Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

“Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said. She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”

Lmao get him

I advise you to set your hooks and reel him in.” Jessica took a long swallow of her cognac. “This is not a trout, Genevieve. This is a great, hungry shark.” “Then use a harpoon.”

Hers was a tone and manner that assured the listener of only two choices: obedience or death. It proved as effective in this case as in most others.

and buried his grieving heart, as he always did, under laughter.

“Did you know that Shelley’s first wife drowned herself in the Serpentine?” “Is my first wife considering the same?” he asked, eyeing her uneasily. “Certainly not. Genevieve says that killing oneself on account of a man is inexcusably gauche. I was merely making conversation.”

A bloodred stone for the brave girl who’d shed his blood. And diamonds flashing fiery sparks, because lightning had flashed the first time she’d kissed him.

He would go away, and calm down, and put matters into perspective, and when he returned he would… Well, he didn’t know precisely what he would do, but that was because he wasn’t calm. When he was, he would figure it out.

This is so me fr

And what of me? he wanted to cry. You don’t know what it was like for me, the hideous thing she left behind, shut out, shunned, mocked, abused. Left…to endure…and pay, dearly, for what others took for granted: tolerance, acceptance, a woman’s soft hand.

Where in the name of heaven had he obtained the idea she was fragile or missish? This was the woman who’d shot him!

After three weeks, he was desperate. He would have settled for anything vaguely like affection: one “blockhead” or “clodpole”—a priceless vase hurled at his head—his shirts in shreds—a row, please God, just one.

“Go ahead. Tell me that I’m ‘humoring’ you or ‘managing’ you or whatever other obnoxious wifely thing I am doing.” “Jessica, you are a pain in the arse, do you know that?” He scowled at her. “If I were not so immensely fond of you, I should throw you out the window.”

“I do not mind starting my family with an eight-year-old boy,” she said. “One can communicate with children at that age. They are very nearly human.”