Page 25 of The Dueling Duchess

Guy could understand her recognizing him and Sin because they’d both been immortalized in satirical cartoons—Guy because of his amorous antics and Sin thanks to his crusade against child labor—but how she’d learned Elliot’s identity was a mystery.

“Who else do you think knows?” he asked.

She merely shrugged and turned toward the pile of clothing on the settee, which she began digging through, as if she were no longer interested in Guy or his friends.

As if she found herself in the same room with a masquerading marquess every day of the week.

Guy—who’d been dreading all the prying questions she was going to ask about the three of them and what they were doing—couldn’t help being offended that she had no interest in the matter at all.

“How did you know who Elliot was?” he finally asked, irked by his own curiosity but unable to resist.

She appeared not to hear him and kept digging.

Really, the woman was beyond strange. In the weeks that Guy had been working at Farnham’s, Marianne had volunteered him to rehearse with Blade and her bird four times.

The lethal woman probably hadn’t said more than a dozen sentences, most of which had been of the two-word variety: “Hold this. Stand there. Don’t move.” And so forth.

Quite honestly, she was one of the oddest people he’d ever met.

More than a little disgruntled by her lack of curiosity, Guy turned back to the newspapers.

They didn’t all contain stories about him or mention his name, but enough of them did to surprise him. He hadn’t read the society section in any newspaper in years and he was shocked by just how closely they reported every little thing he did. And how often they either made up things entirely or embroidered on events until they were all but unrecognizable to him.

Indeed, if a person were to form a picture of him based solely on the contents of the numerous references in the society sections, that person would conclude he did nothing but carouse, womanize, and engage in dangerous or foolish wagers.

“Learning anything new?” Blade had moved to the end of the settee that was closest to him and was still rooting through the garments like a truffle-hunting pig.

“I have, actually. A great deal of it is nothing but fiction.”

He flicked through the papers and brought out an issue of the London Chronicle, a newspaper he knew for a fact his mother read.

“Look here,” he said, holding up the paper.

She stopped her digging and came over to look. “Swimming nude in the Serpentine?” She looked at Guy. “Who is the C__ of N__?”

“The Countess of Neath.”

“And you’re saying you didn’t go swimming in the nude?”

“No, I’m saying I didn’t go swimming in the nude with her. Betsy—the countess—is happily married, and the last time I saw her was at dinner at her house, with her husband and parents in attendance. And everyone was fully clothed, by the way.”

“But you did go swimming nude with somebody?”

“Well, yes. But that’s hardly the point, is it?”

She snorted and then went back to her digging.

Guy was peeved by her dismissive attitude. Indeed, he’d moved past annoyed into the neighborhood of downright irritated.

Just what was it with the women in this circus, anyhow?

Marianne either ignored, mocked, or laughed at him, Cecile openly despised him, and here was Blade pretending that his antics weren’t enough to fascinate half the population of England, behaving as if stories about Guy didn’t sell more newspapers than articles about Boney!

“What are you looking for?” he asked.

“Angus has been taking things and hiding them,” she said, a hint of annoyance in her normally flat tone.

Guy looked at the bird, who’d flown over to the dressing table when his mistress had begun digging.