Lord of Scoundrels (18 page)

Then it came, velvet-soft, the one answer she hadn’t expected, and the one, she knew in an instant, she should have predicted.

“I should like to see you try,” he said.

His brain was trying to tell him something, but Dain couldn’t hear it past the clanging in his ears:
crawl…and beg
. He couldn’t think past the mockery he heard in her soft tones and the fury twisting his gut.

And so he locked himself in frigid rage, knowing he was safe there, impervious to hurt. He had not crawled and begged when his eight-year-old world shattered to pieces, when the only thing like love he’d ever known had fled from him and his father had thrust him away. The world had thrust him into privies, taunted and mocked and beat him. The world had recoiled from him and made him pay for every pretty deceit that passed for happiness. The world had tried to beat him down into submission, but he would not submit, and the world had had to learn to live with him on his terms.

As she must. And he would endure whatever he must, to teach her so.

He thought of the great rocks he’d pointed out to her hours ago, which centuries of drumming rain and beating wind and bitter cold could not wear down or break down. He made himself a mass of stone like them, and, as he felt her move beside him, he told himself she would never find a foothold; she could no more scale him than she could melt him or wear him down.

She came onto her knees beside him, and he waited through the long moment she remained motionless. She was hesitating, he knew, because she wasn’t blind. She knew stone when she saw it, and maybe, already, she saw her mistake…and very soon, she’d give it up.

She lifted her hand and touched his neck—and snatched her hand away almost in the same instant, as though she felt it, too, as he did: the crackling shock darting under the skin to shriek along his nerve endings.

Though he kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, Dain saw her puzzled reaction in the periphery of his vision, caught her frown as she studied her hand, discerned her thoughtful glance moving to his neck.

Then, his heart sinking, he perceived the slow upturn of her mouth. She edged nearer, and her right knee slid behind him against his buttock, while her left pressed against his thigh. Then she slipped her right arm round his shoulders and draped her left over his upper chest, and leaned in closer. Her sweetly rounded bosom pressed against his arm while she touched her lips to the too sensitive skin at the corner of his eye.

He kept himself rigid, concentrated hard on breathing steadily, to keep himself from howling.

She was warm and so soft, and the faint apple scent of chamomile swirled like a net about him…as though the slenderly curved body enveloping his weren’t snare enough. She trailed her parted lips down, over his cheek, along his unyielding jaw to the corner of this mouth.

And
Fool!
he silently berated himself, for daring her, when he knew she could not back away from a challenge and he had never come away unscathed after issuing one.

He had walked into a trap, again, for the hundredth time, and this time it was worse. He could not turn to drink in her sweetness, because that would be yielding, and he would not. He must sit like a granite monolith, while her soft bosom rose and fell against his arm, and while her warm breath, her soft mouth, teased over his skin in brushstroke kisses.

Like a block of stone he remained, while she sighed softly against his ear, and the sigh hissed through his blood. And so he continued, immovable outwardly, wretched inwardly, while she slowly worked loose the knot of his neckcloth and drew it away.

He saw it drop from her fingers and tried to keep his attention on the tangled white fabric at his feet, but she was kissing the back of his neck, and sliding her hand under his shirt at the same time. He couldn’t focus his eyes or concentrate his mind because she was everywhere, a fever coiling over him and throbbing inside him.

“You’re so smooth,” her murmuring voice came from behind him, her breath warm on the nape of his neck while she stroked his shoulder. “Smooth as polished marble, but so warm.”

He was on fire, and her low, foggy tones were oil drizzled upon the flames.

“And strong,” she went on, while her serpent hands went on, too, sliding over taut muscles that tightened and quivered under her touch.

He was weak, a great, stupid ox, sinking into the mire of a virgin’s seduction.

“You can pick me up with one hand,” the throaty voice continued. “I love your big hands. I want them all over me, Dain. Everywhere.” She flicked her tongue over his ear, and he trembled. “On my skin. Like this.” Under his fine cambric shirt, her fingers stroked over his pounding heart. She brushed her thumb over the taut nipple, and his breath hissed out between clenched teeth.

