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His grin faltered a bit. “Still, you know all about it. You weren’t in the least puzzled by what the lady and gentleman in your grandmama’s pocket watch were doing. And you seem to have an excellent notion of the services the tarts are employed to perform.”
“There is a difference between intellectual knowledge and practical experience,” she said. “I will admit I’m a trifle anxious in the latter regard. Yet you are not at all inhibited, and so I am sure you will not be shy about instructing me.”
Jessica hoped he wouldn’t be too impatient to do so. She was a quick learner, and she was sure she could discover how to please him in a relatively short time. If he gave her the chance. That was all she was truly worried about. He was used to professionals who were trained to satisfy. He might easily become bored and irritated with her ignorance, and abandon her for women who were less…bother.
She knew he was taking her to Devon with the intention of leaving her there when he’d had his fill of her.
She knew she was asking for heartache to hope and try for more.
Most of the world—all but a handful of the wedding guests, certainly—viewed him as a monster, and her marriage to the Bane and Blight of the Ballisters as a narrow notch above a death sentence. But he was not a monster when he held her in his arms. And so Jessica couldn’t stop herself from hoping for more of that, at least. And hoping, she was determined to try.
His gaze had slid away. He was rubbing his thumb over his knee, and frowning at it as though a wrinkle had had the audacity to appear in his trousers.
“I think we’d better continue this discussion later,” he said. “I had not…Gad, I should think it was simple enough. It’s not as though you’re competing at university for a first in Classics or Mathematics.”
Only for first in his black heart, she thought.
“When I do something, I want to do it well,” she said. “Actually, I always want to be the best. I am terribly competitive, you see. Perhaps it comes of having to manage so many boys. I had to beat my brother and cousins at everything, including sports, or they wouldn’t respect me.”
He looked up—not at her, but at the coach window. “Amesbury,” he said. “About bloody time, too. I’m starving.”
What the Bane and Blight of the Ballisters was, at the moment, was terrified.
Of his wedding night.
Now, when it was too late, he saw his mistake.
Yes, he knew Jessica was a virgin. He could hardly forget it, when that had been one of the most mortifying aspects of the entire situation: one of Europe’s greatest debauchees mindless with lust for a slip of an English spinster.
He had known she was a virgin just as he had known her eyes were the color of a Dartmoor mist, and as changeable as the atmosphere of those treacherous expanses. He knew it in the same way he knew her hair was silken jet and her skin was creamy velvet. He’d known it, and the knowing was sweet, when he’d looked down at his bride as they stood before the minister. She’d worn a silver-grey gown and a faint pink had glowed in her cheeks, and she was not only the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, but she was pure as well. He had known no other man had possessed her, that she was his and his alone.
He had also known he would bed her. He’d dreamt of it long and often enough. Moreover, having waited what seemed like six or seven eternities, he had made up his mind to do it properly, in a luxurious inn, in a big, comfortable bed with clean linens, after a well-prepared supper and a few glasses of good wine.
Somehow, he had neglected to take into account what being a virgin meant, beyond being untouched. Somehow, through all those heated fantasies, he’d left out one critical factor: No series of men had gone before him to make the way easy. He had to break her in himself.
And that, he feared, was just what he’d do: break her.
The carriage halted. Suppressing a desperate urge to scream at the coachman to keep on driving—until Judgment Day, preferably—Dain helped his wife out.
She took his arm as they started toward the entrance. Her gloved hand had never seemed so woefully small as it did at this moment.
She had insisted she was taller than average, but that wasn’t the least bit reassuring to a man as big as a house, and likely to have the same impact when he fell upon her.
He would crush her. He would break something, tear something. And if he somehow managed not to kill her and if the experience did not turn her into a babbling lunatic, she would run away screaming if he ever tried to touch her again.
She would run away, and she would never again kiss him and hold him and—
“Well, stand me up and knock me down again—either a coal barge just hove into view or it’s Dain.”
The raucous voice jolted Dain back to the moment and to his forgotten surroundings. He’d entered the inn without noticing and heard the landlord’s greeting without attending, and was, in the same distracted way, following his host to the stairway that led to the chambers Dain had reserved.
Coming down the stairs was the voice’s owner: his old Eton schoolfellow Mallory. Or, rather, the Duke of Ainswood now. The previous duke, all of nine years old, had fallen victim to diphtheria a year ago. Dain recalled signing the condolence note his secretary had written to the mother and the tactfully combined condolences and congratulations to Mallory, the cousin. Dain hadn’t bothered to point out that tact was wasted on Vere Mallory.
Dain hadn’t seen the man since Wardell’s funeral. His former schoolfellow had been drunk then and he was drunk now. Ainswood’s dark hair was a greasy rat’s nest, his eyes puffy and bloodshot, and his jaw rough with at least two days’ growth of beard.
