Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

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.

Chapter 6

On the afternoon following Madame Vraisses’ party, an unhappy Roland Vawtry paid Francis Beaumont two hundred pounds.

“I saw it myself,” Vawtry said, shaking his head. “From the window. Even so, I shouldn’t have believed it if everyone else hadn’t seen it as well. He went right out the door and chased her down the street. To scare her off, I suppose. Daresay she’s packing her bags this instant.”

“She was at the unveiling celebration last night,” Beaumont said, smiling. “Cool and collected and managing her swarm of panting admirers with smooth aplomb. When Miss Trent does decide to pack, it will be her trousseau. And the linens will be embellished with a D as in Dain.”

Vawtry bridled. “It isn’t at all like that. I know what happened. Dain doesn’t like interruptions. He doesn’t like uninvited guests. And when he doesn’t like something, he makes it go away. Or he smashes it. If she’d been a man, he would have smashed her. Since she wasn’t, he made her go away.”

“Three hundred,” said Beaumont. “Three hundred says she’s his marchioness before the King’s Birthday.”

Vawtry suppressed his own smile. Whatever Dain did or didn’t do with Miss Jessica Trent, he would not marry her.

Which wasn’t to say that Dain would never wed. But that would be only to heap more shame, shock, and disgust upon his family, both the few living—a handful of distant cousins—and the legion dead. The bride, beyond doubt, would be the mistress, widow, or daughter of a notorious traitor or murderer. She would also be a famous whore. The ideal would be a half-Irish mulatto Jewess brothel keeper whose last lover had been hanged for sodomizing and strangling the Duke of Kent’s only legitimate offspring, the nine-year-old Alexandrina Victoria. A Marchioness of Dain who was a gently bred virgin of respectable—if eccentric—family was out of the question.

Dain’s being married—to anybody—in a mere two months or so was so far out of the question as to belong to another galaxy.

Vawtry accepted the wager.

This was not the only wager placed in Paris that week, and not the largest in which the names Dain and Trent figured.

The prostitutes who’d witnessed Miss Trent’s entry into Dain’s drawing room and his ensuing pursuit told all of their friends and customers about it. The male guests also related the tale, with the usual embellishments, to anyone who’d listen, and that was everyone.

And everyone, of course, had an opinion. Many put money behind their opinions. Within a week, Paris was seething and restless, rather like the Roman mob at the arena, impatiently awaiting the combat to death of its two mightiest gladiators.

The problem was getting the combatants into the same arena. Miss Trent traveled in respectable Society. Lord Dain prowled the demimonde. They were, most inconsiderately, avoiding each other. Neither could be persuaded or tricked into talking about the other.

Lady Wallingdon, who’d resided in Paris eighteen months and had spent most of that time striving, with mixed success, to become its premier hostess, saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and promptly snatched it.

She boldly scheduled a ball on the same day one of her rivals had scheduled a masquerade. It happened to be exactly a fortnight after the Chasing Miss Trent Down the Street Scene. Though Lady Pembury and her two grandchildren did not qualify as the crème de la crème of either Parisian or London society, and though Lady Wallingdon would not have bothered with them in other circumstances, she invited them to her ball.

She also invited Lord Dain.

Then she let everyone know what she’d done. Though she, like at least half of Paris, believed him to be enslaved by Miss Trent, Lady Wallingdon did not expect him to come. Everyone knew that the Marquess of Dain was about as likely to attend a respectable social affair as he was to invite the executioner to test the guillotine’s blade upon his neck.

On the other hand, Dain had already behaved in an unlikely manner regarding Miss Trent, which meant there was a chance. And where there was a chance of something impossible happening, there would always be people wanting to be there in case it did.

In Lady Wallingdon’s case, these turned out to be the very same people she’d invited. Not a single note of regrets arrived. Not even, to her disquiet, Lord Dain’s.

But then, he hadn’t sent an acceptance, either, so at least she didn’t have to pretend she didn’t know whether he’d attend or not, and worry a

bout being caught in a lie. She could keep her other invitees in suspense with a clear conscience. In the meantime, to be on the safe side, she hired a dozen burly French menials to augment her own staff.

Jessica, meanwhile, was acknowledging defeat. After a mere three encounters with Dain, a simple animal attraction had intensified to mindless infatuation. Her symptoms had not simply become virulent; they had become noticeable.