“I want you to do that,” she said, “to me.”

He wanted to, sweet Mother of Jesus, how he wanted to. The knuckles of his tightly fisted hand were white, and his clenched jaw was aching, and those sensations were pure delight compared to the vicious throbbing in his loins.

“Do what?” he asked, willing the syllables past his thickened tongue. “Was I…supposed…to feel something?”

“You bastard.” She pulled her hand away, and he felt one coursing thrill of relief, but before he could draw the next breath, she was scrambling onto his lap, drawing up her skirts as she straddled him.

“You want me,” she said. “I can feel it, Dain.”

She could hardly fail to. There was nothing between hot, aroused male and warm female but a layer of wool and a scrap of silk. His trousers. Her drawers…soft thighs pressing against his. God help him.

He knew what was there, beneath the drawers: a few inches of stocking above her knee, the knot of a garter, the silken skin above. Even the fingers of his crippled left hand twitched.

As though she could read his mind, she lifted that useless hand and dragged it over the rumpled silk of her skirt.

Under
, he wanted to cry. The stocking, the garter, the sweet, silken skin…
please
.

He clamped his mouth shut.

He wouldn’t beg, wouldn’t crawl.

She pushed him back against the sofa cushions and he went down easily. All his strength was focused on keeping the cry from escaping.

He saw her hand move to the ties of her bodice.

“Marriage requires adjustments,” she said. “If it’s a tart you want, I must act like one.”

He tried to close his eyes, but he hadn’t the strength even for that. He was riveted upon her slim, graceful fingers and their wicked work…the tapes and hooks giving way, the fabric slipping down…the swell of creamy flesh spilling from the lace and sagging silk.

“I know my…charms…aren’t as immense as what you’re used to,” she said, pushing the bodice down to her waist.

He saw twin moons, alabaster smooth and white.

His mouth was dry, his head thick, filled with cotton wool.

“But if I come very close, maybe you’ll notice.” She lifted herself up and bent over him…very near, too near.

One taut rosebud…inches from his parched lips…woman-scent, rich, coiling in his nostrils, swirling in his head.

“Jess.” His voice was cracked and harsh, parched.

His mind was a desert. No thought. No pride. He was mere sand, whirling in a windstorm.

With a choked cry, he pulled her down, and captured her mouth…sweet oasis…
oh, yes, please
…and she parted to his frantic plea. He raked her sweetness thirstily. He was dry, burning, and she cooled him and inflamed him at once. She was the rain, and she was hot brandy, too.

He dragged his hand down over her smooth, supple back, and she shivered, and sighed against his mouth. “I love your hands.” Low, the caressing whisper of her voice.

“
Sei bella
,” he answered roughly, his fingers curling and tightening at her waist. So firm and supple, but oh, so small under his big hand.

There was so little of her, but he wanted it all, and wanted it desperately. He raked his famished mouth over her face, her shoulder, her throat. He rubbed his cheek against the velvety slopes of her breasts and nuzzled the fragrant valley between. He made a winding path with his tongue to the rosy nipple that had teased him moments ago, and captured it. He caressed it with his lips, his tongue, and held her shuddering body fast while he suckled.

From above him came a soft, startled cry. But her fingers were tangling in his hair, moving restlessly over his scalp, and he knew the cry was not pain, but excitement.

The tormenting she-devil liked it.

Then, heated and maddened as he was, he knew he wasn’t powerless.

He could make her beg, too.

His heart was racing at a gallop and his mind was thick and drunk, but somehow he summoned a fragment of control and, instead of hurrying on, he laid siege to her other breast, more slowly and deliberately…

She went to pieces.

“Oh. Oh, Dain. Please.” Her fingers moved spasmodically, over his neck, his shoulders.

Yes, beg
. He took the quivering nipple lightly between his teeth, and gently tugged.

“Dear God. Please…don’t. Yes. Oh.” She was squirming helplessly, arching toward him one instant and trying to twist away in the next.

