Lord of Scoundrels Read Online Free Page B

had no sooner ceased tinkling than Dain heard a familiar male voice muttering in English accents, and an unfamiliar, feminine one murmuring in response. He could not make out the words. For once, Bertie Trent managed to keep his voice below the alleged “whisper” that could be heard across a football field.
    Still, it was Bertie Trent, the greatest nitwit in the Northern Hemisphere, which meant that Lord Dain must postpone his own transaction. He had no intention of conducting a bargaining session while Trent was by, saying, doing, and looking everything calculated to drive the price up while under the delirious delusion he was shrewdly helping to drive it down.
    “I say,” came the rugby-field voice. “Isn’t that—Well, by Jupiter, it is .”
    Thud. Thud. Thud. Heavy approaching footsteps.
    Lord Dain suppressed a sigh, turned, and directed a hard stare at his accoster.
    Trent stopped short. “That is to say, don’t mean to interrupt, I’m sure, especially when a chap’s dickering with Champtois,” he said, jerking his head in the proprietor’s direction. “Like I was telling Jess a moment ago, a cove’s got to keep his wits about him and mind he don’t offer more than half what he’s willing to pay. Not to mention keeping track of what’s ‘half’ and what’s ‘twice’ when it’s all in confounded francs and sous and what you call ’em other gibberishy coins and multiplying and dividing again to tally it up in proper pounds, shillings, and pence—which I don’t know why they don’t do it proper in the first place except maybe to aggravate a fellow.”
    “I believe I’ve remarked before, Trent, that you might experience less aggravation if you did not upset the balance of your delicate constitution by attempting to count ,” said Dain.
    He heard a rustle of movement and a muffled sound somewhere ahead and to his left. His gaze shifted thither. The female whose murmurs he’d heard was bent over a display case of jewelry. The shop was exceedingly ill lit—on purpose, to increase customers’ difficulty in properly evaluating what they were looking at. All Dain could ascertain was that the female wore a blue overgarment of some sort and one of the hideously overdecorated bonnets currently in fashion.
    “I particularly recommend,” he went on, his eyes upon the female, “that you resist the temptation to count if you are contemplating a gift for your chère amie . Women deal in a higher mathematical realm than men, especially when it comes to gifts.”
    “That, Bertie, is a consequence of the feminine brain having reached a more advanced state of development,” said the female without looking up. “She recognizes that the selection of a gift requires the balancing of a profoundly complicated moral, psychological, aesthetic, and sentimental equation. I should not recommend that a mere male attempt to involve himself in the delicate process of balancing it, especially by the primitive method of counting .”
    For one unsettling moment, it seemed to Lord Dain that someone had just shoved his head into a privy. His heart began to pound, and his skin broke out in clammy gooseflesh, much as it had on one unforgettable day at Eton five and twenty years ago.
    He told himself that his breakfast had not agreed with him. The butter must have been rancid.
    It was utterly unthinkable that the contemptuous feminine retort had overset him. He could not possibly be disconcerted by the discovery that this sharp-tongued female was not, as he’d assumed, a trollop Bertie had attached himself to the previous night.
    Her accents proclaimed her a lady . Worse—if there could be a worse species of humanity—she was, by the sounds of it, a bluestocking. Lord Dain had never before in his life met a female who’d even heard of an equation, let alone was aware that one balanced them.
    Bertie approached, and in his playing-field confidential whisper asked, “Any idea what she said, Dain?”
    “Yes.”
    “What