Chapter 7
CHAPTER SEVEN
As much as his attention focused on the doorway, Dante felt more than saw Miss Evans observing him and his reaction to the newcomers.
Of course, with her infernal curiosity, she couldn’t resist watching those around her, but she also seemed astute about people.
She’d summed up Lady Diana and the Hon. James Dutton at a glance and given the both of them exactly what they most wanted to see.
He didn’t want her guessing too much about him.
Bathsheba gazed about the room, evaluating the furnishings and everyone else in it, making an instant decision about their usefulness to her. She measured Andover, then Lady Diana.
And then her attention landed on him.
Her eyes grew heavy-lidded, and a small, feline smile played about her mouth. The old wound opened, weeping its poison and gall. She was lovelier than she had been six years ago, but she was also richer now, with the luxuries of wealth to augment her natural looks.
She wore a gown of turquoise silk, the deep color signaling that she was no dainty maiden to be put in pastels or virginal white.
A cunning pattern of trim at the bosom accented the breasts swelling above the neckline of her gown—she had always made the best use of that feature.
Her smile widened when she caught him taking her measure, and she returned his stare with a bold evaluation of her own.
He flushed with humiliation as her eyes raked over him.
She concluded by gazing into his face, and the self-satisfied smile curled up both ends of her mouth.
She was telling him without words that she’d had him once, and believed she could have him again.
She could summon whatever and whomever she wanted with no more than a crook of one slender finger.
“Lord and Lady Baeccon of Haggerston Park,” announced the butler, Buckle, who had eventually emerged from his foray through the cellars and decided to acquit himself to the task of hosting Andover’s party.
Andover, who’d been caught up in conversation with Dorsey by a distant fireplace, ambled over to do the honors, leading the pair to where Cousin Diana sat. “Baeccon, glad you could tear yourself away from the card table to humor me. And you’ve trotted out your lady, well done of you.”
“Yes, well, my exquisite Bathsheba said she had an acquaintance among your group. And I live to please her, of course.”
His lordship’s slightly sour expression as he delivered this line, along with a faint lift of his lip, suggested he had found through experience that displeasing his wife made his own life intolerable.
Was the bloom already off the rose, then?
But Bathsheba would not be so unwise as to diminish her value in her husband’s eyes.
She had worked hard to find herself a silk-lined nest; she would work as hard to keep it.
“Bacon?” Cousin Diana harrumphed, raising her quizzing glass to inspect his lordship.
“Haggerston. That’s about as far north as one can go before crossing the border into the land of the wild Scots.
A castle, isn’t there, of some age? A Sir Carnaby of Haggerston Castle looked for my hand, back in the day, but I was too choosy then. ”
“He must have been devastated not to win you, Lady Diana.” Bathsheba smiled widely, as if she were enchanted by the older woman’s wit.
“But I am happy to report that he consoled himself later with another bride. We have not been much inside Haggerston Castle, since Sir Carnaby’s daughter married and went to Cheshire, and altogether we do not spend much time in the north.
” She squeezed her husband’s arm lightly.
“It was very clever of my lord to find us a rural retreat for when we should wish for the quiet, but I have found the Scots to be not entirely civilized. Though I will say, a rough edge can have its appeal, in certain persons.”
Dante would swear her eyes flicked in his direction. “Still, we spend most of our time in London. And it is Baeccon now, as I’m sure you’ve heard.” Helpfully, she spelled it.
“Oh, I see,” Diana said to his lordship. “You won your lady, then you won her an ancestral seat from some poor desperate sod at the gaming tables, and now you are looking to win some income to prop up the sagging pile.”
Baeccon’s scowl said her ladyship had guessed the right of it. Shrewd, Cousin Diana was. Bathsheba’s silk-lined nest was proving to have been made from a sow’s ear, then. Dante couldn’t find it in himself to feel any pity, particularly not when she was turned out splendidly.
The other actresses regarded her gown and her coiffure with outright envy. Only Cerys stood serene and composed, and for once surprisingly quiet, studying the other woman with a glimmer of green in her shifting eyes.
“And you are?” Bathsheba turned to Cerys, sensing a rival. Dante, unaccountably, stiffened with the impulse to move to her side and protect the younger girl.
Whence that ridiculous and unwise urge?
“She is—” Lady Diana began.
