Lord of Scoundrels (12 page)

He had not realized, until he offered, how very much her answer did matter. He had not realized until now how boring and depressing Paris and the weeks and months to come would appear when he contemplated her gone…forever.

Though she’d consented, he was still anxious, because she wasn’t his yet, and she might escape after all. Yet his pride wouldn’t let him yield to her. Yield an inch, and a woman would take an ell.

He must begin as he meant to go on, he told himself, and he meant to be master in his own house. He would not be managed. He would not change his ways for anybody, even her. Dain gave the orders; others obeyed.

“
Cara
,” he said.

She met his gaze, her expression wary.

He took her hand. “Pack your bags,” he said softly.

She tried to pull her hand away. He let it go, but only to wrap his good arm about her waist and pull her close and up, off the floor, and clamp his mouth over hers.

It was over in an instant. She scarcely had time to struggle. One swift, brazen kiss…and he let her down and released her. She tottered back a step, her face flushed.

“That’s all the negotiating you get, Jess,” he said, hastily smothering the heat and hunger the too short embrace had stirred. “If you go on arguing, I shall assume you want more.”

“Very well, London it is—but that will cost you, Dain,” she said.

She turned away. “Mr. Herriard, show him no mercy. If he wants blind obedience, he will not get it cheap. I shall expect a king’s ransom in pin money. My own carriages and cattle. Ample portion to issue, female as well as male. Make him howl, Mr. Herriard. If he does not roar and stomp about like an outraged elephant, you may be certain you are not demanding enough.”

“I should pay a great deal,” Dain said, grinning evilly, “for
blind obedience
. I shall begin making a list of commands this very night.” He made her an extravagant bow. “Until the day after tomorrow, then, Miss Trent.”

She curtsied. “Go to blazes, Dain.”

“I shall, undoubtedly—eventually.” He looked to the solicitor. “You may call upon me at two o’clock tomorrow with your infernal documents, Herriard.”

Without waiting for a reply, Dain sauntered from the room.

O
n the way to Calais, Dain had ridden with Bertie outside the coach. At the inns, Dain had retired to the taproom with Bertie while Jessica dined with her grandmother. During the Channel crossing, His Lordship had kept to the opposite end of the French steamer. En route to London, he had again ridden outside the luxurious carriage he’d hired. Once in London, he had deposited her, Bertie, and Genevieve at the door of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Louisa’s house. Jessica had not seen her betrothed since.

Now, a full fortnight after leaving Paris—fourteen days during which her affianced husband seemed determined to ignore her out of existence—he arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon and expected her to drop whatever she was doing to attend to him.

“He wants me to go for a drive?” Jessica said indignantly when her flustered aunt returned to the sitting room to relay Dain’s message. “Just like that? He has suddenly recollected my existence and expects me to come running at the snap of his fingers? Why didn’t you tell him to go to the devil?”

Aunt Louisa sank into a chair, pressing her fingers to her forehead. In the few minutes she’d spent with him, Dain had evidently managed to undermine even her autocratic composure.

“Jessica, pray look out the window,” she said.

Jessica set down her pen upon the writing desk where she’d been battling with the wedding breakfast menu, rose, and went to the window. Upon the street below she saw a handsome black curricle. It was attached to two very large, very temperamental black geldings, which Bertie was struggling mightily to hold. They were snorting and dancing restlessly about. Jessica had no doubt that in a very few minutes they’d be dancing on her brother’s head.

“His Almighty Lordship says he will not leave the house without you.” Aunt Louisa’s voice throbbed with outrage. “I advise you to hurry, before those murderous beasts of his kill your brother.”

In three minutes, a seething Jessica had a bonnet upon her head and her green pelisse snugly fastened over her day frock.

In another two, she was being helped onto the carriage seat. Or
shoved
was more like it, for Dain promptly flung his huge body onto the seat, and she had to wedge herself into a corner to avoid his brawny shoulder. Even so, in the narrow space it was impossible to escape physical contact. His useless left hand lay upon his thigh, and that muscled limb pressed brazenly against hers, as did the allegedly crippled left arm. Their warmth penetrated the thick fabric of her pelisse as well as the muslin frock beneath, to make her skin tingle.

“Comfortable?” he asked with mocking politeness.

“Dain, this curricle is not big enough for the two of us,” she said crossly. “You’re crushing me.”

“Maybe you’d better sit on my lap, then,” he said.

Suppressing the urge to slap the smirk off his face, she turned her attention to her brother, who was still fumbling about the horses’ heads. “Confound you, Bertie, get away from there!” she snapped. “Do you want them to mash your skull upon the paving stones?”

Dain laughed and gave the beasts leave to start, and Bertie hastily stumbled back to the safety of the sidewalk.

