Lord of Scoundrels (Scoundrels 3)

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.