Lord of Scoundrels

by Loretta Chase

Women…sighing and salivating…over his magnificent physique. Maybe the brutal bedding had destroyed a part of her brain.

“I was not thinking clearly then,” he said. “I was at the mercy of my delicate nerves.

“Good heavens, that sounds like a flat-out compliment.” He laid his hand over his melting heart. “And on my intellect, no less. My primitive, male intellect. I do believe I shall swoon.” His gaze slid to her décolletage. “Maybe I’d better lie down.

She let out a small sigh. “I daresay I was finished the day I met you.”

But he was an animal. She had only to smile at him and the monstrous, brutal need swelled inside him, smothering intellect and demolishing the woefully thin veneer of civilized male.

He decided not to try any more syllables of anything.

“You were not supposed to have the face of a dé Medici prince. You were not supposed to have the physique of a Roman god. I wasn’t prepared for that. I had no defenses ready.” With a small sigh, she brought her hands to his shoulders. “I still haven’t. Physically, I cannot resist you at all.”

He watched the graceful movement of her slight body as she climbed onto the bed and settled back against the pillows, unashamed, uninhibited, unafraid. “I almost wish I could be naked all the time,” she said softly. “I love the way you look at me.”

Then the world shook for him as well, and if it had ended in that instant, he would have gone to damnation happily, because she clung to him and kissed him as though there were no tomorrow and she would hold and want him forever. And when the world exploded, and he spilled himself into her, it was as though his soul spilled, too, and he would have given up that soul gladly, if that were the price for the moment of pure happiness she gave him.

She was buttering a piece of scone, oblivious, as usual, to the cataclysm she’d just set off.

as though everything had been thoroughly explained and settled and not a single fragment of the sky had fallen.

For the first time, Dain had an inkling of what it must feel like to be Bertie Trent, owning the necessary human quantity of grey matter, but possessing no notion how to make it function. Perhaps, Dain thought, Trent hadn’t been born that way after all. Perhaps he had simply been incapacitated by a lifetime of explosions.

Perhaps the term femme fatale ought to be taken more literally. Perhaps it was the brain she was fatal to. Not my brain, Dain resolved. She is not go...

She should have also realized, though, that the difficulty lay deeper. She should have put the clues together: his acute sensibility, his mistrust of women, his edginess in his family home, his bitterness toward his mother, the portrait of his forbidding father, and Dain’s contradictory behavior toward Jessica herself. She’d known—hadn’t every instinct told her?—he badly needed her, needed something from her. He needed what every human being needed: love.

But he needed it far more than many, because, apparently, he hadn’t had so much as a whiff of it since he was a babe.

Then Dain wouldn’t have looked up at her as he had, and she wouldn’t have seen the lonely little boy in him. She would not have grieved for that child, and Dain would not have seen the grief in her eyes.

Now he would think she felt sorry for him—or worse, that she’d deliberately lured him into betraying himself. He was probably furious with her. Don’t, she prayed silently. Be angry if you must, but don’t turn your back and walk away.

She was not, in short, to try to get under his skin or—heaven forfend!—weasel her way into his black, rotten heart.

This was not in the least fair, considering that the beast had already crept under her skin and was rapidly fastening like a pernicious parasite upon her heart. He didn’t even have to work at it. She was falling in love with him—in spite of everything and against her better judgment—more slowly, yes, but just as inexorably as she’d fallen in lust with him. That didn’t mean, however, that she wasn’t strongly tempted to do him a violent injury. When it came to being exasperating, Dain was a genius. By Friday, she was debating the relative merits of putting another bullet through him and trying to decide which portion of his anatomy she could most easily live without.

By Saturday, she’d decided that his brain was probably th...

“Dain, the woman is one matter,” she said. “The child is another. He did not ask to have her for a mother, any more than he asked to be born. She was exceedingly unkind to use him as she did today. No child should be subjected to such a scene.

Above all, he didn’t want her to comprehend, any more than he wanted to himself, what he’d felt when he’d looked down into that face, into the devil’s mirror.

“I am tired of this,” she said. “I am tired of your mistrust. I am tired of being accused of manipulating and patronizing and…bothering. I am tired of trying to deal with a consistently unreasonable man as though he were a reasonable one. I am tired of having every effort to reach you thrown back at me with insult.”

He would have to stop viewing the present—and her especially—through the warped spectacles of the past. He would have to learn who his wife was and deal with that woman, not the general species, Female, he viewed with such bitter contempt. He would have to learn it all the hard way, because she had a more urgent problem to spend her energy upon at present.

If Dain had been in the least superstitious, he might have believed that another woman’s soul had entered Jessica’s beautiful body. A week with this amiable, blindly obedient stranger left him acutely uncomfortable. After two weeks, he was wretched.

