Page 32 of The Dueling Duchess

Guy shrugged, already accustomed to being mocked for his atrocious accent after only a few days in France. “Are you hungry or not, Sin?”

“I ate there earlier,” Sin said, pulling out his watch. “They are closing in half an hour, so you’d better hurry.”

“Blast! That doesn’t give me any time to change.”

Sin looked at the burgundy velvet and gold-trimmed costume it amused Barnabas to make his few male performers wear, and grinned. “You don’t need to change, Guy; you look like some wealthy old woman’s favorite footman.”

“Very droll.”

Sin had to wear a similar costume, so he was hardly in a position to mock. Guy turned away and headed toward the cloak room.

“If you stop to change your clothing, you’ll miss dinner,” Sin called after him.

Guy just waved a dismissive hand at him.

He wasn’t going to change and miss out on eating. Being shot at was surprisingly hungry and thirsty work, so food was more important than his reluctance to traipse through a French city looking like a court jester.

* * *

Cecile hurried through the quiet streets, wrapped in a heavy wool cloak against the chill of the evening.

She didn’t like walking alone, but all the other women had already eaten, and the only place that served late meals was closing soon.

Because discretion was the better part of valor—or some such English saying—she’d also taken the precaution of buckling her gun holster over her gray wool gown after she’d taken off her black silk costume.

Lord Carlisle asked you to go to dinner with him.

Cecile laughed out loud at that thought.

Yes, she knew exactly what the gorgeous peer had in mind, and it hadn’t been merely food. The days she’d spent riding in the caravan with him had worn away at her reserve until she’d almost given in to his charm. What she needed to do now was put some distance between them.

One would have thought that spending more time with him would have made him seem more mundane, but it hadn’t. There was something about the man that made her feel like a fourteen-year-old girl: dizzy, breathless, and awed. The last thing Cecile needed was the complication of a man in her life. Especially one that would end in disappointment, if not actual heartache.

She was no fool; Guy would one day be a duke and she was a circus performer. Cecile could never be anything other than a temporary dalliance to such a man.

You could tell him the truth—that you are a duchess in your own right.

She actually laughed out loud at that.

Yes, because he would surely believe such a tale. And even if he did believe her, impoverished French aristocrats were literally a ha’penny a dozen these days.

Cecile recalled meeting a French duke and duchess operating a pawnbroker’s shop when she first moved to England. Twenty years ago the French community had swelled so rapidly that most Englishmen, especially the upper echelon, had considered the émigrés flooding their shore a nuisance at best and a plague at worst.

Cecile had borne the brunt of such derision often over the years, although it had become less of an issue of late, especially now that she worked for Barnabas. As an émigré himself—albeit one who’d come to England years and years before the Revolution—he had no tolerance for such abuse, and at least half his employees were French.

But a man like the Marquess of Carlisle would look down his nose at an impoverished Frenchwoman who’d entered into a white marriage with a dying duke in a prison. Not that she had any proof of the alliance.

No, that was a part of her life best left exactly where it was—buried somewhere in the English Channel.

Nothing could come of her attraction to Lord Carlisle, and she would do well to remember it.

Are you saying that you want something to come of it? Since when did you want anything more than a roll in the sheets?

Cecile’s lips flexed into a scowl. I don’t want marriage. But neither do I want to be used and cast aside like a piece of rubbish.

No, if there is going to be any casting aside, then you like to do it.

Cecile couldn’t argue with that; it was far better to be the person in control of the affair, something she’d discovered after the first, and only, time she’d fancied herself in love—years and years and years ago, when she’d been an innocent and foolish girl of nineteen. She’d had many lovers since then—why not, she had only herself to please after all—and she’d been in control of each and every relationship. That was the only way she would—