Lord of Scoundrels by Loretta Chase Page B

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.
    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