Page 22 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

Bathsheba.

Here.

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.”