“I hate to leave you alone,” he said.
“I don’t faint,” she said. “I don’t indulge in hysterics. I’ll be quite all right.”
He gave her a worried glance, then hurried away.
As soon as he was gone, Jessica pulled off his coat and restored her gown to rights as best she could without her maid. She couldn’t reach all the fastenings, most of which were in back, but she found enough to secure the bodice, so that she didn’t have to hold it up. While she struggled with the ties and hooks, she reviewed her situation with brutal objectivity.
She knew it hardly mattered that Dain hadn’t ravished her. What mattered was that it had been Dain with whom she’d been caught. That was enough to make her damaged goods in the eyes of all the world.
Within less than twenty-four hours, the story would reach every corner of Paris. Within a week, it would reach London. She could see well enough what the future held.
No self-respecting gentleman would sully his family name by marrying Dain’s leavings. After this, she wouldn’t have a prayer of attracting to her shop the hosts of rich, respectable people her success—and her own respectability—depended upon. Ladies would hold their skirts to keep from brushing against her when they passed, or cross the street to avoid contamination. Gentlemen would cease being gentlemen and subject her to the same indignities they offered the lowliest streetwalker.
With a handful of words, in short, Dain had destroyed her life. On purpose.
All he’d needed to do was sweep one of his deadly glances over them and tell them they’d seen nothing, and they would have decided it was healthiest to agree with him. All the world feared him, even his so-called friends. He could make them do and say and believe what he wanted.
But all he’d wanted was revenge—for whatever it was his twisted mind believed Jessica had done to him. He’d taken her to this garden with no other purpose. She wouldn’t have put it past him to have dropped a hint beforehand to somebody, to make sure the discovery would take place at the most humiliating moment: her bodice undone and sagging to her waist, his tongue down her throat, his filthy hand up her skirt.
Though her face heated at the recollection, she refused to feel ashamed of what she’d done. Her behavior might be accounted indecent by Society’s rules, and misguided according to her own, but it wasn’t evil. She was a healthy young woman who had simply yielded to feelings countless other women yielded to—and might do with impunity if they were married or widowed and discreet about it.
Even though she wasn’t married or widowed, and by normal rules should have been considered out of bounds, she couldn’t, in all fairness, blame him for taking advantage of what was offered so willingly.
But she could and would blame him for refusing to shield her. He had nothing to lose, and he’d known very well that she had everything to lose. He could have helped her. It would have cost him nothing, scarcely an effort. Instead, he’d insulted and abandoned her.
That was the evil. That was the base, unforgivable act.
And that, she resolved, was what he’d pay for.
At half past four in the morning, Dain was holding court in Antoine’s, a restaurant in the Palais Royal. His circle of companions had by this time widened to include a handful of Lady Wallingdon’s guests: Sellowby, Goodridge, Vawtry, and Esmond. The subject of Jessica Trent was scrupulously avoided. Instead, the fight in the cardroom, which Dain had missed—between a drunken Prussian officer and a French republican—and the ensuing mayhem were discussed in detail and at argumentative length.
Even the tarts felt obliged to express their opinions, the one on Dain’s right knee taking the republican side, while the one on the left was squarely with the Prussian. Both argued with a level of ignorance, both political and grammatical, that would have made Bertie Trent seem an intellectual prodigy.
Dain wished he hadn’t thought of Trent. The instant the brother’s image flickered in Dain’s mind, the sister’s arose: Jessica gazing up into his eyes from under an overdecorated bonnet…watching his face while he unbuttoned her glove…hitting him with her bonnet and her small gloved fist…kissing him while lightning flashed and thunder crashed…whirling round a dance floor with him, her skirts rustling about his legs, her face glowing with excitement. And later, in his arms…a fire-storm of images, feelings, and one sweet, anguished moment…when she had kissed his big, loathsome nose…and cut his heart to pieces and put it back together again and made him believe he was not a monster to her. She had made him believe he was beautiful.
Lies, he told himself.
They were all lies and tricks, to trap him. He’d ruined her brother. She had nothing left. Thus, like Susannah, whose brother had gambled away the family fortune, Jessica Trent was desperate enough to set the oldest trap in history to catch herself a rich, titled husband.
But now Dain found himself considering the circle of men about him. All were better prospects altogether.
His gaze lingered upon Esmond, who sat beside him, and was the most beautiful man on three continents, and also very possibly—though no one knew for sure—even wealthier than the Marquess of Dain.
Why not Esmond? Dain asked himself. If she needed a rich spouse, why should a quick-witted female like Jessica Trent choose Beelzebub over the Angel Gabriel, hell rather than heaven?
Esmond’s blue gaze met his. “L’amore è cieco,” he murmured in perfect Florentine accents.
Love is blind.
Dain recollected Esmond telling him a few weeks ago about “bad feelings” regardingVingt-Huit, and recalled the events that had taken place almost immediately thereafter. Gazing at him now, Dain had an uncomfortable feeling of his own: that the angelic count was reading his mind, just as he’d read clues, invisible to everyone else, about the now defunct palace of sin.
Dain was opening his mouth to deliver a crushing setdown when Esmond stiffened, and his head turned slightly, his gaze fixing elsewhere while his smile faded.
Dain looked that way, too—toward the door—but at first he could see nothing, because Sellowby had leaned over to refill his glass.
Then Sellowby lounged back again in his chair.
Then Dain saw her.
