Chapter 10 #3
“But you know I am ambitious, Dante. Like you. Why should I not have Baeccon’s title and rank, and whatever wealth he can manage not to lose at the gaming table? And why should I not have a lover who pleases me also?” She stroked his arm again.
“Is your husband aware that you intend to make him a cuckold?”
“Let us not dwell on unpleasant matters, when there are much more pleasant things we could discuss.” Bathsheba squeezed his arm, a supplication, a caress.
Once, her very nearness had made him burn with lust. Once, that sultry invitation would have undone him. She was knowledgeable in bed, and he had received the kind of tutelage in pleasure that he’d hadn’t known how to discover for himself.
The kind of pleasure a man could mistake for love, until he grew wiser.
Dante snapped his sketchbook shut. “I hope I will not dash any hopes when I am obliged to say that my affections lie elsewhere. If you will excuse me.”
He imagined her glare burning twin holes in the back of his coat as he walked away from her, spine straight. Good. Let her see how it felt to be rejected. Walked away from.
Cerys turned to face him as he approached her group, as if she had been waiting. Her smile changed from the knowing smirk to something softer. Welcome. When he came to her, she slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow as if she belonged at his side, and knew it.
“The Viscount Andover has graciously agreed to lend his ballroom for Lady Baeccon’s matinee, if she wishes,” she said.
“And thereafter, Mr. Thompson has agreed to let us use his spa for a run of our Hamlet, and other shows if we please our audience. We are discussing how to arrange the staging and set up seats.”
“Benches will do for the most of ’em,” Dorsey said. “A few chairs for the gouty gents and the elderly ladies. The rest can stand. ’Tis what they do when we’re at a barn or market.”
“Perhaps we can contrive something that will do for the longer term,” Thompson suggested. “To serve through the months while your permanent theater is being built.”
“I have some thoughts on that,” Dante said. “If I may steal Miss Evans away from you for a moment?”
Dorsey nodded, his focus drawn away as the older actress, the one called Mame, strolled up to the group. “You won’t take our Cerys far, will you, Mr. Manelli?” Mame said with a shrewd look.
“Not out of sight,” he assured her. “You may be witness to her every move.”
Mame chuckled. “People pay admission to watch this one, Mr. Manelli. Remember that.” Despite her easy smile, her pointed stare communicated the warning of chaperones the world over. Spoil her, and there will be hell to pay.
He was annoyed at the implication, touched at the older woman’s protectiveness, and curious about its source. Because she was protecting the troupe’s assets, or because she cared for the girl herself?
Cerys walked with him along the well-trodden path toward what would become the Parade, once he completed the designs for the villas Thompson meant to build. “You abandoned me on the edge of the forest to be ravened by the wolves,” he accused her.
She laughed. He wondered if she had pitched the sound to carry, that ringing mirth. Wondered if she knew how Bathsheba tossed her head at the sound, eyes narrowed.
“Poor Mr. Manelli.” She patted his arm with her other hand, then left it there, both of her hands on his arm. He had barely registered Bathsheba’s touch. Cerys’s left him enveloped in heat.
“Got a few nips in, did she?”
“More like rakes with her talons.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I could not come to you. You must be hanging after me, or what else is the point?”
“I have never in my life hung about anyone,” he snapped.
Why so irritable, when he had what he wanted—Cerys on his arm—he couldn’t say. Like a dog that stood and snapped over its food rather than feasting. Yet he could not help but feel he had walked from one snare into another, and the little minx was pulling his strings as she pulled everyone else’s.
She looked up into his face, her expression soft and questioning, then sent a knowing look after Bathsheba.
“Not even her,” he said firmly. He had made himself a fool, but he had been circumspect enough that not even his friends, or family, could accuse him of being a mooncalf over her. He’d kept his ecstasy, and then his suffering, to himself.
Cerys strolled at his side, their steps falling into an easy rhythm. The spring breeze ruffled the curls that had peeked beneath her cap. She was not a woman who pressed her hair, or anything about herself, into submission.
“She must have thrown lure after lure at you, to make you bate so hard after her,” she remarked.
“I am not bait.”
