Chapter 3 #2
“He advised me not to sell it right away,” she said evasively. “He wished to contact a Russian client first. There is a cousin or nephew or some such of the tsar’s who—”
“Fifty pounds,” said Lord Dain. “Unless this Russian is one of the tsar’s numerous mad relations, he won’t give you a farthing more than that.”
“Then he must be one of the mad ones,” said Jessica. “Le Feuvre mentioned a figure well above that.”
He gave her a hard stare. Gazing into his dark, harsh face, into those black, implacable eyes, Jessica had no trouble imagining him sitting upon an immense ebony throne at the very bottom of the pits of Hades.
Had she looked down and discovered that the expensive polished boot a few inches from her own had turned into a cloven hoof, she would not have been in the least amazed.
Any woman with an ounce of common sense would have picked up her skirts and fled.
The trouble was, Jessica could not feel at all sensible. A magnetic current was racing along her nerve endings. It slithered and swirled through her system, to make an odd, tingling heat in the pit of her belly, and it melted her brain to soup.
She wanted to kick off her shoes and trail her stockinged toes up and down the black, costly boot.
She wanted to slide her fingers under his starched shirt cuff and trace the veins and muscles of his wrist and feel his pulse beating under her thumb.
Most of all, she wanted to press her lips to his hard, dissolute mouth and kiss him senseless.
Of course, all such a demented assault would get her would be a position flat on her back and the swift elimination of her maidenhead—very possibly in full view of the café’s patrons.
Then, if he was in a good humor, he might give her a friendly slap on the bottom as he told her to run along, she reflected gloomily.
“Miss Trent,” he said, “I am sure all the other girls at school found your wit hilarious. Perhaps, however, if you would stop batting your eyelashes for a moment, your vision would clear and you would notice that I am not a little schoolgirl.”
She hadn’t been batting her eyelashes. When Jessica did play coquette, it was purposely and purposefully, and she was certainly not such a moron as to try that method with Beelzebub.
“Batting?” she repeated. “I never bat, my lord. “This is what I do.” She looked away toward an attractive Frenchman seated nearby, then shot Dain one swift, sidelong glance. “That isn’t batting,” she said, releasing the instantly bedazzled Frenchman and returning to full focus upon Dain.
Though one could hardly believe it possible, his expression became grimmer still.
“I am not a schoolboy, either,” he said. “I recommend you save those slaying glances for the sorts of young sapskulls who respond to them.”
The Frenchman was now gazing at her with besotted fascination. Dain turned and looked at him. The man instantly looked away and began talking animatedly with his companions.
She recollected Genevieve’s warning. Jessica couldn’t be certain Dain had any active thoughts of reeling her in. She could see, however, that he’d just posted a No Fishing sign.
A thrill coursed through her, but that was only to be expected. It was the primitive reaction of a female when an attractive male displayed the usual bad-natured signs of proprietorship. She was hammeringly aware that her feelings about him were decidedly primitive.
On the other hand, she was not completely out of her mind.
She could see Big Trouble brewing.
It was easy enough to see. Scandal followed wherever he went. Jessica had no intention of being caught in the midst of it.
“I was merely providing a demonstration of a subtle distinction which had apparently escaped you,” she said. “Subtlety, I collect, is not your strong point.”
“If this is a subtle way of reminding me that I overlooked what your gimlet eyes perceived in that dirt-encrusted picture—”
“You apparently did not look very closely even when it was clean,” she said. “Because then you would have recognized the work of the Stroganov school—and would not have offered the insulting sum of fifty quid for it.”
His lip curled. “I didn’t offer anything. I expressed an opinion.”
“To test me,” she said. “However, I know as well as you do that the piece is not only Stroganov school, but an extremely rare form. Even the most elaborate of the miniatures were usually chased in silver. Not to mention that the Madonna—”
“Has grey eyes, not brown,” Dain said in a very bored voice.
“And she’s almost smiling. Usually they look exceedingly unhappy.”
“Cross, Miss Trent. They look exceedingly ill tempered. I suppose it’s on account of being virgins—of experiencing all the unpleasantness of breeding and birthing and none of the jolly parts.”
