am certainly not alone, and it hardly seems henwitted to have the most terrifying man in Paris as my escort. It’s very chivalrous of you, Dain. Rather sweet, actually.” She paused at a narrow street. “Ah, I am getting my bearings. This leads to the Rue de Provence, does it not?”
“What did you say?” he asked in ominously low tones.
“I said, ‘This leads—’”
“Sweet,” he said, following her round the corner.
“Yes, there it is.” She quickened her pace. “I recognize the lamppost.”
If she’d been a man, he would have made sure her skull had an intimate acquaintance with that lamppost.
Dain realized he was clenching his fists. He slowed his steps and told himself to go home. Now. He had never in his life raised a hand against a female. That sort of behavior showed not only a contemptible lack of control, but cowardice as well. Only cowards used deadly weapons against the weaponless.
“There seems to be no imminent danger of your endlessly wandering the streets of Paris and agitating the populace into a riot,” he said tightly. “I believe I might with clear conscience allow you to complete your journey solo.”
She paused and turned and smiled. “I quite understand. The Rue de Provence is usually very crowded at this time, and one of your friends might see you. Best run along. I promise not to breathe a word about your gallantry.”
He told himself to laugh and walk away. He’d done it a thousand times before, and knew it was one of the best exits. There was no way to stab and jab when Dain laughed in your face. He’d been more viciously stabbed and jabbed before. This was merely…irritation.
All the same, the laugh wouldn’t come, and he couldn’t turn his back on her.
She had already disappeared round the corner.
He stormed after her and grabbed her arm, stopping her in her tracks. “Now, you hold your busy tongue and listen,” he said levelly. “I am not one of your Society fribbles to be twitted and mocked by a ha’pennyworth of a chit with an exalted opinion of her wit. I don’t give a damn what anyone sees, thinks, or says. I am not chivalrous, Miss Trent, and I am not sweet, confound your impertinence!”
“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 stranglehold.
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 ho voluta tra le mie braccia dal primo momento che ho vista.
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 back, 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.
But not Susannah. She couldn’t dance because she was in mourning, but she could talk and did, and looked up at him as though he were a knight in shining armor, Sir Galahad himself.
After four months, he was permitted to hold her gloved hand for twenty seconds. It took him another two months to work up the courage to kiss her.
In her uncle’s rose garden, the chivalrous knight had planted a chaste kiss upon his lady’s cheek.
Almost in the same instant, as though on cue, a flock of shrieking women—mother, aunt, sisters—flew out of the bushes. The next he knew, he was closeted in the study with Susannah’s uncle and sternly commanded to declare his intentions. Naive, besotted puppy that he’d been, Dain had declared them honorable.
In the next moment, he had a pen in his hand and an immense heap of documents before him, which he was commanded to sign.
Even now, Dain could not say where or how he’d found the presence of mind to read them first. Perhaps it had to do with hearing two commands in a row, and being unaccustomed to taking orders of any kind.
Whatever the reason, he’d set down the pen and read.
He’d discovered that in return for the privilege of marrying his blushing rosebud, he would be permitted to pay all of her late brother’s debts, as well as her uncle’s, aunt’s, mother’s, and her own, now and forever, ’til death do us part, amen.
Dain had decided it was a foolhardy investment and said so.
He was sternly reminded that he’d compromised an innocent girl of good family.
“Then shoot me,” he’d replied. And walked out.
No one had tried to shoot him. Weeks later, back in Paris, he’d learned that Susannah had wed Lord Linglay.
Linglay was a sixty-five-year-old rouge-wearing roué who looked about ninety, collected obscene snuffboxes, and pinched and fondled every serving girl foolish enough to come within reach of his palsied hands. He had not been expected to survive the wedding night.
He had not only survived, but he’d managed to impregnate his young bride, and had continued to do so at a brisk pace. She’d scarcely get one brat out before the next one was planted.
Lord Dain was imagining in detail his former love in the arms of her painted, palsied, sweating, and drooling spouse, and savoring those details, when the bells of Notre Dame clanged in the distance.
He realized they were rather more distant than they ought to be, if he was upon the Rue de Rivoli, where he lived and ought to be by now.
Then he saw he was in the wrong street, the wrong neighborhood altogether.
His baffled glance fell upon a familiar-looking lamppost.
His spirits, lightened by images of Susannah’s earthly purgatory, instantly sank again and dragged him, mind, body, and soul, into the mire.
Touch me. Hold me. Kiss me.
He turned the corner, into the dark, narrow street, where the blank, windowless walls could see and tell nothing. He pressed his forehead against the cold stone and endured, because he hadn’t any choice. He couldn’t stop what twisted and ached inside him.
I need you.
Her lips clinging to his…her hands, holding him fast. She was soft and warm and she tasted of rain, and it was sweet, unbearably sweet, to believe for a moment that she wanted to be in his arms.
He’d believed it for that moment, and wanted to believe still, and he hated himself for what he wanted, and hated her for making him want it.
And so, setting his jaw, Lord Dain straightened and went on his way, enduring, while he told himself she’d pay. In time.
Everyone did. In time.