He slid his hand up under the rumpled, tangled skirt and stroked over the silken drawers. She moaned.

He released her breast and she sank down and dragged her parted lips over his until he answered, and welcomed her in, and let jolts of pleasure shake his frame while she ravished his mouth.

And while he drank in the hot liquor of her kiss, he was pushing up the flimsy silk leg of her drawers, stroking over stocking and upward, to the knot of her garter. He swiftly untied it and pushed it away, and drew the stocking down, and slid his fingers over her thigh and up, over the bunched up silken drawers, to grasp her sweetly rounded buttock.

She came away from his mouth, her breathing shallow, uneven.

Still grasping her bottom, he shifted position, moving her with him, so that she lay on her side, trapped between his big frame and the sofa back. He kissed her again, deeply, while he moved his hand to the fastenings of her drawers, and untied them, and eased them down. He felt her body tense, but he held her mouth captive, distracting her with a slow, tender kiss, and all the while his fingers were moving over her thigh, stroking, caressing, stealing toward her innocence.

She squirmed, pulling away from his mouth, but he would not let her escape, and he could not keep from touching her…the fine, taut skin at the juncture of her thigh…a wanton tangle of silky curls…and sweet womanliness, warm, butter-soft…and butter-slick…the delicious evidence of desire.

He had stirred her, roused her. She wanted him.

He began to stroke the tender feminine folds, and she went very, very still.

Then, “Oh.” Her voice was soft with surprise. “Oh. That’s…
wicked
. I did not—” The rest was lost in a smothered cry, and the sweet warmth pressed against his finger. Her slender body twisted and turned restlessly, toward him, away. “Oh, Lord.
Please
.”

He scarcely heard the plea. He was beyond hearing. His blood pounded in his veins, thundered in his ears.

He found the tender bud and the narrow parting beneath, but it was so small, so tight against his great, intruding finger.

He caressed the sensitive peak, and it swelled. She was clutching his coat, making soft, breathless sounds, trying to burrow into his hard body. Like a frightened kitten. But she wasn’t frightened. She trusted him. His own trusting kitten. Innocent. So fragile.

“Oh, Jess, you’re so tiny,” he murmured, despairing.

He stroked gently inside her, but slick and hot as she was, the way was too small, too tight for him.

His lust-swollen rod strained furiously against his trousers, a great, monstrous invader that would tear her to pieces. He wanted to weep, to howl.

“So tight,” he said, his voice raw with misery, because he couldn’t stop touching her, couldn’t stop caressing what he couldn’t, dare not, have.

She didn’t hear him. She was lost in the fever he was feeding. She was touching him, kissing him.

So restless her hands, her innocently wanton mouth. She was smoldering in the fire he’d built to conquer her, and he could not stop adding fuel to the blaze.

“Oh, don’t…yes…
please
.”

He heard her gasp, then a sob…and her body shuddered, and the tight flesh clenched against his fingers…and eased…and clenched again, as another climax shook her slender frame.

He drew his hand away and found it was shaking. Every muscle in his body was taut with strain, aching with the effort it had cost him to keep from ripping her apart. His groin felt as though it had been clamped in Satan’s own vise.

He drew a ragged breath. And another. And another, waiting for her to come back to the world, and hoping his loins would calm before then, before he had to move.

He waited, but nothing happened. He knew she wasn’t dead. He could hear, feel, her breathing…slow, steady, peaceful…too peaceful.

He stared at her incredulously. “Jess?”

She murmured and burrowed in, nestling her head in the cradle of his shoulder.

For another full minute he gazed, slack-jawed, into her beautiful tranquil,
slumbering
face.

Just like a damned man, he thought exasperatedly. She got what she wanted, then curled up and went to sleep.

That was what
he
was supposed to do, blast and confound her bloody impudence. And now—curse her for a selfish ingrate—he would have to figure out how—with only one arm working—to get her to bed without waking her.

