Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [116]
She had reached the crisis point in her tale, and that was all that troubled her at present. A crease had appeared between her gracefully arched eyebrows and her gaze had dropped to her tightly folded hands.
"Charity wants the icon in exchange for the boy," she said. "Otherwise, if I try to take him, she threatened to scream blue murder— because that would bring you into it, and she knows you'll send him— and her— away. But that I cannot permit, and I brought you here to tell you so. I will find a way to keep him out of your sight, if you insist. I will not, however, let him go away with his irresponsible mother to London, where he will fall into the hands of cutpurses, perverts, and murderers."
"The icon?" he said, scarcely heeding the rest. "The bitch wants my Madonna— a Stroganov— for that hideous little— "
"Dominick is not hideous," Jessica said sharply. "True, he has behaved monstrously, but he received no discipline at home in the first place and he has been much provoked in the second. He was blissfully unaware he was a bastard, or what that meant, just as he did not grasp the meaning of his mother's trade— until he went to school, where the village children enlightened him in the cruelest possible way. What he is, is frightened and confused, and painfully aware that he is not like other children— and no one wants him." She paused. "Except me. If I had pretended I didn't want him, his mother might not have demanded so much. But I could not pretend, and add to the child's misery."
"Plague take the black whoreson!" he shouted, pulling away from the rock. "That bitch will not have my icon!"
"Then you will have to take the child away from her yourself," said Jessica. "I do not know where she is hiding, but I strongly doubt she can be found in less than twenty-four hours. Which means that someone must be at the Postbridge coach stop early tomorrow morning. If the someone is not me, with the icon, it must be you."
He opened his mouth for a roar of outrage, then shut it and counted to ten instead.
"You are proposing," he said levelly, "that I toddle down to Postbridge at the crack of dawn…and patiently await Charity Graves' entrance…and there, before a crowd of bog-trotters, negotiate with her?"
"Certainly not," said Jessica. "You need not negotiate. He's your son. All you have to do is take him, and there will be nothing she can do about it. She could not claim she was being tricked— as she easily might if anyone but you attempts it."
"Take him— just like that? In front of everybody?"
She peered up at him from under her soggy bonnet. "I do not see what is so shocking. I am merely suggesting you behave in your customary style. You stomp in and take over and tell Charity to go to blazes. And to hell with what everyone else thinks."
He clung doggedly to the fraying threads of his control. "Jessica, I am not an idiot," he said. "I see what you are about. You are…managing me. The idea of mowing Charity Graves down is supposed to be irresistibly appealing. Also, perfectly logical, since I have no intention of giving up my icon. Which I don't."
"I'm aware of that," she said. "Which is why I could not possibly steal it. I cannot believe the woman actually thought I would. But she is completely amoral, and I daresay the word 'betrayal' means nothing to her."
"Yet you mean to take the icon if I do not do as you ask," he said.
"I must. But I could not do so without telling you."
He tilted her chin up with his knuckle and, bending his head, gave her a hard stare.
"Did it never occur to you, Mistress Logic, that I wouldn't let you take it?"
"It occurred to me that you might try to stop me," she said.
With a sigh he released her chin and turned his gaze upon the mountainous mass of granite. "And I should have about the same success, I collect, as I would in trying to persuade this rock to trot over to Dorset."
Dain heard a low rumble in the distance, as though the heavens themselves agreed that the situation was hopeless.
He felt as bewildered and angry and helpless as