Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

It had been ridiculous, he realized now, as he searched the cool grey depths of her eyes. It had been absurd to be outraged with her. The scene in the Wallingdons’ garden hadn’t been her doing. He was beginning to suspect whose it had been. If the suspicion was correct, he had not only behaved abominably, but had been unforgivably stupid.

The obsequious worm had even dared to suggest a row of gems whose initials formed a message: Diamond-Emerald-Amethyst-Ruby-Epidote-Sapphire-Turquoise…for DEAREST. Dain had very nearly lost his breakfast.

He had told himself he didn’t care whether she liked it or not. She’d have to wear it anyway. He’d found it a great deal easier to pretend when she wasn’t near. Easier to make believe he’d chosen that particular ring simply because it was the finest. Easier to hide in his dark wasteland of a heart the real reason: that it was a tribute, its symbolism as mawkish as any the jeweler’s clerk had proposed.

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 took the ring from her and slipped it over her finger, then quickly drew his hand away, afraid she’d discern the trembling.

In which case, Dain decided, it would be pointless—as well as a waste of energy better saved for the wedding night—to take Beaumont apart and break him into very small pieces. By rights, Dain ought to thank him instead. But then, the Marquess of Dain was not very polite.

Jessica was not to be pestered and she was not to be contradicted. She answered to nobody but Dain, and he answered to nobody but the king, and then only if he was in the mood.

The next day, Dain’s private secretary had arrived with a brace of servants and taken over. After that, all Jessica had had to do was give an occasional order and accustom herself to being treated like an exceedingly precious and delicate, all-wise and altogether perfect princess.

“All a male need do,” she’d told him patiently, “is unfasten his trouser buttons and aim somewhere, and it’s done. I am a female, however, and neither my plumbing nor my garments are so accommodating.”

The carriage halted. Suppressing a desperate urge to scream at the coachman to keep on driving—until Judgment Day, preferably—Dain helped his wife out.

He would crush her. He would break something, tear something. And if he somehow managed not to kill her and if the experience did not turn her into a babbling lunatic, she would run away screaming if he ever tried to touch her again. She would run away, and she would never again kiss him and hold him and—

Dain’s nerves were already in a highly sensitive state. The realization that he must introduce this repellent figure to his dainty, elegant, pure wife stretched those frayed nerves another dangerous notch.

“That’s what he wants. To the body, my dear. The oaf’s head is thick as an anvil.”

Fortunately, her cries could not be heard over the shouts of the assembled onlookers, or Dain might have been distracted—with unfortunate results—by his dainty wife’s bloodthirsty advice.

His eyes widened briefly in astonishment when they lit upon her, and an odd, pained look crossed his features. But in the next instant, the familiar, mocking expression was in place. “My lady,” he said, and swept her a theatrical bow.

Reason told her there must be a typically crack-brained masculine reason for his behavior, and sooner or later she’d figure it out, and it would turn out to have nothing to do with trying to hurt her feelings or make her feel undesirable or any of the other gloomy sensations she was experiencing at the moment.

Satan’s blacksmith was using his head as an anvil again. Lucifer’s chief cook was mixing a foul brew in his mouth. At some point during Dain’s pitifully few hours of sleep, the Prince of Darkness had apparently ordered a herd of raging rhinoceroses to stampede over his body.

Whatever conscience Lord Dain possessed had sunk into a fatal decline and expired sometime about his tenth birthday. At the sound of his wife’s voice offering assistance, it rose, like Lazarus, from the dead. It fastened its gnarled fingers upon his heart and let out a shriek that should have shattered the window, the water jug, and the small washstand mirror into which Dain was gazing. Yes, he answered silently. He wanted help. He wanted help being born over again and coming out right this time.

His glance strayed to her, then quickly away. But not quickly enough. Her tangled black hair hung loose about her shoulders, and the faint flush of sleep yet clung to her cheeks, a wash of pearly pink on creamy white porcelain. Never had she appeared more fragile. Though tousled, her face unwashed, her slim body sagging with fatigue, she had never, either, appeared more beautiful.

“In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment,” she said. “It is a curry, spiced with excitement and humor and a healthy dollop of cynicism.” She lowered her lashes. “I think you will eventually make a fine curry, Dain—with a few minor seasoning adjustments.”

As she must. And he would endure whatever he must, to teach her so. He thought of the great rocks he’d pointed out to her hours ago, which centuries of drumming rain and beating wind and bitter cold could not wear down or break down. He made himself a mass of stone like them, and, as he felt her move beside him, he told himself she would never find a foothold; she could no more scale him than she could melt him or wear him down.

She was clutching his coat, making soft, breathless sounds, trying to burrow into his hard body. Like a frightened kitten. But she wasn’t frightened. She trusted him. His own trusting kitten. Innocent. So fragile.

Just like a damned man, he thought exasperatedly. She got what she wanted, then curled up and went to sleep.

Instead, he’d taken pains. He’d taught her pleasure and taken care of her after. Sweet and chivalrous he’d been, truly. Her husband was transforming simple animal attraction into something much more complicated.

He would have asked nothing…or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…

“How dare you?” she said, angrily blinking the tears back. “How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son.”