J
essica wasn’t sure when exactly she’d become aware she was being carried up the stairs. It all seemed part of a dream or part of long ago, when she was a sleepy little girl, so tiny that even Uncle Frederick, who was the smallest of her uncles, could easily scoop her up in one arm and carry her up the stairs to the nursery. An uncle’s arm made a hard seat, true, and the ride was bumpy, but she was perfectly safe, snugly braced against a big male body, her head nestled upon a broad shoulder.

Gradually the fog of sleep cleared, and even before she opened her heavy eyes, Jessica knew who was carrying her.

She also remembered what had happened. Or most of it. A great deal was lost in the delirious whirlpool Dain had pulled her into.

“I’m awake,” she said, her voice heavy with sleep. She was still weary, and her mind was thick as pudding. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

“You’ll tumble down the stairs,” Dain said gruffly. “At any rate, we’re nearly there.”

There, it turned out, was Her Ladyship’s Apartments. The Grand Catacombs, she silently renamed them, as Dain carried her into the dimly lit cavern of her bedchamber.

He set her down very carefully upon the bed.

Then he rang for her maid…and left. Without another word, and in rather a hurry.

Jessica sat gazing at the empty doorway, listening to his carpet-muffled footsteps as he strode down the long hallway, until she heard the faint thud of his door closing.

Sighing, she bent to remove the stocking he’d loosened, which had slid down to her ankle.

She had known from the minute she’d agreed to marry him that it wouldn’t be easy, she reminded herself. She had known he was in an exceedingly prickly humor this evening—all day, in fact. She could not expect him to behave rationally…and bed her properly…and sleep with her.

Bridget appeared then, and without appearing to notice her mistress’s disordered state of dress or distracted state of mind, quietly and efficiently prepared Her Ladyship for bed.

Once tucked in, the maid gone, Jessica decided there was no point in fretting about Dain’s failure to deflower her.

What he had done had been very exciting and surprising, especially the last part, when he’d made her have a little earthquake. She knew what that was, because Genevieve had told her. And thanks to her grandmother, Jessica was well aware that those extraordinary sensations did not always occur, especially early in marriage. Not all men took the trouble.

She could not believe Dain had taken the trouble merely to score a point, like proving his power over her. According to Genevieve, it was extremely painful for an aroused male to deny himself release. Unless Dain had an esoteric way of relieving his arousal that Genevieve had failed to mention, he’d surely suffered acute discomfort.

He must have had a compelling reason for doing so.

Jessica could not begin to imagine what it was. He wanted her, beyond a doubt. He had tried to resist, but he couldn’t—not after she’d shamelessly bared her breasts and stuck them right under his arrogant Florentine nose…not after she’d hiked up her skirts and sat on his breeding organs.

She flushed, recalling, but the heat she felt wasn’t embarrassment. At the time, she’d felt wonderfully free and wicked…and she’d been hotly, deliciously rewarded for her boldness.

Even now, she felt he’d given her a gift. As though it were her birthday, not his. And after gifting his wife with a little earthquake and enduring acute physical discomfort, he had—with no small difficulty, she was sure—contrived to get her up the stairs without waking her.

She found herself wishing he hadn’t done so. It would have been easier if he’d roughly wakened her and laughed at her and let her make her own way upstairs, dazed, stumbling…besotted. It would have been easier still if he had simply pushed her down, rammed into her, rolled away, and fallen asleep.

Instead, he’d taken pains. He’d taught her pleasure and taken care of her after. Sweet and chivalrous he’d been, truly.

Her husband was transforming simple animal attraction into something much more complicated.

And soon, if she was not very careful, she might make the fatal error of falling in love with him.

Midafternoon of the following day, Lady Dain discovered that Athcourt did have ghosts.

She knelt on a threadbare carpet in the upper-most chamber of the North Tower. The room was one of Athcourt’s furnishings graveyards. About her were trunks filled with clothing of bygone eras, draperies, and linens, as well as assorted odds and ends of furniture, crates of mismatched dinnerware, and a number of household utensils of enigmatic function. Beside her knelt Mrs. Ingleby, the housekeeper.