“Speaking on behalf of virgins everywhere, my lord,” she said, leaning toward him a bit, “I can tell you there are a host of jolly experiences. One of them is owning a rare work of religious art worth, at the very minimum, five hundred pounds.”
He laughed. “There’s no need to inform me you’re a virgin,” he said. “I can spot one at fifty paces.”
“Fortunately, I’m not so inexperienced in other matters,” she said, unruffled.
“I have no doubt Le Feuvre’s mad Russian will pay me five hundred.
I’m also aware that the Russian must be a good client for whom he wishes to make a shrewd purchase.
Which means I should do considerably better at auction.
” She smoothed her gloves. “I have observed many times how men’s wits utterly desert them once auction fever takes hold.
There’s no telling what outrageous bids will result. ”
Dain’s eyes narrowed.
At that moment, their host sallied forth with their refreshments.
With him were four lesser minions who bustled about, arranging linens, silver, and crockery with painful precision.
Not a stray crumb was allowed to mar a plate, not a trace of tarnish smudged the flawless sheen of the silver.
Even the sugar had been sawed into perfect half-inch cubes—no small feat, when the average sugar loaf was somewhere between granite and diamonds on the hardness scale.
Jessica had always wondered how the kitchen help managed to break it up without using explosives.
She accepted a small slice of yellow cake with frothy white icing.
Dain let the fawning proprietor adorn his plate with a large assortment of fruit tarts, artistically arranged in concentric circles.
They ate their sweets in silence until Dain, having decimated enough tarts to set every tooth in his mouth throbbing, set down his fork and frowned at her hands.
“Have all the rules changed since I’ve been away from England?” he asked. “I’m aware ladies do not carelessly expose their naked hands to public view. I did understand, though, that they were permitted to remove their gloves to eat.”
“It is permitted,” she said. “But it isn’t possible.” She raised her hand to show him the long row of tiny pearl buttons. “I should be all afternoon undoing them without my maid’s help.”
“Why the devil wear such pestilentially bothersome things?” he demanded.
“Genevieve bought them especially for this pelisse,” she said. “If I didn’t wear them, she’d be dreadfully hurt.”
He was still staring at the gloves.
“Genevieve is my grandmother,” she explained. He hadn’t met her. He’d arrived just as Genevieve had lain down for her nap—though Jessica had no doubt her grandmother had promptly risen and peeped through the door the moment she’d heard the deep, masculine voice.
The voice’s owner now looked up, his black eyes glinting. “Ah, yes. The watch.”
“That, too, was a wise choice,” Jessica said, setting down her own fork and settling back into her business mode. “She was enchanted.”
“I am not your little white-haired grandmother,” he said, instantly taking her meaning.
“I am not so enchanted with icons—even Stroganovs—to pay a farthing more than they’re worth.
To me, it’s worth no more than a thousand.
But if you’ll promise not to bore me to distraction by haggling and trying to slay me with your eyes in between, I shall gladly pay fifteen hundred. ”
She had hoped to work him round by degrees. His tone told her he had no intention of being worked upon. Straight to the point, then—the point she’d decided upon hours ago, after catching the expression in his eyes when she’d let him examine her remarkable find.
“I shall gladly give it to you, my lord,” she said.
“No one gives me anything,” he said coldly. “Play your game—whatever it is—with someone else. Fifteen hundred is my offer. My only offer.”
“If you would send Bertie home, the icon is yours,” she said. “If you will not, it goes to auction at Christie’s.”
If Jessica Trent had comprehended the state Dain was in, she would have stopped at the first sentence.
No, if she had truly comprehended, she would have taken to her heels and run as fast and as far as she could.
But she couldn’t understand what Lord Dain barely understood himself.
He wanted the gentle Russian Madonna, with her half-smiling, half-wistful face and the scowling Baby Jesus nestled to her bosom, as he had not wanted anything in all his life.
He had wanted to weep when he saw it, and he didn’t know why.
The work was exquisite—an art sublime and human at once—and he’d been moved, before, by artistry.
What he felt at this moment wasn’t remotely like those pleasant sensations.
What he felt was the old monster howling within.
He couldn’t name the feelings any better than he could when he’d been eight years old.