Dain’s nerves were already in a highly sensitive state. The realization that he must introduce this repellent figure to his dainty, elegant, pure wife stretched those frayed nerves another dangerous notch.
“Ainswood,” he said with a curt nod. “What a charming surprise.”
“Surprise is hardly the word.” Ainswood stomped down to the foot of the stairs. “I’m knocked acock. Last time I saw you, you said you wouldn’t come back to England again on anybody’s account, and if anyone else wanted you at his funeral, he’d better contrive to keel over in Paris.” His bloodshot gaze fell upon Jessica then, and he grinned in what Dain considered an intolerably obscene manner. “Why, bless me if hell hasn’t truly frozen over. Dain not only back in England, but traveling with a bit of muslin, to boot.”
The threads of Dain’s control began to unravel. “I won’t ask what hermit’s cave you’ve been living in, that you don’t know I’ve been in London for nearly a month and wed this morning,” he said, his voice cool, his insides roiling. “The lady happens to be my lady.”
He turned to Jessica. “Madam, I have the dubious honor of presenting—”
The duke’s loud guffaw cut him off. “Wed?” he cried. “Quick, tell me another. Mayhap this bird of paradise is your sister. No, better yet, your great aunt Mathilda.”
Since any female out of the schoolroom would know that “bird of paradise” was a synonym for “harlot,” Dain had no doubt his wife was aware she’d just been insulted.
“Ainswood, you have just called me a liar,” he said in ominously mild tones. “You have slandered my lady. Twice. I will give you precisely ten seconds to compose an apology.”
Ainswood stared at him for a moment. Then he grinned. “You always were good with the daring and daunting, my lad, but that cock won’t fight. I know a hoax when I see one. Where was your last performance, my dove?” he asked Jessica. “The King’s Theatre, Haymarket? You see, I don’t slander you a bit. I can tell you’re above his usual Covent Garden wares.”
“That’s three times,” said Dain. “Innkeeper.”
Their host, who’d withdrawn to a dark corner of the hall, crept out. “My lord?”
“Kindly show the lady to her chamber.”
Jessica’s fingers dug into his arm. “Dain, your friend’s half-seas over,” she whispered. “Can’t you—”
r /> “Upstairs,” he said.
She sighed and let go of his arm and did as she was told.
He watched until she’d passed the landing. Then he turned back to the duke, who was still gazing upward at her, his expression lewdly expressive of his thoughts.
“Prime piece,” said His Grace, turning back to him with a wink. “Where’d you find her?”
Dain grabbed his neckcloth and shoved him against the wall. “You stupid, filthy piece of horse manure,” he said. “I gave you a chance, cretino. Now I have to break your neck.”
“I’m quaking in my boots,” Ainswood said, his bleary eyes lighting at the prospect of battle. “Do I get the chit if I win?”
A short while later, oblivious to her maid’s protests, Jessica stood on the balcony overlooking the inn’s courtyard.
“My lady, I beg you to come away,” Bridget pleaded. “It isn’t a fit sight for Your Ladyship. You’ll be ill, I know you will, and on your wedding night, too.”
“I’ve seen fights before,” said Jessica. “But never one on my account. Not that I expect they’ll do much damage. I calculate they’re evenly matched. Dain is bigger, of course, but he must fight one-armed. And Ainswood is not only well built, but drunk enough not to feel much.”
The cobblestoned yard below was rapidly filling with men, some in dressing gowns and nightcaps. Word had quickly spread, and even at this late hour, few males could resist the lure of a mill. Not just any mill, either, for the combatants were peers of the realm. This was a rare treat for boxing aficionados.
Each man had drawn a circle of supporters. Half a dozen well-dressed gentlemen were gathered about Dain. They were offering the usual loud and contradictory advice while Dain’s valet, Andrews, helped his master out of his upper garments.
Bridget let out a shriek, and scuttled back against the balcony door. “Heaven preserve us—they’re naked!”
Jessica didn’t care about “they.” Her eyes were upon one man only, and he, stripped to the waist, took her breath away.
The torchlight gleamed upon sleek olive skin, over broad shoulders and brawny biceps, and spilled lovingly over the hard angles and flexing curves of his chest. He turned, displaying to her dazzled eyes a smooth expanse of back, gleaming like dark marble and sculpted in clean lines of bone and rippling muscle. He might have been a marble Roman athlete come to life.
Her insides tightened, and the familiar heat coiling through her was a thrumming mixture of yearning and pride.
Mine, she thought, and the thought was an ache, bittersweet, of hope and despair at once. He was hers in name, by law both sacred and secular. But no law could make him truly, fully hers.