They were both gazing at a portrait of a young woman with curling black hair, coal black eyes, and a haughty Florentine nose. Jessica had found it in a dark corner of the room, hidden behind a stack of trunks, and thickly wrapped in velvet bed hangings.

“This can be no one but His Lordship’s mother,” Jessica said, wondering why her heart hammered as though she were afraid, which she wasn’t. “The gown, the coiffure—last decade of the eighteenth century, no question.”

There was no need to remark upon the physical resemblance. The lady was simply the feminine version of the present marquess.

This was also the first portrait Jessica had seen that bore any resemblance to him.

After Jessica’s solitary breakfast—Dain had eaten and vanished before she’d come down—Mrs. Ingleby had given her a partial tour of the immense house, including a leisurely stroll through the long second-floor gallery opposite their bedrooms, which housed the family portraits. Except for the first Earl of Blackmoor, whose heavy-lidded gaze had reminded her of Dain’s, Jessica had detected no likenesses.

Nowhere among these worthies had she spied a female who could have been Dain’s mother. Mrs. Ingleby, when questioned, had told her there wasn’t such a portrait, not that she knew of. She’d been at Athcourt since the present marquess came into the title, when he’d replaced most of the previous staff.

This portrait, then, had been hidden away during his father’s time. Out of grief? Jessica wondered. Had it been too painful for the late marquess to see his wife’s image? If so, he must have been a very different man from the one she’d seen in his portrait: a fair, middle-aged gentleman, garbed in somber Quaker-like simplicity. But the humble dress was in stark contrast to his expression. No gentle Friend had lived behind the stern countenance with its narrowed, wintry blue eyes.

“I know nothing about her,” Jessica said, “except the date she was wed and the date she died. I hadn’t expected her to be so young. I had assumed the second wife was a more mature woman. This is little more than a girl.”

And who, she wondered angrily, had shackled this ravishing child to the horrid, pious old block of ice?

She drew back, startled by the vehemence of her reaction. Quickly she stood up.

“Have it brought down to my sitting room,” she told the housekeeper. “You may have it lightly dusted before, but no further cleaning until I’ve had a chance to examine it in better light.”

Mrs. Ingleby had been imported from Derby-shire. She’d heard nothing about old family scandals before she’d come and, because she would not tolerate belowstairs gossip, she’d heard nothing since. Lord Dain’s agent had hired her, not simply because of her sterling reputation as a housekeeper, but because of her strict principles: In her view, the care of a family was a sacred trust, which one did not abuse by whispering scandal behind one’s employers’ backs. Either the conditions were good or they were not. If they were not, one politely gave notice and departed.

Her strict views did not, however, prevent the rest of the staff from gossiping when her back was turned. Consequently, most of them had heard about the previous Lady Dain. One of them was one of the footmen summoned to move the portrait to the present Lady Dain’s sitting room. He told Mr. Rodstock who the portrait subject was.

Mr. Rodstock was much too dignified to dash his head against the chimneypiece as he wished to. All he did was blink, once, and order his minions to alert him the instant His Lordship returned.

Lord Dain had spent most of the day in Chudleigh. At the Star and Garter, he’d met up with Lord Sherburne, who was making his meandering way south to Devonport for a wrestling match.

Sherburne, who’d been wed less than a year, had left his young wife in London. He was the last person in the world to find anything odd about a very recently married man’s deserting his bride for the bar parlor of a coaching inn several miles from home. On the contrary, he invited Dain to journey with him to Devonport. Sherburne was awaiting a few other fellows, who were to arrive this evening. He suggested Dain pack, collect his valet, and join them for dinner. Then they could all leave together first thing tomorrow morning.

Dain had accepted the invitation without hesitation, ignoring the skull-splitting shriek of his conscience. Hesitation was always a sign of weakness and, in this case, Sherburne might think Beelzebub needed his wife’s
permission
first, or that he couldn’t bear to be away from her for a few days.

He could bear it easily, Dain thought now, as he hurried up the north staircase to his room. Furthermore, she needed to be taught that she could not manipulate him, and this lesson would be considerably less painful for him than the one he’d given her last night. He’d rather let carrion crows feast on his privates than go through that horrific experience again.

