Page 27 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

But, against her expectations, he’d clung to her like a lifeline. And one thing that could be confidently said about Cerys Van Der Welle Evans, in all her days: she never, ever turned away a soul who needed her help.

Blast the man. She couldn’t make Mr. Manelli her cause. He was supposed to be helping hers.

She looked to Mame again, gripping her glass. The wine was red and potent, an unwatered Madeira. Mame shook her head in subtle discouragement.

Defiantly, Cerys slid her gaze to Dot, who was out of her element with the lords and ladies but making the best of it. With a look of relief she raised her glass to match Cerys, then took a long, bracing swallow of her wine, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

Unobtrusively, Cerys lifted her serviette from her lap and touched the edges of her mouth, a delicate dab. Dot, appalled, grabbed her own napkin and followed suit.

Lady Baeccon, whose sharp, pale eyes missed nothing, noted this exchange, then turned her attention on Cerys. Clearly, she wasn’t finished with her yet.

“You seem well acquainted with Dante.” The opening thrust, but to what kind of attack, Cerys couldn’t guess.

“With Mr. Manelli, do you mean?”

“Of course. Forgive me—we once knew each other well. He will always be Dante to me.” Her ladyship’s smile held a wistful quality, and for a moment, the softening of her face made her almost beautiful. Cerys could see how a man would be moved.

Lord Baeccon sawed at his partridge with savage intensity, as if he imagined a different victim at his mercy, not a roasted and stuffed bird.

Dante. What a full-bodied name, a bolt of heavy silk on the tongue. The name of a poet who had blazed his name into memory for all time. Now there was a mark.

“You must have known him quite well, to be using Christian names,” Cerys murmured.

“Yes, well, we met at a very vulnerable time in my life. I was alone and bereft. It was before I met his lordship. Dante—your Mr. Manelli—lifted me out of despair.”

While it was his lordship, Cerys surmised, who had lifted her to being a peer’s wife, and that was by far the better prize to her ladyship. Had Dante—Mr. Manelli—known what she was? He must have loved her, for her to wound him so deeply.

She slanted a glance down the table, beneath the veil of her eyelashes, and saw him watching alertly.

Watching Cerys, not her ladyship.

With bafflement and suspicion, wary of why she had turned sweet on him when they’d been pulling caps in the library just that afternoon.

But also a hint of fierceness to him, as if he meant to guard Cerys from the talons of Lady Baeccon.

So Mr. Manelli had fallen once for Lady Baeccon’s heavy-lidded seductions, and now he was falling, line and sinker, for Cerys’s wide-eyed, dewy innocence. It suited her to play the ingenue, especially when she was among those who wanted to see it in her. Audiences warmed to a delicate maiden the way they didn’t to a sharp-eyed, experienced woman like Mame. That temptation to guard innocence against corruption beat as strong in the female breast as in the male.

Cerys Van Der Welle Evans had been born savvy, the daughter of a woman who had learned early to navigate the treacherous margins of English class. And whatever innocence might have been born into the world with Cerys had been drenched in the cold waters of the Baltic Sea when they made a grave for her father.

Nobody here needed to know that, on the inside, Cerys had better hunting instincts than Lady Baeccon. Sharper because her every target fed her family, while her ladyship hunted only for herself.

“Tell us about your acquaintance with Mr. Manelli. If your lordship does not mind the tale.” Cerys bestowed a smile upon the lord in question, letting a faint sympathy tint her expression. “After all, we will be working together. I must be sure I have engaged the right man to entrust with a project that means so much to our company.”

“Oh, Dante will do the work. There is nothing he loves more than the challenge of outdoing a rival. He will find you the best materials, the best builders, the best men for the job. There is nothing he cannot wrangle, no man he cannot bend to his will.”

Her ladyship’s lip twisted in a smile part fond, part rueful, and gaze drifted from its moorings on Cerys toward the far end of the table. “No woman he cannot bend, either. It is something about that Italian charm. The man is a mesmerist.”

Cerys nodded. As someone who currently earned her living weaving a spell of enchantment around people, she appreciated Manelli’s powerful charisma. In his case, it wasn’t something studied or practiced but a raw quality that poured off him in waves, like salt spray and sea waves lashing at a rock wall. His masculine potency rather struck a woman over the head, if she didn’t prepare herself before looking at him.

And Lady Baeccon knew that. She’d been close to him for a length of time. A tendril of something hard and bitter sank a thorn into her heart, and it took Cerys a moment to identify the emotion, which was new to her.

Jealousy.

Mr. Manelli had once adored this sultry, sneaky, imperious woman, and he had not yet looked at Cerys as if she were more than an irritating piece of gravel lodged in his shoe.

“And how did you become acquainted?” Cerys asked, ingenue at the fore. “You were also collaborating on a project, I think he said?”

“No, our collaboration was of a much different kind.”