“The challenge is to pry Bertie loose from Dain and his circle of oafish degenerates,” Jessica said severely.
“It would be far more profitable to pry Dain loose for yourself,” said her grandmother. “He is very wealthy, his lineage is excellent, he is young, strong, and healthy, and you feel a powerful attraction.”
“He isn’t husband material.”
“What I have described is perfect husband material,” said her grandmother.
“I don’t want a husband.”
“Jessica, no woman does who can regard men objectively. And you have always been magnificently objective. But we do not live in a utopia. If you open your shop, you will doubtless make money. Yet the family will turn their backs upon you, your social credit will sink, Society will pity you—even while they bankrupt themselves to buy your wares. And every coxcomb in London will be making indecent proposals. Yes, it shows courage to undertake such an endeavor when one is in desperate straits. But you are not desperate, my dear. I can support you well enough, if it comes to that.”
“We’ve been over this ground time and again,” Jessica said. “You’re not Croesus, and we both have expensive tastes. Not to mention that you’ll only create more ill will in the family—while I shall seem a great hypocrite, after insisting for years that you owe none of us a farthing, and we’re not your responsibility.”
“You are very proud and brave, which I respect and admire, my dear.” Her grandmother leaned forward to pat Jessica’s knee. “And assuredly, you are the only one who understands me. We have always been more like sisters or very best friends than grandmama and grandchild, have we not? It is as your sister and friend that I tell you Dain is a splendid catch. 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, hungryshark.”
“Then use a harpoon.”
Jessica shook her head.
Genevieve sat back against the pillows and sighed. “Ah well, I shall not nag you. It is most unattractive. I shall simply hope his reaction to you was nothing like yours to him. That is a man who gets what he wants, Jessica, and if I were you, I should not want him to be the one reeling in the line.”
Jessica suppressed a shudder. “No danger of that. He doesn’t want anything to do withladies. According to Bertie, Dain views respectable women as a species of deadly fungus. The only reason he spoke to me was to amuse himself by trying to shock me out of my wits.”
Genevieve chuckled. “The watch, you mean. That was a delicious birthday surprise. More delicious still was Bertie’s expression when I opened the box. I have never seen his face turn quite that shade of crimson before.”
“Probably because you chose to open the gift in the restaurant. With the Comte d’Esmond looking on.”
And that was most exasperating of all, Jessica thought. Why in blazes couldn’t she have fallen in lust with Esmond? He was very wealthy, too. And mind-numbingly handsome. Andcivilized.
“Esmond istrès amusante,” said Genevieve. “Too bad he is already taken. Something very interesting came into his beautiful eyes when he spoke of Mrs. Beaumont.”
Genevieve had mentioned to Esmond the tenuous picture and Jessica’s belief that it was more than it seemed. Esmond had suggested asking Mrs. Beaumont for the names of experts to clean and appraise it. He’d offered to introduce Jessica to her. They’d made an appointment for the following afternoon, when Mrs. Beaumont would be assisting at a benefit for the widow of her former art master.
“Well, we’ll get to see if anything interesting appears in her eyes tomorrow—or today, rather,” said Jessica. She finished her cognac and slid down from the bed. “I wish we were there already. I feel strongly disinclined to sleep. I have the nasty feeling I’m going to dream about ashark.”
Chapter 3
It would have eased Jessica’s mind, could she but have known, that she gave Lord Dain nightmares.
That is to say, his dreams started out well enough, with thoroughly lewd and lascivious activities. Since he’d often dreamt of females he wouldn’t, awake, have touched with the proverbial long pole, the marquess was not alarmed about dreaming of Bertie Trent’s irritating sister. On the contrary, Dain thoroughly enjoyed putting the supercilious bluestocking in her place—on her back, on her knees, and, more than once, in positions he doubted were anatomically possible.
The trouble was, every time, just as he was on the brink of flooding her virginal womb with the hot seed of latent Ballisters, something ghastly happened. In the dream, he would wake up. Sometimes he found himself sinking in a mire. Sometimes he was chained in a foul black cell, with creatures he couldn’t see tearing at his flesh. Sometimes he was lying on a slab in a morgue undergoing an autopsy.
Being a man of considerable intelligence, he had no trouble understanding the symbolism. Every nightmarish thing that had happened was, metaphorically speaking, exactly what did happen to a man when a female got her hooks into him. He did not understand, however, why, in his sleep, his brain had to make such a ghoulish bother about what he already knew.
For years he’d been dreaming about women he had no intention of becoming entangled with. Countless times, awake, he’d imagined that the whore he was with was a lady who’d caught his eye. Not very long ago, he’d pretended a voluptuous French tart was Leila Beaumont, and he’d come away quite as satisfied as if she had been that icy bitch. No,moresatisfied, because the tart had made an excellent show of enthusiasm, whereas the real Leila Beaumont would have dashed out his brains with a blunt instrument.
Dain, in short, had no trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. He had met Jessica Trent and felt a perfectly normal lust. He lusted for virtually every attractive female he saw. He had a prodigious sexual appetite, inherited, he had no doubt, from his hot-blooded Italian whore of a mother and her family. If he lusted for a whore, he paid her and had her. If he lusted for a respectable female, he found a whore as a substitute, paid her, and had her.
That was what he’d done regarding Trent’s sister. Or tried to do—because it still wasn’t properly done.
The dreams weren’t all that thwarted him. The incident atVingt-Huithad not precisely killed his appetite for trollops, but it had left a sour taste in his mouth. He had not returned to Chloe to take up where he’d left off, and he hadn’t taken up any other tart since. He told himself that Beaumont’s voyeuristic tastes were hardly a reason for swearing off whores altogether. Nonetheless, Dain felt extremely reluctant to enter any room with anyfille de joie, which created a serious problem, since he was just fastidious enough to dislike having a female in a reeking Parisian alleyway.
Consequently, between uncooperative dreams and the foul taste in his mouth, he was unable to exorcise his lust for Miss Trent in the tried-and-true fashion. Which meant that, by the time a week had passed, Dain’s temper was badly frayed.
Which was exactly the wrong time for Bertie Trent to tell him that the dirty, mildewed picture Miss Trent had bought for ten sous had turned out to be an extremely valuable Russian icon.
