He’d discovered that in return for the privilege of marrying his blushing rosebud, he would be permitted to pay all of her late brother’s debts, as well as her uncle’s, aunt’s, mother’s, and her own, now and forever, ’til death do us part, amen.
Dain had decided it was a foolhardy investment and said so.
He was sternly reminded that he’d compromised an innocent girl of good family.
“Then shoot me,” he’d replied. And walked out.
No one had tried to shoot him. Weeks later, back in Paris, he’d learned that Susannah had wed Lord Linglay.
Linglay was a sixty-five-year-old rouge-wearing roué who looked about ninety, collected obscene snuffboxes, and pinched and fondled every serving girl foolish enough to come within reach of his palsied hands. He had not been expected to survive the wedding night.
He had not only survived, but he’d managed to impregnate his young bride, and had continued to do so at a brisk pace. She’d scarcely get one brat out before the next one was planted.
Lord Dain was imagining in detail his former love in the arms of her painted, palsied, sweating, and drooling spouse, and savoring those details, when the bells of Notre Dame clanged in the distance.
He realized they were rather more distant than they ought to be, if he was upon the Rue de Rivoli, where he lived and ought to be by now.
Then he saw he was in the wrong street, the wrong neighborhood altogether.
His baffled glance fell upon a familiar-looking lamppost.
His spirits, lightened by images of Susannah’s earthly purgatory, instantly sank again and dragged him, mind, body, and soul, into the mire.
Touch me. Hold me. Kiss me.
He turned the corner, into the dark, narrow street, where the blank, windowless walls could see and tell nothing. He pressed his forehead against the cold stone and endured, because he hadn’t any choice. He couldn’t stop what twisted and ached inside him.
I need you.
Her lips clinging to his…her hands, holding him fast. She was soft and warm and she tasted of rain, and it was sweet, unbearably sweet, to believe for a moment that she wanted to be in his arms.
He’d believed it for that moment, and wanted to believe still, and he hated himself for what he wanted, and hated her for making him want it.
And so, setting his jaw, Lord Dain straightened and went on his way, enduring, while he told himself she’d pay. In time.
Everyone did. In time.
Chapter 6
On the afternoon following Madame Vraisses’ party, an unhappy Roland Vawtry paid Francis Beaumont two hundred pounds.
“I saw it myself,” Vawtry said, shaking his head. “From the window. Even so, I shouldn’t have believed it if everyone else hadn’t seen it as well. He went right out the door and chased her down the street. To scare her off, I suppose. Daresay she’s packing her bags this instant.”
“She was at the unveiling celebration last night,” Beaumont said, smiling. “Cool and collected and managing her swarm of panting admirers with smooth aplomb. When Miss Trent does decide to pack, it will be her trousseau. And the linens will be embellished with aDas inDain.”
Vawtry bridled. “It isn’t at all like that. I know what happened. Dain doesn’t like interruptions. He doesn’t like uninvited guests. And when he doesn’t like something, he makes it go away. Or he smashes it. If she’d been a man, he would have smashed her. Since she wasn’t, he made her go away.”
“Three hundred,” said Beaumont. “Three hundred says she’s his marchioness before the King’s Birthday.”
Vawtry suppressed his own smile. Whatever Dain did or didn’t do with Miss Jessica Trent, he would not marry her.
Which wasn’t to say that Dain would never wed. But that would be only to heap more shame, shock, and disgust upon his family, both the few living—a handful of distant cousins—and the legion dead. The bride, beyond doubt, would be the mistress, widow, or daughter of a notorious traitor or murderer. She would also be a famous whore. The ideal would be a half-Irish mulatto Jewess brothel keeper whose last lover had been hanged for sodomizing and strangling the Duke of Kent’s only legitimate offspring, the nine-year-old Alexandrina Victoria. A Marchioness of Dain who was a gently bred virgin of respectable—if eccentric—family was out of the question.
Dain’s being married—to anybody—in a mere two months or so was so far out of the question as to belong to another galaxy.
Vawtry accepted the wager.
This was not the only wager placed in Paris that week, and not the largest in which the names Dain and Trent figured.