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.

“Yes.” He swallowed a gulp of stinging air. “I know, but I can’t think it out. My brain…seizes up. Paralyzed.” He forced out a short laugh. “Ridiculous.”

He’d received his wishes, and he knew now he could and would endure anything, as long as she didn’t leave him.

He swallowed nausea and pride in one gulp. “Jess, the only unforgivable thing you can do is leave me,” he said. “Se mi lasci mi uccido. If you leave me, I’ll kill myself.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I should never leave you. Really, Dain, I cannot think where you get such addled ideas.”

What he is, is frightened and confused, and painfully aware that he is not like other children—and no one wants him.” She paused. “Except me. If I had pretended I didn’t want him, his mother might not have demanded so much. But I could not pretend, and add to the child’s misery.”

“I do not see what is so shocking. I am merely suggesting you behave in your customary style. You stomp in and take over and tell Charity to go to blazes. And to hell with what everyone else thinks.”

But then, Jessica thought, Dain did not handle his emotional problems well. He had only three methods for dealing with “bother”: knock it down, frighten it away, or buy it off. When the methods didn’t work, he was at a loss. And so he had a tantrum.

“If you run away,” Dain said fiercely, “I shall hunt you down. I shall follow you to the ends of the earth.”

With a short laugh, he turned to her. “We? It isn’t ‘we’ at all, as you know perfectly well. It’s ‘Dain,’ the pitiable, henpecked fellow who must do exactly as his wife tells him, if he knows what’s good for him.” “If you were henpecked, you would obey me blindly,” she said. “But that is not the case at all. You have sought an explanation of my motives, and you are now attempting to deduce Charity’s. You are also preparing to deal with your son. You are trying to put yourself in his shoes, so that you may quickly make sense of any troublesome reactions and respond intelligently and efficiently.” She drew closer and patted his neckcloth. “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.”

She wrapped her arms about his waist and laid her head against his chest. “Not merely ‘fond,’ but ‘immensely fond.’ Oh, Dain, I do believe I shall swoon.” “Not now,” he said crossly. “I haven’t time to pick you up....

Phelps eyed his master’s left arm, which Dain had freed from the sling the instant he was out of sight of the house. “Lost your arm saddle, did you, me lord?”

That child had prayed, not knowing what he prayed for. He had not known what his sin was, or what his mother’s was. He had known, though, that he was alone. Dain knew what it was to be alone, unwanted, frightened, confused, as Jessica had said of his son. He knew what this hideous child felt. He, too, had been hideous and unwanted.

Dain had not been loved, but his mother had left him safe enough. He’d been looked after, provided for. His mother had not taken him with her…where he would surely have died with her, of fever, upon an island on the other side of the world. This boy’s mother had left him to die.

Because Jessica wasn’t here to tell me, Dain added silently.

He looked at Phelps, who was slathering butter on an enormous hunk of bread. “Phelps, my arm works,” said Dain. “So it do,” the coachman said expressionlessly.

Then Dain realized his arm must have been working for some time now, and he hadn’t noticed. How else had he held his son’s head up while spooning tea into him? How else had he carried him and patted his back at the same time? How else had he moved the boy’s rigid body this way and that while bathing him and washing his hair? How else had he dressed him in that pestilentially impractical suit with its rows and rows of buttons?

He had been terrified, yes, that she’d leave him. He realized now that he’d felt that way since the day she’d shot him. He’d feared then that he’d done the unforgivable, that he’d lost her forever. And he had not stopped being afraid. Because the only woman who’d ever cared for him before had abandoned him…because he was a monster, impossible to love. But Jessica said that wasn’t true.

A quicker nod this time. And then, “Yes, Papa.” Yes, Papa. And in Lord Beelzebub’s dark, harsh Dartmoor of a heart, the sweet rain fell and a seedling of love sprouted in the once barren soil.

“All in all, you got off easy,” Dain said, after surveying the damage. “Lucky she hadn’t a pistol on her, aren’t you?”

…it was better to leave him where he would be safe…and provided for. Jessica had told the whore what to say and the whore had done it. Then Dain saw how much trust his wife had placed in him. If she hadn’t, she would have come with him, no matter what he said or did. But she’d trusted…that he’d make the boy feel safe, and make Dominick believe that what he’d been told was true.

“If you do not keep that infernal female out of my way, I’ll drop you both into a bog,”

“To you, my dear Lucia: for bringing my wicked husband into the world…for giving him so much of what was best in you…and for giving him up, so that he would live and grow up into a man…and I would find him.”

She slipped her arm through his, through the one that his own fears and need had paralyzed, and a little boy’s greater fears and need had cured.

“I am so proud of you, Dain. And proud of myself,” she added, looking away and blinking hard, “for having the good sense to marry you.”