Lord of Scoundrels Read Online Free PDF

She was supposed to faint, or recoil in horrified revulsion at the very least. Yet she had gazed at him as bold as brass, and it had seemed for a moment as though the creature were actually flirting with him.
    He decided to leave. He could just as well wrestle with this incongruity out of doors. He was heading for the door when Bertie turned and hurried after him.
    “You got off easy,” Trent whispered, loud enough to be heard at Notre Dame. “I was sure she’d rip into you—and she will rip if she’s a mind to, and don’t care who it is, either. Not but what you could handle her, but she does give a fellow a headache, and if you was thinking of going for a drink—”
    “Champtois has just come into possession of an automaton you will find intriguing,” Dain told him. “Why don’t you ask him to wind it up so that you can watch it perform?”
    Bertie’s square face lit with delight. “One of them what-you-call-’ems? Truly? What does it do?”
    “Why don’t you go look?” Dain suggested.
    Bertie trotted off to the shopkeeper and promptly commenced babbling in accents any right-thinking Parisian would have considered grounds for homicide.
    Having distracted Bertie from his apparent intention of following him, Lord Dain had only to take another few steps to be out the door. But his gaze drifted to Miss Trent, who was again entranced with something in the jewel case, and eaten by curiosity, he hesitated.

Chapter 2
     
    A bove the whirring and clicking of the automaton, Jessica heard the marquess’s hesitation as clearly as if it had been a trumpet’s blare at the start of battle. Then he marched. Bold, arrogant strides. He’d made up his mind and he was coming in with heavy artillery.
    Dain was heavy artillery, she thought. Nothing Bertie or anyone else could have told her could have prepared her. Coal black hair and bold, black eyes and a great, conquering Caesar of a nose and a sullen sensuality of a mouth—the face alone entitled him to direct lineage with Lucifer, as Withers had claimed.
    As to the body…
    Bertie had told her Dain was a very large man. She had half expected a hulking gorilla. She had not been prepared for a stallion: big and splendidly proportioned—and powerfully muscled, if what his snug trousers outlined was any indication. She should not have been looking there , even if it was only an instant’s glance, but a physique like that demanded one’s attention and drew it…everywhere. After that unladylike instant, it had taken every iota of her stubborn willpower to keep her gaze upon his face. Even then, she’d only managed the feat because she was afraid that otherwise she’d lose what little remained of her reason, and do something horribly shocking.
    “Very well, Miss Trent,” came his deep voice, from somewhere about a mile above her right shoulder. “You have piqued my curiosity. What the devil have you found there that’s so mesmerizing?”
    His head might be a mile above her, but the rest of his hard physique was improperly close. She could smell the cigar he had smoked a short time ago. And a subtle—and outrageously expensive—masculine cologne. Her body commenced a repeat of the slow simmer she had first experienced moments earlier and had not yet fully recovered from.
    She would have to have a long talk with Genevieve, she told herself. These sensations could not possibly be what Jessica suspected they were.
    “The watch,” she said composedly. “The one with the picture of the woman in the pink gown.”
    He leaned closer to peer into the case. “She’s standing under a tree? Is that the one?”
    He set his expensively gloved left hand upon the case, and all the saliva evaporated from her mouth. It was a very large, powerful hand. She was rivetingly aware that one hand could lift her straight off the floor.
    “Yes,” she said, resisting the urge to lick her dry lips.
    “You’ll want to examine it more closely, I’m sure,” he said.
    He reached up,