Cerys stuck out her hand. “Cerys Evans, actress with the Dorsey Players. That’s Jed, over there.” She nodded her head in a broad, common gesture. In an instant, the genteel delicacy with which she had met Cousin Diana melted away.
Cousin Diana raised her thin, painted brows.
“Oh. An actress.” Bathsheba’s eyes slid away. She as much as spoke the words: No one of account, then. She pinned her dark gaze on Dante, and he had the sense she’d been waiting for this meeting.
She soaked in the sight of him for a long moment, an appreciative curl at her lips. “Hello, Dante.”
“Manelli,” he reminded her. “Lady Baeccon.” He would not bow nor give any other acknowledgement. His cravat was strangling him was it was.
“You’re acquainted?” Dutton pounced.
“We knew each other well, once,” Bathsheba said softly.
“Before your lordship was in the picture,” Dante said to the other man. He knew a jealous husband when he saw one. “Once she met you, she turned me off immediately.”
Jilted him rather hard-heartedly, as a matter of fact. Leaving him shredded and holding his hat, made painfully aware, and not for the first time, that his father’s status put him on the backfoot with the British high born.
More fool he for letting down his guard. He’d never been as gullible since, and never would be again.
“Do you live here now, Dante?” Bathsheba asked, ignoring his attempt to establish a chilly distance. “I had heard you moved your family to Cheltenham.”
Now why would she know that, unless she had asked about him among their former acquaintance? It wasn’t as if he were the famous sort whose removal from London would be remarked in the papers.
He was lucky when the Cheltenham journal reported on his movements.
He was fortunate when his name surfaced in any discussions at all.
The Crescent debacle was only the latest decision of a bigger, more well-known architect on a project to bury Dante’s involvement from view.
He’d never be able to establish his reputation without his name on a commission. The more public, the better.
To his horror, humiliation choked his throat.
Surprise, unease, and something else—perhaps that long-ago hurt, or else the excruciating pain of knowing he’d been so easily taken in by her— It held him tighter than a boiled pudding.
He’d thanked his saints that he would never have to see this woman again in his life, and now she was here in this drawing room, and he would have to endure hours of dinner. What had he done to deserve this hell?
Her amusement showed in the flicker of her lips. He remembered that mouth. He remembered where that mouth had been on his body. Horror held him petrified.
The scent of jasmine floated to his nose. Cerys Evans stood beside him, tapping her closed fan on his arm as if she knew he was petrified and she meant, in the subtlest way, to knock his wits back in order.
“As a matter of fact, Mr. Manelli is building a house just outside of Cheltenham,” Cerys said. The common affectation was gone, and she was the gracious, genteel version again. “I’ve seen the designs. They’re quite elegant. It’s a home anyone would wish over their head.”
“Is he still dabbling about with the Gothic influences? He was much attached to them, once.” Bathsheba surveyed Cerys with new appraisal. She’d dismissed her before, but now, seeing her attached to Dante’s arm, the girl took on a new interest.
“No, he is working in the classical style now.” Cerys smiled sweetly. “You’d be astonished at how very much a man’s tastes can change.”
Oh, that was a cut, claws out. Dante saw his own surprise mirrored in Dutton’s widening eyes. Lady Diana smirked.
“Indeed?” Bathsheba’s smile became tense around the corners. “I think when you are older, Miss Cerys, you will realize men rarely change their stamp.”
“Oh, you may call me Miss Evans, as I am the eldest of my father’s house,” Cerys said serenely. That grace, that elegance, that superior smile. She was practically beating Bathsheba into a froth. She turned to Dante, and the glint of mischief in her eyes said she knew exactly what she was doing.
“I think Francesca’s room particularly charming. She will adore that motif of rosettes.”
Dante would only stare down into her face. Her skin glowed like the pearlescent inside of a sea shell. Her dark eyes were nets that had entangled him like a creature fished from the deep.
“Francesca?” Bathsheba’s voice sliced, and Cerys widened her eyes, the picture of innocence. “Dante, have you introduced Miss Evans to your mother?”
“I admit I have not yet had the honor, but I look forward to it. I have a feeling Mrs. Manelli and I will get along famously.” Cerys fanned herself lazily, giving a small shrug, as if hugging herself.
She was making herself a target. Dante had to stop her.