“Your eyes,” she said, her gaze perfectly steady, “are very black. Intellect tells me they must be merely a very dark brown. Yet the illusion is…overpowering.”
There was a quick, stabbing sensation in the environs of his diaphragm, or his belly, he couldn’t tell.
His composure faltered not a whit. He had learned composure in hard school.
“The conversation has progressed with astonishing rapidity to the personal,” he drawled. “You are fascinated by my eyes.”
“I can’t help it,” she said. “They are extraordinary. So very black. But I do not wish to make you uncomfortable.”
With a very faint smile, she turned back to the jewelry case.
Dain wasn’t certain what exactly was wrong with her, but he had no doubt something was. He was Lord Beelzebub, wasn’t he? She was supposed to faint, or recoil in horrified revulsion at the very least. Yet she had gazed at him as bold as brass, and it had seemed for a moment as though the creature were actually flirting with him.
He decided to leave. He could just as well wrestle with this incongruity out of doors. He was heading for the door when Bertie turned and hurried after him.
“You got off easy,” Trent whispered, loud enough to be heard at Notre Dame. “I was sure she’d rip into you—and she will rip if she’s a mind to, and don’t care who it is, either. Not but what you could handle her, but she does give a fellow a headache, and if you was thinking of going for a drink—”
“Champtois has just come into possession of an automaton you will find intriguing,” Dain told him. “Why don’t you ask him to wind it up so that you can watch it perform?”
Bertie’s square face lit with delight. “One of them what-you-call-’ems? Truly? What does it do?”
“Why don’t you go look?” Dain suggested.
Bertie trotted off to the shopkeeper and promptly commenced babbling in accents any right-thinking Parisian would have considered grounds for homicide.
Having distracted Bertie from his apparent intention of following him, Lord Dain had only to take another few steps to be out the door. But his gaze drifted to Miss Trent, who was again entranced with something in the jewel case, and eaten by curiosity, he hesitated.
Chapter 2
Above the whirring and clicking of the automaton, Jessica heard the marquess’s hesitation as clearly as if it had been a trumpet’s blare at the start of battle. Then he marched. Bold, arrogant strides. He’d made up his mind and he was coming in with heavy artillery.
Dain was heavy artillery, she thought. Nothing Bertie or anyone else could have told her could have prepared her. Coal black hair and bold, black eyes and a great, conquering Caesar of a nose and a sullen sensuality of a mouth—the face alone entitled him to direct lineage with Lucifer, as Withers had claimed.
As to the body…
Bertie had told her Dain was a very large man. She had half expected a hulking gorilla. She had not been prepared for a stallion: big and splendidly proportioned—and powerfully muscled, if what his snug trousers outlined was any indication. She should not have been looking there, even if it was only an instant’s glance, but a physique like that demanded one’s attention and drew it…everywhere. After that unladylike instant, it had taken every iota of her stubborn willpower to keep her gaze upon his face. Even then, she’d only managed the feat because she was afraid that otherwise she’d lose what little remained of her reason, and do something horribly shocking.
“Very well, Miss Trent,” came his deep voice, from somewhere about a mile above her right shoulder. “You have piqued my curiosity. What the devil have you found there that’s so mesmerizing?”
His head might be a mile above her, but the rest of his hard physique was improperly close. She could smell the cigar he had smoked a short time ago. And a subtle—and outrageously expensive—masculine cologne. Her body commenced a repeat of the slow simmer she had first experienced moments earlier and had not yet fully recovered from.
She would have to have a long talk with Genevieve, she told herself. These sensations could not possibly be what Jessica suspected they were.
“The watch,” she said composedly. “The one with the picture of the woman in the pink gown.”
He leaned closer to peer into the case. “She’s standing under a tree? Is that the one?”
He set his expensively gloved left hand upon the case, and all the saliva evaporated from her mouth. It was a very large, powerful hand. She was rivetingly aware that one hand could lift her straight off the floor.