He’d never bothered to name them, simply shoved and beaten them out of his way, repeatedly, until, like his schoolmates of long ago, they’d stopped tormenting him.
Having never been allowed to mature, those feelings remained at the primitive childlike level.
Now, caught unexpectedly in their grip, Lord Dain could not reason as an adult would.
He could not tell himself Bertie Trent was an infernal nuisance whom Dain should have sent packing ages ago.
It never occurred to the marquess to be delighted at present, when the nitwit’s sister was prepared to pay—or bribe was more like it—him generously to do so.
All Dain could see was an exceedingly pretty girl teasing him with a toy he wanted very badly. He had offered her his biggest and very best toy in trade. And she had laughed and threatened to throw her toy into a privy, just to make him beg.
Much later, Lord Dain would understand that this—or something equally idiotic—had been raging through his brain.
But that would be much later, when it was far too late.
At this moment, he was about eight years old on the inside and nearly three and thirty on the outside, and thus, beside himself.
He leaned toward her. “Miss Trent, there are no other terms,” he said, his voice dangerously low. “I pay you fifteen hundred quid and you say, ‘Done,’ and everyone goes away happy.”
“No, they don’t.” Her chin jutted up stubbornly. “If you will not send Bertie home, there is no business on earth I would do with you. You are destroying his life. No amount of money in the world will compensate. I should not sell the icon to you if I were in the last stages of starvation.”
“Easy enough to say when your stomach is full,” he said. Then, in Latin, he mockingly quoted Publilius Syrus. “‘Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is calm.’”
In the same language she quoted the same sage, “‘You cannot put the same shoe on every foot.’”
His countenance betrayed nothing of his astonishment.
“It would appear that you have dipped into Publilius,” he said.
“How very odd, then, that so clever a female cannot see what is before her eyes. I am not a dead language to play in, Miss Trent. You are treading perilously close to dangerous waters.”
“Because my brother is drowning there,” she said.
“Because you are holding his head under. I am not large enough or powerful enough to pull your hand away. All I have is something you want, which even you cannot take away.” Her silver eyes flashed.
“There is only one way for you to get it, my lord Beelzebub. You throw him back.”
Had he been capable of reasoning in an adult fashion, Dain would have acknowledged that her reasoning was excellent—that, moreover, it was precisely as he would have done had he found himself in her predicament.
He might even have appreciated the fact that she told him plainly and precisely what she was about, rather than using feminine guiles and wiles to manipulate.
He was not capable of adult reasoning.
The flash of temper in her eyes should have glanced harmlessly off him.
Instead, it shot fast and deep and ignited an inner fuse.
He thought the fuse was anger. He thought that if she had been a man, he would have thrown her—straight against the wall.
He thought that, since she was a woman, he would have to find an equally effective way of teaching her a lesson.
He didn’t know that throwing her was the exact opposite of what he wanted to do. He didn’t know that the lessons he wanted to teach her were those of Venus, not Mars, Ovid’s Ars Armatoria, not Caesar’s De Bello Gallico.
Consequently, he made a mistake.
“No, you do not see clearly at all,” he said.
“There is always another way, Miss Trent. You think there isn’t because you assume I will play by all the dear little rules Society dotes upon.
You think, for instance, that because we’re in a public place and you’re a lady, I’ll mind my manners.
Perhaps you even think I have a regard for your reputation.
” He smiled evilly. “Miss Trent, perhaps you would like to take a moment to think again.”
Her grey eyes narrowed. “I think you are threatening me,” she said.
“Let me make it as clear as you did your own threat.” He leaned toward her.
“I can crack your reputation in under thirty seconds. In three minutes I can reduce it to dust. We both know, don’t we, that being who I am, I need not exert myself overmuch to accomplish this.
You have already become an object of speculation simply by being seen in my company.
” He paused briefly to let the words sink in.
She said nothing. Her slitted eyes were glinting furious sparks.
“Here is how it works,” he went on. “If you accept my offer of fifteen hundred, I shall behave myself, escort you to a cabriolet, and see that you are taken safely home.”
“And if I do not accept, you will attempt to destroy my reputation,” she said.
“It will not be an attempt,” he said.
She sat up very straight and folded her dainty gloved hands upon the table. “I should like to see you try,” she said.