“Bate,” she said, and spelled it. “In falconry. It is when the bird is still leashed but tries to fly. A harsh stop for the bird, I believe.”
“How on earth do you know of falconry?”
“Oh, a neighbor of ours, Sir Hewitt, took an interest once he came home from the wars and needed occupation. It is not a popular sport on the whole, I understand, but there’s a group of gentlemen quite avid about it.
He tried to teach me a thing or two, but Lady Vaughn always feared they would claw me. I was better at archery, anyway.”
Entertainments of genteel young ladies. Had she been raised a gentleman’s daughter? If so, why was she consorting with actors? Her family would be distraught to know where she was.
“Is your father a knight also?”
She laughed, the sound free and open, nothing contrived about the gesture this time. “My stepfather is a prince when it comes to nobility of character, but I can’t see him ever coming in line for honors.”
He glanced down at her, noting the fresh flush of color in her cheeks, not rouge, and the tiny freckles across her nose and cheeks. “It would not do for me to ask your age,” he noted. She seemed so canny in some ways, so girlish in others.
“A score of years, so my mother tells me,” she said promptly. “It would likewise not be polite for me to inquire about your age.”
“I’ve a dozen years on you, chit.”
She raised her brows. “Oh, is that all? I had guessed more.”
He paused to glare. “Indeed?”
“Yes. It is the scowl.” She lifted a hand—he saw it coming and steeled himself. Even so, when she trailed her gloved fingers over his brows, the touch startled him. The leather was warm and smooth, but she smelled of oranges and something deeper, warmer. Clove.
He found his eyes drifting closed and forced them open.
It was only that he had not known a woman’s touch in a while.
He was busy. He had no wish to acquire a reputation for indiscretions, or even discreet affaires.
He must be visionary yet responsible, ambitious yet efficient, scrupulously dedicated to his task.
He could not be the fool throwing over good sense to follow the skirts of a young girl who was only toying with him.
And yet a bolt of feeling struck through his chest at the touch of Cerys’s fingers on his face. Astonishment that he could be so moved. Surprise that she would touch him in plain view of the others; it was the gesture of a couple who were intimate, if not affianced.
And the appalling urge to lean into her hand and let her fingers soothe away all the worry and trouble. To stand for a moment in the spring sunlight struggling to emerge behind the clouds, in the scent of wildflowers and damp earth, in the sense of calm that she carried with her.
“Poor dear,” she said, her voice a low caress, as thrilling as the touch of her fingers. “It is very heavy, isn’t it? All that armor against the world.”
“You presume much, to speculate about my emotions,” he murmured. But he did not pull his head away from her touch, and his accusation lacked the heat of a scold.
“My mother is the same way. Always on her guard against the world. She had to be, when I was younger. And even now, when the property is doing well, when she has a husband who dotes on her and the babanod are all healthy, she is looking over her shoulder still, watching to see if someone is coming to take it all away.” She paused a moment, stroking his brow. “It is a hard way to live, I think.”
He tried to move his limbs, to not be skewered by this observation.
He was back in the sunlit studio, his father accusing him of being as much a clod as the lump of clay unyielding in his hands.
The conversation that drifted out of the headmaster’s office when his mother tried to enroll him in school: “—only the son of a sculptor.”
Being known among Cockerell’s apprentices as the swarthy one. Known among the architects and builders as the Italian.
Bathsheba’s amused voice, that last afternoon in bed together: “Dante, don’t be ridiculous. He’s a lord.”
He forced his eyes open again. He kept sliding under Cerys’s spell. Those eyes, the color of new shoots of grass, stared full into his face, unabashedly curious. Studying him. The little minx saw too much.
She withdrew her hand, tucking it around his arm again with a soft, consoling pat. “Poor dear,” she said once more. “You really had no defense against her, did you? She tore you to pieces.”
He stiffened. Tried to resist, to push away this knowledge. And her effrontery in saying it aloud. “You presume—”
“The question now is what you wish our little ruse to accomplish.” She tugged at his arm to keep them walking, away from the group, but not too far. “Do you want her to pine for you and make a play to have you back, or do you want her to suffer, knowing what she missed?”