Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [48]
But he had, several times, and each time he'd come to, he'd felt hotter. A physician had come and examined the wound and treated it and bandaged it and told Dain he was very lucky.
It was clean. No bones had been shattered. Muscle and nerve damage was negligibly minor. There was no danger of infection.
Dain should not, therefore, be feverish, but he was. First his arm burned, then his shoulder and neck caught fire. Now his head was ablaze.
Amid this internal hellfire, he heard Esmond's voice, smooth and soothing as always.
"She knows, naturellement, that no jury in France would convict her," said Esmond. "Here, it is easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than to convict a beautiful woman of any crime which appears to be in any way connected to l'amour."
"Of course she knows." Dain gritted out the words. "Just as I know she didn't do it in the heat of the moment. Did you see her hand? Not a hint of trembling. Cold and steady as you please. She was not in a mindless rage. She knew precisely what she was doing."
"She knows very well what she is doing," Esmond agreed. "Shooting you was only the beginning. She means to make a spectacle of you. I am to tell you that she will make public— in the courtroom if she can get the trial she insists upon, or in the papers if she cannot— every detail of the episode. She says she will repeat all you said to her and describe in full detail everything you did."
"In other words, she'll exaggerate and twist words to her purpose," said Dain, angrily aware that all she had to utter was the truth. And that, in the eyes of the world, would reduce Lord Beelze-bub to a lovesick, panting, groaning, sweating schoolboy. His friends would howl with laughter at his mawkish outpourings, even the Italian.
She would remember what the words sounded like— she was adept in Latin, wasn't she?— and do an apt imitation, because she was quick and clever…and vengeful. Then all his mortifying secrets, dreams, fantasies, would be translated into French and English— and soon, every other language known to humankind. The words would be printed in bubbles over his head in printshop caricatures. Farces of the episode would be enacted upon the stage.
That was merely a fraction of what he'd face, Dain knew.
He had only to recollect how the press had pilloried Byron a dozen years earlier— and the poet had been a model of social rectitude compared to the Marquess of Dain. Furthermore, Byron had not been obscenely wealthy, terrifyingly big and ugly, and infuriatingly powerful.
The bigger they are, the harder the fall. And the better the world liked seeing them fall.
Dain understood the way of the world very well. He could see plainly enough what the future held. Miss Jessica Trent saw, too, undoubtedly. That was why she hadn't killed him. She wanted to make sure he suffered the torments of hell while he lived.
She knew he would suffer, because she had struck in the only place where he could be hurt: his pride.
And if he couldn't endure it— which she knew, of course, he couldn't— she'd get her satisfaction in private, no doubt. She would make him crawl.
She had him exactly where she wanted him, the she-devil.
Amid the hellfire raging over half his body, his head began to pound. "I'd better deal with her directly," he said. His tongue was thick, slurring the words. "Negotiate. Tell her…" He swallowed. His throat burned, too. "Terms. Tell her…"
He shut his eyes and searched his throbbing, roiling mind for words, but they wouldn't come. His head was a red-hot mound of metal a hellish blacksmith was hammering upon, pounding intellect, thought, into nothingness. He heard Esmond's voice, very far away, but couldn't make sense of the words. Then the satanic hammer struck one shattering blow, and knocked Dain into oblivion.
* * *
Consumed by the feverish illness he shouldn't have had, Dain drifted in and out of consciousness for most of the