Lord of Scoundrels Read Online Free Page A

up like that. In fact, you’ve grown amazingly piglike since last I saw you. You’ve gained two stone at least. Maybe as much as three.” Her gaze dropped. “And all in your belly, by the looks of it. You put me in mind of the king.”
    “That whale? ” he shrieked. “I do not. Take it back, Jess.”
    “Or what? You’ll sit on me?” She laughed.
    He stalked away and flung himself onto the sofa.
    “If I were you,” she said, “I’d worry less about what my sister said and did, and more about my own future. I can take care of myself, Bertie. But you…Well, I believe you’re the one who ought to be thinking about marrying somebody plump in the pocket.”
    “Marriage is for cowards, fools, and women,” he said.
    She smiled. “That sounds like the sort of thing some drunken jackass would announce—just before falling into the punch bowl—to a crowd of his fellow drunken jackasses, amid the usual masculine witticisms about fornication and excretory processes.”
    She didn’t wait for Bertie to sort through his mind for definitions of the big words. “I know what men find hilarious,” she said. “I’ve lived with you and reared ten male cousins. Drunk or sober, they like jokes about what they do—or want to do—with females, and they are endlessly fascinated with passing wind, water, and—”
    “Women don’t have a sense of humor,” Bertie said. “They don’t need one. The Almighty made them as a permanent joke on men. From which one may logically deduce that the Almighty is a female.”
    He uttered the words slowly and carefully, as though he’d taken considerable pains to memorize them.
    “Whence arises this philosophical profundity, Bertie?” she asked.
    “Say again?”
    “Who told you that?”
    “It wasn’t a drunken jackass, Miss Sneering and Snide,” he said smugly. “I may not have the biggest brain box in the world, but I guess I know a jackass when I see one, and Dain ain’t.”
    “Indeed not. He sounds a clever fellow. What else does he have to say, dear?”
    There was a long pause while Bertie tried to decide whether or not she was being sarcastic. As usual, he decided wrong.
    “Well, he is clever, Jess. I should have realized you’d recognize it. The things he says—why, that brain of his is always working, a mile a minute. Don’t know what he fuels it with. Don’t eat a lot of fish, you know, so it can’t be that.”
    “I collect he fuels it with gin,” Jessica muttered.
    “Say again?”
    “I said, ‘I reckon his brain’s like a steam engine.’”
    “Must be,” said Bertie. “And not just for talking, either. He’s got the money sort of brains, too. Plays the ’Change like it was a fiddle, the fellows say. Only the music Dain makes come out is the ‘chink, chink, chink’ of sovereigns. And that’s a lot of chinks, Jess.”
    She had no doubt of that. By all accounts, the Marquess of Dain was one of England’s wealthiest men. He could well afford reckless extravagance. And poor Bertie, who couldn’t afford even modest extravagance, was bent on imitating his idol.
    For idolatry it surely was, as Withers had claimed in his barely coherent letter. That Bertie had exerted his limited faculties so far as to actually memorize what Dain said was incontrovertible proof that Withers hadn’t exaggerated.
    Lord Dain had become the lord of Bertie’s universe…and he was leading him straight to Hell.
     
     
    Lord Dain did not look up when the shop bell tinkled. He did not care who the new customer might be, and Champtois, purveyor of antiques and artistic curiosities, could not possibly care, because the most important customer in Paris had already entered his shop. Being the most important, Dain expected and received the shopkeeper’s exclusive attention. Champtois not only did not glance toward the door, but gave no sign of seeing, hearing, or thinking anything unrelated to the Marquess of Dain.
    Indifference, unfortunately, is not the same as deafness. The bell