“Yes,” she said, resisting the urge to lick her dry lips.
“You’ll want to examine it more closely, I’m sure,” he said.
He reached up, removed a key from a nail on the rafter, moved to the back of the case, unlocked it, and took out the watch.
Champtois could not have failed to notice this audacity. He uttered not a syllable. Jessica glanced back. He seemed to be deep in conversation with Bertie. “Seemed” was the significant word. What one generally meant by conversation was, with Bertie, barely within the realms of probability. Deep conversation—and in French—was out of the question.
“Perhaps I had better demonstrate how the thing operates,” said Dain, yanking her attention back to him.
In his low voice, Jessica recognized the too innocent tones that inevitably preceded a male’s typically idiotic idea of a joke. She could have explained that, not having been born yesterday, she knew very well how the timepiece operated. But the glint in his black eyes told her he was mightily amused, and she didn’t want to spoil his fun. Yet.
“How kind,” she murmured.
“When you turn this knob,” he said, demonstrating, “as you see, her skirts divide and there, between her legs, is a—” He pretended to look more closely. “Good heavens, how shocking. I do believe that’s a fellow kneeling there.” He held the watch closer to her face.
“I’m not shortsighted, my lord,” she said, taking the watch from him. “You are quite right. It is a fellow—her lover apparently, for he seems to be performing a lover’s service for her.”
She opened her reticule, took out a small magnifying glass, and subjected the watch to very narrow study, all the while aware that she was undergoing a similar scrutiny.
“A bit of the enamel has worn off the gentleman’s wig and there is a minute scratch on the left side of the lady’s skirt,” she said. “Apart from that, I would say the watch is in excellent condition, considering its age, though I strongly doubt it will keep precise time. It is not a Breguet, after all.”
She put away the magnifying glass and looked up to meet his heavy-lidded gaze. “What do you think Champtois will ask for it?”
“You want to buy it, Miss Trent?” he asked. “I strongly doubt your elders will approve of such a purchase. Or have English notions of propriety undergone a revolution while I’ve been away?”
“Oh, it isn’t for me,” she said. “It’s for my grandmot
her.”
She had to give him credit. He never turned a hair.
“Ah, well, then,” he said. “That’s different.”
“For her birthday,” Jessica explained. “Now, if you’ll pardon me, I had better extract Bertie from his negotiations. The tone of his voice tells me he’s trying to count and, as you so perceptively remarked, that isn’t good for him.”
He could pick her up with one hand, Dain thought as he watched her saunter across the shop. Her head scarcely reached his breastbone, and even with the overloaded bonnet, she couldn’t weigh eight stone.
He was used to towering over women—over mostly everybody—and he had learned to feel comfortable in his oversize body. Sports—boxing and fencing, especially—had taught him to be light on his feet.
Next to her, he had felt like a great lummox. A great, ugly, stupid lummox. She had known perfectly well what sort of watch the curst thing was all along. The question was, What sort of curst thing was she? The chit had stared straight into his blackguard’s face and not batted an eye. He had stood much too close to her and she had not budged.
Then she had taken out a magnifying glass, of all things, and evaluated the lewd timepiece as calmly as though it were a rare edition of Fox’s Book of Martyrs.
He wished now he had paid more attention to Trent’s references to his sister. The trouble was, if a man paid attention to anything Bertie Trent said, that man was certain to go howling mad.
Lord Dain had scarcely completed the thought when Bertie shouted, “No! Absolutely not! You just encourage her, Jess. I won’t have it! You ain’t to sell it to her, Champtois.”
“Yes, you will, Champtois,” Miss Trent said in very competent French. “There is no need to regard my little brother. He has no authority over me whatsoever.” She obligingly translated for her brother, whose face turned a vivid red.
“I ain’t little! And I’m head of the curst family. And I—”
“Go play with the drummer boy, Bertie,” she said. “Or better yet, why don’t you take your charming friend out for a drink?”