Page 53 of The Gentleman’s Leading Lady

“I think there are parts you are not telling us,” Dante observed.

Dorsey shrugged. “Does it matter? Girl’s an excellent mimic. She can play a lady in the drawing room and a barmaid in a brawl. She can be Lady Teazle or Lady MacBeth, and that’s all I need to know of her.”

“Thank you, Dorsey. That’s the nicest thing I’ve ever heard you say about me.” Cerys pushed back her hair.

“Just don’t prove me wrong,” Dorsey grumbled. “Fred, want a go? You can fight Mr. Manelli.”

“Where did you study, Mr. Manelli?” Cerys asked, watching as Dante parried thrusts from Kiddell.

“A friend of my father’s family came to England and opened a school of his own, trying to capture Angelo’s success. But he kept to the Italian style of the southern regions.”

“But how would they differ? Are there that many ways to fight?”

“You’d be surprised.” His smile was crooked, as if he did not often smile in genuine delight, and might have forgotten how.

At last, at long last, his guard was slipping. That tight, careful reserve with which he held himself was beginning to loosen, perhaps from the exercise, perhaps because the easy camaraderie of their group told him there was no one he needed to impress. A crack in the marble façade. Cerys pounced.

“Show me.”

“The stance I was taught is different, for one thing. Like this.” Cerys tried to model his crouch, and he frowned. She was beginning to develop an affection for that scowl. “No. More like this.”

“I’m doing it,” she protested.

“Lower. Wider. Distribute your weight.” He turned to her and pressed a hand on her outthrust knee, then tapped her rear thigh. “Back more. Lower, I said.” He pressed a hand to her hip.

He had not thought about the impropriety of touching her, because she was dressed as a man, Cerys assumed, or because they were, for the moment, both sportsmen. But his hand on her body seared as if she’d fallen against a hot stove. He smelled of that blend of Hungary water that stirred and teased a different hunger in her body.

He froze. So did she.

“Is this right?” she breathed, purposefully leaning into his hand.

Oh, she was so far from a proper young lady. And she didn’t even have the grace to be ashamed.

He didn’t move his hand, though he’d realized what he was doing. His palm rested on her hip, heavy, warm. His artist’s hands, long, supple fingers, small scars from nicks that she wondered how he had acquired. His fingers squeezed into her flesh, gently, possessively.

He cleared his throat, his voice gruff when he spoke, like a man parched with thirst. “Too much weight on the back leg. Angelo teaches that, and I don’t know why. It makes it easier to parry, I assume, but you have to shift your weight to advance, and that gives your opponent too much time to see you coming. Try balancing your weight on both feet.”

“Oh.” Cerys looked up into his face. “I can feel the difference.”

He caught and held her glance, and so much moved in the dark depths of his expression. His eyes burned with a dark flame.

Her breath tangled in her chest, forgetting the way out.

He took away his hand. He cleared his throat again.

“The way I was taught, the Italian way, relies on strength as well as agility. Lunge at Kiddell. Attack.”

She stepped forward, as she’d been trained, and he shook his head, planting both hands on her hips this time. “No.”

Cerys caught the glance Kiddell exchanged with Dorsey. She couldn’t follow what it meant, because her entire being was slammed with a sudden, overwhelming heat. Her mind staggered with it.

“The weight moves from the back leg to the front,” Dante said. “You don’t mince. You leap. Lunge as if you mean to run him through.”

Kiddell leaned his sword tip on his boot, watching with interest as Dante showed Cerys what he meant, moving her body as he wished her to move. She could barely see through the veil that suddenly clouded her vision.

Dante was touching her. Touching her. Her being could take in no other information but that.

“Attack from on high,” he murmured in her ear. “Point your sword downward. He will have to raise his arm to block you. That will leave him open.”