Her grandmother opened it, gazed at her for a long moment, then turned to Withers. "Miss Trent requires a hot bath," she said. "Have someone see to it- quickly- if you please."

Then she took Jessica's arm, tugged her inside, sat her down, and pulled off her sodden boots.

"I will go to that party," said Jessica, fumbling with her pelisse buckles. "Dain can make a fool of me if he likes, but he will not ruin my evening. I don't care if all of Paris saw. He's the one who ought to be embarrassed- running half-naked down the street. And when I reminded him that he was half-naked, what do you think he did?"

"My dear, I cannot imagine." Genevieve quickly worked the silk stockings off.

Jessica told her about the leisurely trouser unbuttoning.

Genevieve went into whoops of laughter.

Jessica frowned at her. "It was very difficult to keep a straight face- but that wasn't the hardest part. The hardest part was- " She let out a sigh. "Oh, Genevieve. He was so adorable. I wanted to kiss him. Right on his big, beautiful nose. And then everywhere else. It was so frustrating. I had made up my mind not to lose my temper, but I did. And so I beat him and beat him until he kissed me. And then I kept on beating him until he did it properly. And I had better tell you, mortifying as it is to admit, that if we had not been struck by lightning- or very nearly- I should be utterly ruined. Against a lamppost. On the Rue de Provence. And the horrible part is"- she groaned- "I wish I had been."

"I know," Genevieve said soothingly. "Believe me, dear, I know." She stripped off the rest of the garments- Jessica being incapable of doing much besides babbling and staring stupidly at the furniture- wrapped her in a dressing gown, planted her in a chair by the fire, and ordered brandy.

About half an hour after Jessica Trent had fled him, Lord Dain, drenched to the skin and clutching a mangled bonnet, stalked through the door a trembling Herbert opened for him. Ignoring the footman, the marquess marched down the hall and up the stairs and down another hall to his bedroom. He threw the bonnet onto a chair, stripped off his dripping garments, toweled himself dry, donned fresh attire, and rejoined his guests.

No one, including the tarts, was audacious or drunk enough to seek an accounting of his whereabouts and doings. Dain seldom troubled to explain his actions. He was accountable to nobody.

All he told them was that he was hungry and was going out to dinner, and they were at liberty to do as they pleased. All but Trent, who was incapable of any action beyond breathing- which he did with a great deal of noise- accompanied Dain to a restaurant at the Palais Royal. Thence they proceeded to Vingt-Huit, and discovered it had closed down that very day. Since no other establishment offered Vingt-Huit's variety, the party broke up into smaller groups, each seeking its own choice of entertainment. Dain went to a gambling hell with his pair of...cows and Vawtry and his cow.

At three o'clock in the morning, Dain left, alone, and wandered the streets.

His wanderings took him to Madame Vraisses', just as the guests were beginning to leave.

He stood under a tree, well beyond the feeble glimmer of a lonely streetlamp, and watched.

He'd brooded there for nearly twenty minutes when he saw Esmond emerge, with Jessica Trent upon his arm. They were talking and laughing.

She was not wearing a ridiculous bonnet, but a lunatic hair arrangement even more ludicrous. Shiny knots and coils sprouted from the top of her head, and pearls and plumes waved from the knots and coils. The coiffure, in Dain's opinion, was silly.

That was why he wanted to rip out the pearls and plumes and pins...and watch the silky black veil ripple over her shoulders...white, gleaming in the lamplight.

There was too much gleaming white, he noted with a surge of irritation. The oversize ballooning sleeves of her silver-blue gown didn't even have shoulders. They started about halfway to her elbow, primly covering everything from there down- and leaving what should have been concealed brazenly exposed to the view of every slavering hound in Paris.

Every man at the party had examined, at leisure and close quarters, that curving whiteness.

While Dain, like the Prince of Darkness they all believed him to be, stood outside lurking in the shadows.

He did not feel very satanic at the moment. He felt, if the humiliating truth be told, like a starving beggar boy with his nose pressed to the window of a pastry shop.

He watched her climb into the carriage. The door closed and the vehicle lumbered away.