A moment later, the curricle was hurtling at a breakneck pace through the crowded West End streets. Jammed, however, between the high, cushioned side of the carriage seat and the rock-hard body of her demonic betrothed, Jessica knew she was in small danger of tumbling out. She leaned back and contemplated Dain’s Steeds from Hell.

They were the worst-tempered horses she’d ever encountered in her life. They fussed and snorted about and objected to everything and everybody that strayed into their path. They tried to trample pedestrians. They exchanged equine insults with every horse they met. They tried to knock over lampposts and curb posts, and strove to collide with every vehicle that had the effrontery to share the same street with them.

Even when they reached Hyde Park, the animals showed no signs of tiring. They tried to run down the workmen finishing the new archway at Hyde Park Corner. They threatened to stampede down Rotten Row—upon which no vehicle but the monarch’s was permitted.

They succeeded in none of their fiendish enterprises, however. Though he waited until the last minute, Dain quelled all attempts at mayhem. To Jessica’s mingled annoyance and admiration, he did so without seeming to make the slightest effort, despite having to drive with only one hand.

“I suppose there wouldn’t be any challenge in it,” she said, thinking aloud, “if your cattle behaved themselves.”

He smoothly drew the right one back from imminent collision with the statue of Achilles and turned the satanic beasts westward into the Drive. “Perhaps your ill temper has communicated itself to them, and they’re frightened. They don’t know where to run, what to do. Is that it, Nick, Harry? Afraid she’ll shoot you?”

The beasts tossed their heads and answered with evil horsey laughter.

Leave it to Dain, she thought, to give his horses Lucifer’s nicknames. And leave it to him to own animals who fully merited the names.

“You’d be ill tempered, too,” she said, “if you’d spent the last week wrestling with guest lists and wedding breakfast menus and fittings and a lot of pestering relatives. You’d be cross, too, if every tradesman in London were besieging your house, and if your drawing room had come to look like a warehouse, heaped with catalogs and samples. They have been plaguing me since the morning our betrothal announcement appeared in the paper.”

“I shouldn’t be ill tempered in the least,” he said, “because I should never be so cork-brained as to let myself be bothered.”

“You’re the one who insisted upon the grand wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square,” she said. “Then you left it all to me. You haven’t made the smallest pretense of helping.”

“
I?
Help?” he asked incredulously. “What the devil are servants for, you little nitwit? Did I not tell you to send the bills to me? If no one else in the household is competent to do the work, then hire somebody. If you want to be a wealthy marchioness, why don’t you act like one? The working classes work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “The upper classes tell them what to do. You should not upset the social order. Look at what happened in France. They overthrew the established order decades ago, and what have they to show for it? A king who dresses and behaves like a bourgeois, open sewers in their grandest neighborhoods, and not a decently lit street, except about the Palais Royal.”

She started at him. “I had no idea you were such a Tory snob. Certainly one couldn’t tell, given your choice of companions.”

He kept his gaze upon the horses. “If you’re referring to the tarts, may I remind you that they’re hired help.”

The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of his bed partners. Jessica did not want to think about how he’d amused himself at night while she lay sleepless in her bed, fretting about the wedding night and her lack of experience—not to mention her lack of the Rubenesque figure he was so revoltingly partial to.

Gloomily certain that her marriage would be a debacle—no matter what Genevieve said—Jessica did not want to care whether she pleased him in bed or not. She could not get the better of her pride, though, and that feminine vanity couldn’t bear the prospect of failing to captivate a husband. Any husband, even him. Neither of Genevieve’s spouses had ever dreamt of straying, nor had any of the lovers she’d discreetly taken during her long widowhood.

But now was hardly the time to wrestle with that daunting problem, Jessica told herself. It made more sense to take the opportunity to get some practical matters sorted out. Like the guest list.

“I know where your female companions fit on your social scale,” she said. “The men are another matter. Mr. Beaumont, for instance. Aunt Louisa says one may not invite him to the wedding breakfast because he isn’t good ton. But he is your friend.”

“You bloody well better not invite him,” Dain said, his jaw hardening. “Buggering sod tried to spy on me when I was with a whore. Invite him to the wedding and the swine will think he’s invited to attend the wedding night as well. What with the opium and drink, he probably can’t get his own rod to stand to attention—so he watches someone else do it.”

Jessica discovered that the image of Rubenesque trollops writhing in his lap wasn’t nearly so agitating as what now appeared in her mind’s eye: six and a half feet of dark, naked,
aroused
male.

She had a good idea of what arousal looked like. She’d seen some of Mr. Rowlandson’s erotic engravings. She wished she hadn’t. She didn’t want so vivid an image of Dain doing with a voluptuous whore what the men in Rowlandson’s pictures had been doing.

