Lord of Scoundrels - Loretta Chase [99]
She should have also realized, though, that the difficulty lay deeper. She should have put the clues together: his acute sensibility, his mistrust of women, his edginess in his family home, his bitterness toward his mother, the portrait of his forbidding father, and Dain's contradictory behavior toward Jessica herself.
She'd known— hadn't every instinct told her?— he badly needed her, needed something from her.
He needed what every human being needed: love.
But he needed it far more than many, because, apparently, he hadn't had so much as a whiff of it since he was a babe.
…he takes it all for granted: her smiles and reassurance, her patience, forgiveness.
Jessica knew she should have laughed, as he had, and kept matters light, no matter what she'd felt. She should not have spoken of mamas and little boys they loved. Then Dain wouldn't have looked up at her as he had, and she wouldn't have seen the lonely little boy in him. She would not have grieved for that child, and Dain would not have seen the grief in her eyes.
Now he would think she felt sorry for him— or worse, that she'd deliberately lured him into betraying himself.
He was probably furious with her.
Don't, she prayed silently. Be angry if you must, but don't turn your back and walk away.
* * *
Dain didn't leave.
All the same, if Jessica had been a fraction less accustomed to male irrationality, his behavior during the next few days would have destroyed every hope she'd cherished of building anything remotely like a proper marriage. She would have decided he was Beelzebub in truth, and had never been a little boy at all— let alone a heartbroken and lonely one— but had sprung fully grown from the skull of the Prince of Darkness, much as Athena had popped out of Zeus' head.
But that, she soon understood, was what Dain wanted her to believe: that he was a heartless debauchee whose primary interest in her was lascivious, and who viewed her as an amusing toy, no more.
By Friday, he had debauched her in the window seat of his bedroom, an alcove off the portrait gallery, under the pianoforte in the music room, and against the door of her sitting room— in front of his mother's portrait, no less. And that was only the daytime depravity.
At least when they were making love he was consistently passionate. Whatever he might be able to pretend when cool and rational, he could not pretend he didn't want her— badly— or that making her equally lust-crazed wasn't crucial element of the business.
The rest of the time, however, he was the Dain everyone believed he was. For hours at a stretch he could be amiable, even charming. Then, for no ascertainable reason, he'd turn on her, trickling sarcasm over her like acid, or patronizing her, or casually uttering a handful of words nicely calculated to turn her mind black with rage.
The message, in other words, was that Jessica was permitted to desire him; she was not, however, to insult him with any softer emotions, such as affection or compassion. She was not, in short, to try to get under his skin or— heaven forfend!— weasel her way into his black, rotten heart.
This was not in the least fair, considering that the beast had already crept under her skin and was rapidly fastening like a pernicious parasite upon her heart. He didn't even have to work at it. She was falling in love with him— in spite of everything and against her better judgment— more slowly, yes, but just as inexorably as she'd fallen in lust with him.
That didn't mean, however, that she wasn't strongly tempted to do him a violent injury. When it came to being exasperating, Dain was a genius. By Friday, she was debating the relative merits of putting another bullet through him and trying to decide which portion of his anatomy she could most easily live without.
By Saturday, she'd decided that his brain was probably