Though no one was by to see or hear, he laughed under his breath. He had laughed a great deal this night, but he couldn't laugh the truth away.

He'd known she was trouble- had to be, as every respectable female was.

"Wife or mistress, it's all the same," he'd told his friends often enough. "Once you let a lady- virtuous or not- fasten upon you, you become the owner of a piece of troublesome property, where the tenants are forever in revolt and into which you are endlessly pouring money and labor. All for the occasional privilege- at her whim- of getting what you could get from any streetwalker for a few shillings."

He'd wanted her, yes, but this was hardly the first time in his life the unacceptable sort of female had stirred his lust. He lusted, but he was always aware of the miry trap into which such women must- because they'd been born and bred for that purpose- lure him.

And the hateful truth was, he'd walked straight into it, and somehow deluded himself he hadn't- or if he had, it was nothing Dain need fear, because by now there was no pit deep enough, no mire thick enough, to hold him.

Then what holds you here? he asked himself. What mighty force dragged you here, to gaze stupidly, like a moonstruck puppy, at a house, because she was in it? And what chains held you here, waiting for a glimpse of her?

A touch. A kiss.

That's revolting, he told himself.

So it was, but it was the truth, and he hated it and hated her for making it true.

He should have dragged her from the carriage, he thought, and pulled those ladylike fripperies from her hair, and taken what he wanted and walked away, laughing, like the conscienceless monster he was.

What or who was there to stop him? Before the Revolution, countless corrupt aristocrats had done the same. Even now, who would blame him? Everyone knew what he was. They would say it was her own fault for straying into his path. The law would not avenge her honor. It would be left to Bertie Trent...at pistol point at twenty paces.

With a grim smile, Dain left his gloomy post and sauntered down the street. Trapped he was, but he'd been trapped before, he reminded himself. He'd stood outside before, too, aching and lonely because he would not be let in. But always, in the end, Dain won. He had made his schoolboy tormentors respect and envy him. He had paid his father back tenfold for every humiliation and hurt. He'd become the old bastard's worst nightmare of hell in this life and, one hoped, his most bitter torment in the hereafter.

Even Susannah, who'd led him about by the nose for six wretched months, had spent every waking minute thereafter having her own pretty nose rubbed in the consequences.

True, Dain hadn't seen it that way at the time, but a man couldn't see anything properly 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 roue 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 mire.

Touch me. Hold me. Kiss me.

He turned the corner, into the dark, narrow street, where the blank, windowless walls could see and tell nothing. He pressed his forehead against the cold stone and endured, because he hadn't any choice. He couldn't stop what twisted and ached inside him.

I need you.

Her lips clinging to his...her hands, holding him fast. She was soft and warm and she tasted of rain, and it was sweet, unbearably sweet, to believe for a moment that she wanted to be in his arms.

He'd believed it for that moment, and wanted to believe still, and he hated himself for what he wanted, and hated her for making him want it.

And so, setting his jaw, Lord Dain straightened and went on his way, enduring, while he told himself she'd pay. In time.

Everyone did. In time.

Chapter 6.

On the afternoon following Madame Vraisses' party, an unhappy Roland Vawtry paid Francis Beaumont two hundred pounds.

"I saw it myself," Vawtry said, shaking his head. "From the window. Even so, I shouldn't have believed it if everyone else hadn't seen it as well. He went right out the door and chased her down the street. To scare her off, I suppose. Daresay she's packing her bags this instant."

"She was at the unveiling celebration last night," Beaumont said, smiling. "Cool and collected and managing her swarm of panting admirers with smooth aplomb. When Miss Trent does decide to pack, it will be her trousseau. And the linens will be embellished with a D as in Dain."

Vawtry bridled. "It isn't at all like that. I know what happened. Dain doesn't like interruptions. He doesn't like uninvited guests. And when he doesn't like something, he makes it go away. Or he smashes it. If she'd been a man, he would have smashed her. Since she wasn't, he made her go away."

"Three hundred," said Beaumont. "Three hundred says she's his marchioness before the King's Birthday."

Vawtry suppressed his own smile. Whatever Dain did or didn't do with Miss Jessica Trent, he would not marry her.