“Thank you, Dain,” Jessica said, smiling up at him. Then she stepped closer, took a handful of starched and neatly folded neckcloths from the valise, and dropped them on the floor. He looked at her. He looked at the linen upon the floor. She took out a stack of pristine white handkerchiefs and, still smiling, threw them down, too.

“We have been wed scarcely three days,” she said. “You do not desert your new bride for your sapskull friends. You will not make a laughingstock of me. If you are unhappy with me, you say so, and we discuss it—or quarrel, if you prefer. But you do not—”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “If you leave this house, I will shoot your horse out from under you.”

“I will not permit you to desert me,” she said. “You will not take me for granted as Sherburne does his wife, and you will not make all the world laugh at me—or pity me—as they do her. If you cannot bear to miss your precious wrestling match, you can jolly well take me with you.”

“You’re not going to put me out,” she said, retreating to the center of the huge bed. “I’m not a child and I will not be locked in my room.”

a bride, but not a wife.

He was lost in simple animal hunger, as she had been, last night. He wasn’t sorry, merely mindless with primitive male lust. His hand worked feverishly, pulling the gown down, moving over her back, her waist.

It wasn’t the same joy he’d taught her before, but every instinct recognized it and hungered for more. She rocked against him, matching his rhythm, and more came, faster and harder, and faster still…a furious race to the peak…a lightning blast of rapture…and the sweet rain of release.

She would not weep forever, he told himself. And upsetting as it was to hear it and feel the tears trickling over his skin, he knew matters might have been worse. At least she had turned to him, not away. Besides, she was entitled to cry, he supposed. He had been rather unreasonable these last few days. Very well, more than that. He’d been a beast.

He’d been acting like his father. Cold and hostile and rejecting every effort to please. For Jessica had been trying to please, hadn’t she? She had read to him and tried to talk to him and she’d probably thought the portrait of his mother would be a lovely surprise for him. She had wanted him to stay, when any other woman would have been in raptures to be rid of him. She had offered herself to him, when any other woman would have swooned with relief to escape his attentions. And she’d given herself willingly and passionately. He was the one who ought to be weeping, with gratitude.

He’d found a spot of blood on one of the coverlet’s gold dragons and there had been a bit on him, but it was nothing like the carnage his overwrought imagination had pictured these last three days.

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

It was the strain, Dain decided. The trauma of finding himself married, combined with crazed lust for his bride, had been more than his mind could cope with. The portrait of his mother had finished him off. With that, his brain had shut down altogether.

His face set and his body turned to stone, but he couldn’t muster the callous laughter or the clever witticism needed to complete this too familiar scene. He had tasted happiness in her arms, and hope, and he could not let them go without knowing why.

“Jessica, I know I’ve been…difficult,” he said. “All the same—” “Difficult?” She looked up, her grey eyes wide. “You have been impossible. I begin to think you are not right in the upper storey. I knew you wanted me. The one thing I’ve never doubted was that. But getting you into bed—you, the greatest whoremonger in Christendom—gad, it was worse than the time I had to drag Bertie to the tooth-drawer. And if you think I mean to be doing that the rest of our days, you had better think again. The next time, my lord, you will do the seducing—or there won’t be any, I vow.”

“I mean it, Dain. I am sick to death of throwing myself at you. You like me well enough. And if the first bedding didn’t prove we suit in that way at least, then you are a hopeless case, and I wash my hand...

“Worse than…Bertie…to the tooth-drawer.” He gave a shaky laugh. “The tooth-drawer. Oh, Jess.”

“You’re overwrought,” she said. “I should have realized. We’ve both been under a strain. And it’s harder on you because you are so sensitive and emotional.” Sensitive. Emotional. He had the hide of an ox—and about the same intelligence, apparently. But he didn’t contradict her. “A strain, yes,” he said.

“There, you see?” she said, unoffended. “I told you there were other benefits to having a wife. I can come in very handy when you wish to shock your friends.”

With the world securely in order, Dain was able to devote the leisurely bath time to editing his mental dictionary. He removed his wife from the general category labeled “Females” and gave her a section of her own. He made a note that she didn’t find him revolting, and proposed several explanations: (a) bad eyesight and faulty hearing, (b) a defect in a portion of her otherwise sound intellect, (c) an inherited Trent eccentricity, or (d) an act of God. Since the Almighty had not done him a single act of kindness in at least twenty-five years, Dain thought it was about bloody time, but he thanked his Heavenly Father all the same, and promised to be as good as he was capable of being.

In any case, he wouldn’t be able to prevent their coming because there was no way he could keep his hands off her.

He knew a good thing when he had it. He knew that tumbling his wife was about as close to experiencing heaven as he’d ever get. He was far too selfish and depraved by nature to give it up. As long as she was willing, he wasn’t going to worry about consequences. Something horrible was bound to happen, of course, sooner or later. But that was how his life worked. Since he couldn’t prevent it, whatever it was, he might as well take his motto from Horace: Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero. Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow.

Dain kept his gaze on his plate and concentrated on swallowing the morsel he’d just very nearly choked on. She was possessive…about him. The beautiful, mad creature—or blind and deaf creature, or whatever she was—coolly announced it as one might say, “Pass the salt cellar,” without the smallest awareness that the earth had just tilted on its axis.

Not to mention you’d probably shoot me.”