Chapter 7 #3
Dante was still reeling from the scent of warm jasmine, his senses on high alert from her touch. It was taking everything he had to master his baser impulses and keep from hauling the girl into his arms.
He’d been too long without a woman. That was all.
“Hamlet is my favorite,” Andover said.
Bathsheba pounced. “Oh, indeed. I must see your Ophelia.”
Diana wrinkled her nose. “Duped, betrayed, and led to ruin by a man.”
“But she dies so prettily,” Bathsheba said. “I am sure Miss Evans would be most affecting in the role.”
Dorsey clapped his hands, his eyes alight. “Hamlet it is! One of my favorites, too. Only wait until you see my ghost. Milord Andover, I don’t suppose you’d allow it here in your house? Your gallery in the other wing, now that was made for a stage…”
He drew their host away in conversation, which left Lady Baeccon to regard Cerys, her eyes aglitter. Her gaze dropped to Cerys’s hand on Dante’s arm, the prim white silk glove standing out against his dark coat. Every individual finger was a brand sinking into his flesh, marking him hers.
“You haven’t said how you know Miss Evans, Dante,” Lady Baeccon observed. She held her own husband’s arm, but there was nothing melting or graceful in it, not like the way Cerys leaned toward Dante. As if she were dazzled. As if he were the most interesting creature in the room.
“We have only just met,” Dante said swiftly.
If he could move Cerys out of Bathsheba’s line of sight, all the better.
The girl had a mouth, but the rest of her was tender flesh, far too easily shredded by the older woman’s claws.
Bathsheba had sharpened her teeth on many a cunning competitor she had cut down so she might get ahead.
She could level Cerys as easily as a gardener shearing a bloom.
“Mr. Manelli has agreed to build us a theater, since we are currently seeking a dedicated space of our own,” Cerys said. “He and I are planning the designs.”
She turned to him and tilted her chin to glance up at him. The lines of her face were drawn as precisely, as delicately, as a cameo, but the glow of spirit animated her eyes.
“I am convinced I want Doric columns on the outside,” she said. “But I can concede to Corinthian columns for the proscenium arch, since you do like your flowery capitals.”
He could only stare. Her loveliness robbed him of thought.
The dance of light in her peridot green eyes, warm and intelligent and amused.
The curve of her full lips, puckered at the corners.
Her pert little chin, and then that nose that said she didn’t care if she were beautiful, or if people thought her so, because she had a character she had already defined for herself.
“Acanthus,” he said. His voice was a tumble of rocks on the riverbank, dry with sudden, undeniable want.
Her lips danced at the corners. “If you say so.”
Pools of devils, she was enchanting. A manipulative little baggage, and if he wasn’t wise, he was going to fall straight into whatever snare she was laying for him.
What did she possibly think he could offer her? Part of him wanted to know.
“What are you about, my little harpy?” he murmured. He kept his voice low, for Bathsheba was watching them intently, and the butler had opened the doors to the dining parlor.
Her hand pressed his arm, the lightest squeeze, yet the gesture marked him. “Find me later,” she whispered, “and perhaps I shall tell you.”
And then she was drawn away as the lines organized for dinner.
Andover took Lady Baeccon, who finally tore her calculating gaze away from Dante, but not Cerys.
Lord Baeccon levered Cousin Diana to her feet.
That left Dutton to offer his arm to Cerys, and Dante didn’t miss the satisfaction in the younger man’s eyes.
He might be married, to all accounts to a congenial young woman who had already provided him with progeny, but he was a man.
He was, in fact, a man of some wealth and position, in line to inherit a barony, and Dante wondered how the cunning Miss Evans might decide to use him.
But he could detect nothing more than courteous pleasantry in her manner as she laughed at his comment, not too breathy or effusive a laugh.
She strolled in on his arm but touched him with only the lightest brush, nothing like how she had twined her hand around Dante’s arm.
And when her companion seated her, then took his seat beside, she offered him no more than cordial thanks and then allowed herself to be drawn into conversation with Lord Baeccon, who had decided that the attention of any proximate young ladies must be on him.
There was calculation in her eyes as she turned to his lordship—Dante practically saw the wheels turning in her cunning little mind—but she had the man’s measure at a glance.
She shifted slightly away from him in her seat, her smile fixed in place, but without a trace of the impishness she had turned on Dante.
For the moment, it seemed, she had decided to toy primarily with Dante. He very much wished to know what she wanted.
And how much he would be willing to give her.