Page 38 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“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?”

His thoughts were as confused as a pot at full boil, bubbling and spewing. “She has already made her play to get me back on her leash,” he said before he thought how unadvised it was to let Cerys Evans further into his private dealings.