Which wasn't to say that Dain would never wed. But that would be only to heap more shame, shock, and disgust upon his family, both the few living- a handful of distant cousins- and the legion dead. The bride, beyond doubt, would be the mistress, widow, or daughter of a notorious traitor or murderer. She would also be a famous whore. The ideal would be a half-Irish mulatto Jewess brothel keeper whose last lover had been hanged for sodomizing and strangling the Duke of Kent's only legitimate offspring, the nine-year-old Alexandrina Victoria. A Marchioness of Dain who was a gently bred virgin of respectable- if eccentric- family was out of the question.

Dain's being married- to anybody- in a mere two months or so was so far out of the question as to belong to another galaxy.

Vawtry accepted the wager.

This was not the only wager placed in Paris that week, and not the largest in which the names Dain and Trent figured.

The prostitutes who'd witnessed Miss Trent's entry into Dain's drawing room and his ensuing pursuit told all of their friends and customers about it. The male guests also related the tale, with the usual embellishments, to anyone who'd listen, and that was everyone.

And everyone, of course, had an opinion. Many put money behind their opinions. Within a week, Paris was seething and restless, rather like the Roman mob at the arena, impatiently awaiting the combat to death of its two mightiest gladiators.

The problem was getting the combatants into the same arena. Miss Trent traveled in respectable Society. Lord Dain prowled the demimonde. They were, most inconsiderately, avoiding each other. Neither could be persuaded or tricked into talking about the other.

Lady Wallingdon, who'd resided in Paris eighteen months and had spent most of that time striving, with mixed success, to become its premier hostess, saw a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and promptly snatched it.

She boldly scheduled a ball on the same day one of her rivals had scheduled a masquerade. It happened to be exactly a fortnight after the Chasing Miss Trent Down the Street Scene. Though Lady Pembury and her two grandchildren did not qualify as the creme de la creme of either Parisian or London society, and though Lady Wallingdon would not have bothered with them in other circumstances, she invited them to her ball.

She also invited Lord Dain.

Then she let everyone know what she'd done. Though she, like at least half of Paris, believed him to be enslaved by Miss Trent, Lady Wallingdon did not expect him to come. Everyone knew that the Marquess of Dain was about as likely to attend a respectable social affair as he was to invite the executioner to test the guillotine's blade upon his neck.

On the other hand, Dain had already behaved in an unlikely manner regarding Miss Trent, which meant there was a chance. And where there was a chance of something impossible happening, there would always be people wanting to be there in case it did.

In Lady Wallingdon's case, these turned out to be the very same people she'd invited. Not a single note of regrets arrived. Not even, to her disquiet, Lord Dain's.

But then, he hadn't sent an acceptance, either, so at least she didn't have to pretend she didn't know whether he'd attend or not, and worry about being caught in a lie. She could keep her other invitees in suspense with a clear conscience. In the meantime, to be on the safe side, she hired a dozen burly French menials to augment her own staff.

Jessica, meanwhile, was acknowledging defeat. After a mere three encounters with Dain, a simple animal attraction had intensified to mindless infatuation. Her symptoms had not simply become virulent; they had become noticeable.

At Madame Vraisses' party, Mr. Beaumont had made a few sly remarks about Dain. Jessica, whose nerves were still vibrating with the aftershocks of one stormy embrace, had answered far too sharply. Beaumont's knowing smile had told her he'd guessed what her problem was, and she wouldn't have put it past him to tell Dain.

But the Beaumonts had abruptly left Paris a week after the party, and Dain hadn't come within a mile of her since the devastating kiss in the thunderstorm.

And so, if he had been told that Jessica Trent was besotted with him, he obviously didn't care. Which was just as she preferred it, Jessica assured herself.

Because there was only one way the Marquess of Dain could care about any woman, and that was for as long as it took to tumble her onto a bed- or a tavern table- unbutton his trousers, dispatch his business, and button up again.

Besotted or not, she knew better than to tempt Fate by risking another encounter with him, when he might see for himself her mortifying condition, and might take it into his head to treat her to his version of caring.

She had scarcely finished convincing herself that the intelligent thing to do was to leave Paris immediately, when Lady Wallingdon's invitation arrived.