Dain knew the house. It had belonged to the previous Marquess of Avory, and had been the scene of more than one drunken orgy. It was promising to become one of the most notorious residences in Paris when the marquess had met his untimely death. That had been about two years ago, and the furnishings were vastly different now. Still, Dain had no trouble recognizing the small sun parlor on the ground floor whose French doors opened into the garden.
That was where he took Jessica.
To negotiate.
Because—as he should have expected and prepared for—matters were not proceeding as he’d planned.
He had planned to wreak havoc and mayhem. Within five minutes of his arrival, he’d found that the combined pride of the Ballisters and Usignuolos wouldn’t let him.
No matter how much he was goaded, he would not be reduced to behaving like an animal.
Not in front of her, at any rate.
He had remembered the scornful look she’d given her brother two weeks ago, and the contemptuously amused look she’d given Dain himself, and how it had made him behave like a complete idiot.
He’d tried to forget it, but every moment and emotion of the episode was branded upon his mind: humiliation, rage, frustration, passion…and one stunning moment of happiness.
He had experienced a host of disagreeable emotions this evening…and forgotten them all the instant he’d danced with her.
She’d been slender and supple and light in his arms. So easy to hold. Her skirts had swirled about his legs, and he’d thought of slim white limbs entangled with his amid the rustle of sheets. Her scent, the provocatively innocent blend of chamomile soap and Woman, had whirled in his head, and he’d thought of pearly skin glimmering in the light of a single candle and long black hair tumbled upon a pillow…and himself wrapped in her clean, sweet womanliness, touching, tasting, drinking her in.
He had told himself these were ludicrous fantasies, that clean, sweet women did not lie in his bed and never would, willingly.
But she had seemed willing enough to dance with him. Though she couldn’t have enjoyed it, and must have had a typically understand feminine motive for seeming to, she’d made him believe she did and that she was happy. And when he’d gazed into her upturned countenance, he’d believed, for a moment, that her silver-grey eyes had been glowing with excitement, not resentment, and she had let him draw her closer because that was where she wanted to be.
It was all lies, of course, but there were ways to make certain lies half-true. Dain knew the ways. She, like every other human being since the Creation, had a price.
Consequently, all he had to do was find out what it was and decide whether he was willing to pay.
He led her to a corner of the garden farthest from the blazing lights of the house. Most of the late Lord Avory’s collection of Roman artifacts was still picturesquely strewn among the shrubbery, doubtless because it would cost a fortune to move the mammoth pieces.
Dain picked his companion up and sat her upon a stone sarcophagus. Standing upon an ornate base, it was tall enough to bring them nearly eye to eye.
“If I do not return very soon,” she said tightly, “my reputation will be in tatters. Not that you care, certainly. But I warn you, Dain, that I will not take it docilely and you—”
“My reputation is already in tatters,” he said. “And you don’t care.”
“That is completely wrong!” she cried. “I tried to tell you before: I do sympathize, and I was willing to help mend matters. Within reason, that is. But you refuse to listen. Because, like every other man, you can keep only one idea in your head at a time—usually the wrong one.”
“Whereas women are capable of holding twenty-seven contradictory notions simultaneously,” he returned. “Which is why they are incapable of adhering to anything like a principle.”
He took her hand and began to peel off her glove.
“You’d better stop that,” she said. “You’re only going to make matters worse.”
He pulled away the glove, and at the first glimpse of her fragile, white hand, all thoughts of negotiation fled. “I don’t see how matters could become worse,” he muttered. “I am already besotted with a needle-tongued, conceited, provoking ape leader of a lady.”
Her head jerked up, her grey eyes widening. “Besotted? You’re nothing like it. Vengeful is more like it. Spiteful.”
He went to work with speedy efficiency on the other glove. “I must be besotted,” he said evenly. “I have the imbecilic idea that you’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen. Except for your coiffure,” he added, with a disgusted glance at the coils and plumes and pearls. “That is ghastly.”
She scowled. “Your romantic effusions leave me breathless.”
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her wrist.
“Sono il tuo schiavo,” he murmured.
He felt the jump of her pulse against his lips. “It means, ‘I am your slave,’” he translated, as she snatched her hand away. “Carissima. Dearest.”
She swallowed. “I think you had better stick to English.”
“But Italian is so moving,” he said. “Ti ho voluta dal primo momento che ti ho vista.”
I’ve wanted you from the first moment I saw you.
“Mi tormenti ancora.”
You’ve tormented me ever since.
He went on telling her, in words she couldn’t understand, all he’d thought and felt. And while he talked, watching her eyes soften and hearing her breath quicken, he swiftly removed his own gloves.
“Oh, don’t,” she breathed.
He leaned in closer, still speaking the language that seemed to mesmerize her.
“You shouldn’t use masculine wiles,” she said in a choked voice. She touched his sleeve. “What have I done that’s so unforgivable?”
You made me want you, he told her in his mother’s language. You’ve made me heartsick, lonely. You’ve made me crave what I vowed I would never need, never seek.
She must have heard the rage and frustration throbbing beneath the longing words, but she didn’t recoil or try to escape. And when he wrapped his arms about her, she only caught her breath, and let it out on a sigh, and he tasted that sigh when his mouth closed over hers.
Jessica had heard the turmoil in his voice, and required no powers of divination to understand that it boded ill. She’d told herself a hundred times already to run away. Dain would let her go. He had too much pride to force her into his embrace or chase her if she fled.
She simply couldn’t do it.
She didn’t know what he needed, and even if she had known, she doubted she could provide it. Yet she felt—and the feeling was as certain as her awareness of imminent disaster—that he needed it desperately, and she couldn’t, despite common sense and reason, abandon him.
Instead, she abandoned herself, as she had been tempted to do the first time she’d seen him, and as she’d been more painfully tempted when he’d unbuttoned her impossible glove, and as she’d wanted past endurance when he’d kissed her in the storm.
He was big and dark and beautiful and he smelled of smoke and wine and cologne and Male. Now she found that she’d never wanted anything so desperately in all her life as she wanted his low voice sending shivers up and down her back and the lashing strength of his arms about her and his hard, depraved mouth crushing hers.
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. “L’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.