Every man at the party had examined, at leisure and close quarters, that curving whiteness.
While Dain, like the Prince of Darkness they all believed him to be, stood outside lurking in the shadows.
He did not feel very satanic at the moment. He felt, if the humiliating truth be told, like a starving beggar boy with his nose pressed to the window of a pastry shop.
He watched her climb into the carriage. The door closed and the vehicle lumbered away.
Though no one was by to see or hear, he laughed under his breath. He had laughed a great deal this night, but he couldn’t laugh the truth away.
He’d known she was trouble—had to be, as every respectable female was.
“Wife or mistress, it’s all the same,” he’d told his friends often enough. “Once you let a lady—virtuous or not—fasten upon you, you become the owner of a piece of troublesome property, where the tenants are forever in revolt and into which you are endlessly pouring money and labor. All for the occasional privilege—at her whim—of getting what you could get from any streetwalker for a few shillings.”
He’d wanted her, yes, but this was hardly the first time in his life the unacceptable sort of female had stirred his lust. He lusted, but he was always aware of the miry trap into which such women must—because they’d been born and bred for that purpose—lure him.
And the hateful truth was, he’d walked straight into it, and somehow deluded himself he hadn’t—or if he had, it was nothing Dain need fear, because by now there was no pit deep enough, no mire thick enough, to hold him.
Then what holds you here?he asked himself.What mighty force dragged you here, to gaze stupidly, like a moonstruck puppy, at a house, because she was in it? And what chains held you here, waiting for a glimpse of her?
A touch. A kiss.
That’s revolting, he told himself.
So it was, but it was the truth, and he hated it and hated her for making it true.
He should have dragged her from the carriage, he thought, and pulled those ladylike fripperies from her hair, and taken what he wanted and walked away, laughing, like the conscienceless monster he was.
What or who was there to stop him? Before the Revolution, countless corrupt aristocrats had done the same. Even now, who would blame him? Everyone knew what he was. They would say it was her own fault for straying into his path. The law would not avenge her honor. It would be left to Bertie Trent…at pistol point at twenty paces.
With a grim smile, Dain left his gloomy post and sauntered down the street. Trapped he was, but he’d been trapped before, he reminded himself. He’d stood outside before, too, aching and lonely because he would not be let in. But always, in the end, Dain won. He had made his schoolboy tormentors respect and envy him. He had paid his father back tenfold for every humiliation and hurt. He’d become the old bastard’s worst nightmare of hell in this life and, one hoped, his most bitter torment in the hereafter.
Even Susannah, who’d led him about by the nose for six wretched months, had spent every waking minute thereafter having her own pretty nose rubbed in the consequences.
True, Dain hadn’t seen it that way at the time, but a man couldn’t see anything properly while a woman was digging her claws into him and tearing him to pieces.
He could see now, clearly: a summer day in 1820, and another funeral, nearly a year after his father’s.
This time it was Wardell inside the gleaming casket heaped with flowers. During a drunken fight over a whore in the stable yard of an inn, he had fallen onto the cobblestones and cracked his skull.
After the funeral, Susannah, the eldest of Wardell’s five younger sisters, had drawn the Marquess of Dain aside and thanked him for coming all the way from Paris. Her poor brother—she’d bravely wiped away a tear—had thought the world of him. She’d laid her hand over his. Then, coloring, she’d snatched it away.
“Ah, yes, my blushing rosebud,” Dain murmured cynically. “That was neatly done.”
And it had been, for with that touch Susannah had drawn him in. She’d lured him into her world—polite Society—which he’d years earlier learned to shun, because there he had only to glance at a young lady to turn her complexion ashen and send her chaperons into hysterics. The only girls who’d ever danced with him were his friends’ sisters, and that was a disagreeable duty they dispatched as quickly as possible.
But not Susannah. She couldn’t dance because she was in mourning, but she could talk and did, and looked up at him as though he were a knight in shining armor, Sir Galahad himself.
After four months, he was permitted to hold her gloved hand for twenty seconds. It took him another two months to work up the courage to kiss her.
In her uncle’s rose garden, the chivalrous knight had planted a chaste kiss upon his lady’s cheek.
Almost in the same instant, as though on cue, a flock of shrieking women—mother, aunt, sisters—flew out of the bushes. The next he knew, he was closeted in the study with Susannah’s uncle and sternly commanded to declare his intentions. Naive, besotted puppy that he’d been, Dain had declared them honorable.
In the next moment, he had a pen in his hand and an immense heap of documents before him, which he was commanded to sign.
Even now, Dain could not say where or how he’d found the presence of mind to read them first. Perhaps it had to do with hearing two commands in a row, and being unaccustomed to taking orders of any kind.
Whatever the reason, he’d set down the pen and read.