The picture hung in her mind, bold as the illuminations displayed during national celebrations, and it twisted her insides into knots and made her want to kill somebody.

She was not simply jealous, she was madly so—and he’d put her into this mortifying state with but a few careless words. Now she looked into the future, and saw him doing it again and again, until he made her completely insane.

She should not let him do it to her, Jessica knew. She should not be jealous of his tarts. She should thank her lucky stars for them, because he’d spend as little time as possible with her, while she would be a wealthy noblewoman, free to conduct her life as she wished. She’d told herself this a thousand times at least, since the day he’d so insolently proposed and she’d stupidly let her heart soften.

Lecturing herself didn’t do any good. She knew he was perfectly awful and he’d used her abominably and he was incapable of affection and he was wedding her mainly for revenge…and she wanted him to want only her, all the same.

“Have I finally shocked you?” Dain asked. “Or are you merely sulking? The silence has become deafening.”

“I am shocked,” she said tartly. “It would never occur to me that you would mind being watched. You seem to delight in public scenes.”

“Beaumont was watching through a
peephole
,” Dain said. “In the first place, I can’t abide sneaks. In the second, I paid for a whore—not to perform, gratis, for an audience. Third, there are certain activities I prefer to conduct in private.”

The carriage drive at this point began to veer northward, away from the banks of the Serpentine. The horses struggled to continue along the riverbank, aiming at a stand of trees. Dain smoothly corrected their direction without appearing to take any notice of what he was doing.

“At any rate, I felt obliged to clarify my rules with the aid of my fists,” he went on. “It’s more than possible Beaumont holds a grudge. I shouldn’t put it past him to take out his ill feeling on you. He’s a coward and a sneak and he has a nasty habit of…” He trailed off, frowning. “At any rate,” he went on, his expression grim, “you’re to have nothing to do with him.”

It took her a moment to grasp the implications of the command, and in that moment the world seemed to grow marginally brighter and her heart a cautious degree lighter. She shifted sideways to scrutinize his glowering profile. “That sounds shockingly…protective.”

“I paid for you,” he said coldly. “You’re mine. I look after what’s mine. I shouldn’t let Nick or Harry near him either.”

“By gad—do you mean to say I am as important a possession as your
cattle?
” She pressed her hand to her heart. “Oh, Dain, you are too devastatingly romantic. I am altogether overcome.”

He brought his full attention upon her for a moment, and his sullen gaze dropped to where her hand was. She hastily returned it to her lap.

Frowning, he turned back to the horses. “That overgarment thing, the what-you-call-it,” he said testily.

“My pelisse? What’s wrong with it?”

“You filled it better the last time I saw it,” he said. “In Paris. When you burst into my party and bothered me.” He steered the beasts right, into a tree-lined avenue a few yards south of the guard-house. “When you assaulted my virtue. Surely you remember. Or did it merely seem to fit better because you were wet?”

She remembered. More important,
he
did—in sufficient detail to notice a few pounds’ shrinkage. Her mood lightened another several degrees.

“You could throw me into the Serpentine and find out,” she said.

The short avenue led to a small, thickly shaded circular drive. The trees ringing it shut out the rest of the park. In a short while, the five o’clock promenade would begin, and this secluded area, like the rest of Hyde Park, would be crammed with London’s fashionables. At present, however, it was deserted.

Dain drew the curricle to a halt and set the brake. “You two settle down,” he warned the horses. “Make the least bother, and you’ll find yourselves hauling barges in Yorkshire.”

His tone, though low, carried the clear signal of Obedience or Death. The animals responded to it just as though they were human. Instantly they became the most subdued, docile pair of geldings Jessica had ever seen.

Dain turned his moody black gaze upon her. “Now, as to you, Miss Termagant Trent—”

“I love these pet names,” she said, gazing soulfully up into his eyes. “Nitwit. Sapskull. Termagant. How they make my heart flutter!”

“Then you’ll be in raptures with a few other names I have in mind,” he said. “How can you be such an idiot? Or have you done it on purpose? Look at you!” He addressed this last to her bodice. “At this rate, there won’t be anything left of you by the wedding day. When was the last time you ate a proper meal?” he demanded.

Jessica supposed that, in Dain’s Dictionary, this qualified as an expression of concern.

“I did not do it on purpose,” she said. “You have no idea what it’s like under Aunt Louisa’s roof. She conducts wedding preparations as generals conduct warfare. The household has been in pitched battle since the day we arrived. I could leave them to fight it out among themselves, but I should not care for the result—and you would detest it. My aunt’s taste is appalling. Which means I have no choice but to be involved, night and day. Then, because it takes all my will and energy to maintain control, I’m too tired and vexed to eat a proper meal—even if the servants were capable of making one, which they aren’t, because she’s worn them to a frazzle, too.”