Page 129 of The Dueling Duchess

“Oh, not now. But when I do.”

“Why are you moving?”

“I always move,” she said simply.

“But . . . why?”

Blade opened her mouth and then closed it and stared out the window.

Cecile sighed. Would this reserved woman ever confide in her? Or was she simply banging her head—

“I’ve always moved a lot—ever since I can remember.” Blade’s voice was low, her words leaving a slight fog on the window.

“Why have you moved so much?”

Blade’s slim shoulders shrugged, and Angus roused himself, looking annoyed by the disruption to his nap.

“Do you have family, Jo?”

“No.”

Cecile didn’t bother to point out that Blade had, last year, claimed to need time away from the Fayre to go and visit a sick cousin.

“There was only my uncle Mungo, but he died.”

“Mungo? That’s an interesting name.”

“He was named after the patron saint of Glasgow.”

“Ah, you are Scottish. And he was the one who raised you?”

“Yes. My mother died when I was a baby so I only had my father,” Cecile said, but then scowled and added, “Well, and I have a cousin here in London, but I don’t count him. My father and I moved almost constantly once the Revolution broke out.”

“Yes, so did we.”

Cecile would have loved to pry, but the connection between them was tenuous and she knew she could be . . . intrusive, so she held her tongue.

“We spent time in France, the Prussian states, all over the Continent, really,” Blade volunteered.

“Your uncle took you there during the War?”

“Oh yes. It was safer with him than anywhere else.”

Safe from what?

But Blade turned around again, her shoulders, usually so straight and proud, oddly slumped.

Her message was clear: The conversation was over.

* * *

Guy paced in the book room, wishing he’d simply gone on to Sin and Marianne’s ball and let the women show up on their own. He knew that was a boorish and ungentlemanly thought, but he was so bloody wound up waiting for them, he was about to—

“Guy?”

His head whipped around. “What?” he asked Helen, who was sitting on the settee beside a yawning, sleepy-eyed Cat, who’d been allowed to stay up late so she could see everyone in their finery.

“You’re walking a hole in the carpet,” Helen teased, looking up at him with a glint of humor in her gray eyes.