Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase Page A

hair arrangement even more ludicrous. Shiny knots and coils sprouted from the top of her head, and pearls and plumes waved from the knots and coils. The coiffure, in Dain’s opinion, was silly.
    That was why he wanted to rip out the pearls and plumes and pins…and watch the silky black veil ripple over her shoulders…white, gleaming in the lamplight.
    There was too much gleaming white, he noted with a surge of irritation. The oversize ballooning sleeves of her silver-blue gown didn’t even have shoulders. They started about halfway to her elbow, primly covering everything from there down—and leaving what should have been concealed brazenly exposed to the view of every slavering hound in Paris.
    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