Page 68 of The Dueling Duchess

And then grinning when she spotted one particularly unpleasant job. “He can take over the laundry, too.”

Blade barked a laugh. “Basil will appreciate that.”

Nobody liked hauling the laundry. It was heavy, dirty, thankless work. And at the end of toting bag after bag of dirty linen, the person had to deal with Ginny Bascom, their laundry woman.

Ginny made Vlad the Impaler seem like a Sunday school teacher by comparison. She held anyone who delivered laundry personally accountable for all the stains on the garments she washed. She especially disliked men, and her harsh haranguing was enough to send even the stoutest of them running scared.

Cecile watched absently as Angus sidled up to Blade’s neck and made a purring sound, nuzzling his head against her jaw.

“That bird has an unnatural attachment to you.”

Blade ignored her criticism, her gaze on nothing in particular as she spun a knife.

Cecile had never seen the woman angry, upset, scared, or sad, and no insult seemed sharp enough to pierce her aura of impenetrability.

Angus, on the other hand, gave Cecile a hostile glare from his glossy black eyes and made an aggressive snapping sound with his giant beak. The raven protected his mistress and loved her.

Maybe Blade had the right idea when it came to keeping other people out of her life and just sticking with her bird—after all, it was difficult to see Angus discarding Blade so he could marry a wealthy raven.

Cecile dropped her head in her hands and squeezed her eyes shut.

Good Lord, she was envious of a bird’s affection. Clearly Guy’s influence was already scrambling her wits.

* * *

As Guy stood surrounded by a few hundred or so of his erstwhile good chums and mates—all shouting, stamping their feet, and guffawing loudly—he struggled to remind himself why he’d signed up for this especially agonizing brand of humiliation.

You did it to get close to Cecile, and you are now close to her—living in her house, right down the corridor from her, in point of fact.

Fine, fine. That was true. But was anything worth this humiliation?

Blade bowed to the wildly clapping audience and then strode toward Guy, the black leather breeches, black tailcoat, and top boots she wore provocative enough to draw even Guy’s gaze.

Jo Brown was an attractive woman—her body slender but shapely—but she was far too strange for him to feel any attraction to her.

And after what she’d done in France last year—essentially rescuing the rest of them single-handedly—he held a great deal of respect, and no small amount of awe, for her.

But that didn’t mean he wanted to get to know her.

No, he’d leave that to his friend Elliot, whom Guy would swear was in love with the woman. Not that you’d ever have known it from Elliot’s cagey behavior.

“You’d better smile or Cecile will have your head,” Blade hissed through her teeth as she plucked several razor-sharp knives from the thick wooden board behind Guy’s head, juggled them in a showy fashion that garnered hoots from the audience, and then tucked them into the tightly fitted vest beneath her tailcoat.

The first time Guy had seen her do that, he’d been shocked by the seemingly dangerous gesture. But then he’d learned there were bone-lined pockets all over her costume, even in the bodice, so she’d not cut herself. Well, unless she missed the pockets entirely. And Blade never missed anything she was aiming for.

“Smile,” Angus echoed, bobbing up and down on Guy’s shoulder before nipping his ear.

“Dammit!” Guy yelped, his startled cry driving the crowd of drunken aristocrats to almost hysterical levels of mirth.

Guy forced a smile that was probably more like a death rictus and glared at the part of the theater that was too high and too dark to see clearly—the part of the house that theatrical folk called the gods. He bloody well wished he were up there. Even the gods had sold out now that word had got out that the former Duke of Fairhurst was working in a female circus.

To be honest, he was more than a little appalled by how much of an attraction he was.

When he’d taken the job, he’d been thinking of how things had been when the Fayre toured France last year.

But Guy hadn’t grown up in France.

And Guy didn’t know every member of the French aristocracy and wasn’t related to at least half of them.