Page 27 of The Dueling Duchess

Woman and bird left without another word.

Guy picked up the papers and straightened the edges before returning them to the table, a grin pulling at his lips and his smile growing the more he thought about the abrupt, intimidating Frenchwoman reading society pages and then actually collecting them as a hobby.

It made him snicker to think how thrilled she’d be when he told her—

And then his smile fell.

It was a damned shame that Guy would never be able to tell her who he really was.

Damn! It was going to be bloody agonizing passing up such a priceless opportunity to tease her.

Chapter 5

Dover

February 28, 1815

Cecile watched the three noblemen as they coaxed the draft horses up the ramp that led to the packet ship that would take them to Calais.

These were the last animals that needed to go onboard and the men had already loaded both their own caravan and the one Cecile would be sharing with Marianne and Blade.

Cecile glanced around at the milling employees who were coming to board, looking for the other women, but didn’t see either one.

She’d not seen Blade since the last show they’d done in London a few days earlier, but she’d briefly spotted Marianne last night at the hotel when she’d arrived with her uncle Barnabas and Sonia Marchand, who was Barnabas’s housekeeper and lover.

It had surprised her that Marianne had ridden down from London in her uncle’s carriage. Sonia by herself was a chore, but Sonia and Barnabas together were often unbearable.

That might have explained why Marianne had looked so out of sorts when she’d arrived, barely saying hello before going up to her room and not coming out again.

When Cecile had knocked on her door and asked if she wanted to go to dinner, Marianne had said she wasn’t hungry.

That was when she’d known something was wrong; Marianne was always hungry and she ate like a horse. It was infuriating that she could eat so much and remain so slender. Cecile had to be careful with what she ate as it had a tendency to attach itself to her hips and bottom.

In any event, Cecile hadn’t seen any other employees in the hotel dining room last night except Sonia and Barnabas and had ended up eating her meal with them, an activity that had put her in a vile mood.

Although she’d been a tenant in Barnabas’s house for almost four years, she made it a practice to avoid both him and his lover. She avoided Barnabas because she already had enough of his company during the day at work.

And she avoided Sonia’s company because the woman was an unpleasant, jealous cat who believed every female was on the hunt for Barnabas. Her jealousy over the man had been laughable at first but had grown old over time.

Also, Sonia seemed to delight in vexing and sniping at the younger woman about everything under the sun, behavior that bothered Cecile far more than it did Marianne.

Although Marianne’s aristocratic employees hadn’t been in the dining room last night, they must have stayed in the hotel because she saw all three at breakfast—not that she’d talked to any of them.

After pouring out the details of her family’s past to the marquess that day several weeks earlier, Cecile had taken care not to make the same slip again. He had made that easier by not asking her any more personal questions. He’d also stopped teasing her or lingering after her rehearsals. She told herself she was grateful that he’d become more reserved with her, but, in fact, the less time he spent chasing her, the more time she’d spent furtively watching him socialize with the other Fayre employees.

He was personable and polite with both the male and female staff, and people of all sorts seemed drawn to him. He possessed that special knack of being friendly to the females without being too familiar, which was something many other male workers had not been able to achieve.

A contest to bed him had begun between some of her unmarried coworkers. It was that sort of unapologetically earthy behavior that had attracted the unwanted attention of reformers to theatrical companies, an attitude that was infuriatingly hypocritical given that many peeresses of the realm behaved just as freely—if not more outrageously—than the women she worked with. Cecile probably would have entered the competition for the marquess herself if she hadn’t known his real identity.

Unfortunately, Cecile did know who he was. Not only that, but she’d developed an excessively strong, and exceedingly unwanted, attraction to him. She could only attribute her giddy reaction to him to the fact that he was something of a celebrity. It shamed her to behave in such a fashion, but there was no denying she had been smitten by him before ever meeting him. The man was simply too dangerous to her peace of mind to spend any time around him.

Although his two friends—Sin and Smithy—were every bit as handsome in their own ways, she felt no spark of attraction for either.

All three men were surprisingly good employees for all that none of them had likely done even one day of manual labor in their lives.

They arrived on time for their scheduled rehearsals, did what she asked of them with a minimum of fuss, and never balked at carrying out even the most menial of tasks.

In the four weeks since the three men had come to work for Farnham’s, Marianne still hadn’t explained their presence to Cecile.