He would go away, and calm down, and put matters into perspective, and when he returned he would…

Well, he didn’t know precisely what he would do, but that was because he wasn’t calm. When he was, he would figure it out. He was certain there must be a simple solution, but he could not contemplate the problem coolly and objectively while she was nearby, bothering him.

“My lord.”

Dain paused at the head of the stairs and looked down. Rodstock was hurrying up after him. “My lord,” he repeated breathlessly. “A word, if you please.”

What the steward had to say was more than a word, yet no more than what was needed. Her Ladyship had been exploring the North Tower storage room. She had found a portrait. Of the previous marchioness. Rodstock thought His Lordship would wish to be informed.

Rodstock was a paragon, the soul of discretion and tact. Nothing in his tone or demeanor indicated any consciousness of the bomb he had just dropped at his master’s feet.

His master, likewise, evidenced no awareness of any explosion whatsoever.

“I see,” Dain said. “That is interesting. I had no idea we had one about. Where is it?”

“In Her Ladyship’s sitting room, my lord.”

“Well, then, I might as well look at it.” Dain turned and headed down the Long Gallery. His heart was beating unsteadily. Other than that, he felt nothing. He saw nothing, either, during the endless walk past the portraits of the noble line of men and women he had never felt a part of.

He walked on blindly to the end of the hall, opened the last door on the left, and turned left again into the narrow passageway. He continued past one door, and on to the next, then through it, and on through the second passage to the door at its end, which stood open.

The portrait that wasn’t supposed to exist stood before the sitting room’s east-facing window on a battered easel, which must have been unearthed from the schoolroom.

Dain walked up to the painting and gazed at it for a long while, though it hurt, badly—more than he could have guessed—to look into the beautiful, cruel face. His throat burned and his eyes as well. If he could, he would have wept then.

But he couldn’t because he wasn’t alone. He did not have to take his eyes from the portrait to know his wife was in the room.

“Another of your finds,” he said, choking a short laugh past his seared throat. “And on your first treasure hunt here, too.”

“Luckily, the North Tower is cool and dry,” she said. Her voice was cool and dry as well. “And the painting was well wrapped. It will need minimal cleaning, but I should prefer another frame. This one is much too dark and overornate. Also, I had rather not put her in the portrait gallery, if you don’t mind. I’d prefer she had a place to herself. Over the dining room mantel, I think. In place of the landscape.”

She came nearer, pausing a few paces to his right. “The landscape wants a smaller room. Even if it didn’t, I’d much rather look at her.”

He would, too, though it was eating him alive to do so.

He would have been content merely to look at his beautiful, impossible mother. He would have asked nothing…or so very little: a soft hand upon his cheek, only for an instant. An impatient hug. He would have been good. He would have tried…

Mawkish nonsense, he angrily reproached himself. It was only a damned piece of canvas daubed with paint. It was a painting of a whore, as all the household, all of Devon, and most of the world beyond knew. All except his wife, with her fiendish gift for turning the world upside down.

“She was a whore,” he said harshly. And quickly and brutally, to have it said and done and over with, he went on. “She ran away with the son of a Dartmouth merchant. She lived openly with him for two years and died with him, on a fever-plagued island in the West Indies.”

He turned and looked down into his wife’s pale, upturned face. Her eyes were wide with shock. Then, incredibly, they were glistening…with tears.

“How dare you?” she said, angrily blinking the tears back. “How dare you, of all men, call your mother a whore? You buy a new lover every night. It costs you a few coins. According to you, she took but one—and he cost her everything: her friends, her honor. Her son.”

“I might have known you could make even this romantic,” he said mockingly. “Will you make the hot-blooded harlot out to be a martyr to—to what, Jess?
Love?
”

He turned away from the portrait, because the howling had started inside him, and he wanted to scream,
Why?
Yet he knew the answer, always had. If his mother had loved him—or pitied him at least, if she could not love him—she would have taken him with her. She would not have left him alone, in hell.