Page 20 of The Dueling Duchess

“Very amusing,” Guy said, shaking the tiny bits of confetti from his hair, eyebrows, and even his eyelashes.

She chuckled, pulling off her blindfold and grinning at him—the first time she’d looked at him with anything other than suspicion or dislike.

Guy’s cock responded instantly to her joyous smile, considerably uplifted by what, in its rather limited experience, was a sign of a woman’s desire to become better acquainted.

Guy’s brain, however, knew better.

She strode to where the hat had fallen when she’d shot it and picked it up, examining it briefly before holding it up for Guy to see.

He couldn’t help feeling a bit impressed—and relieved—that the hole was smack in the middle of the hat.

“Dead center,” she said, her smug, confident tone doing nothing to diminish his cock’s opinion of the situation.

“Yes, well done,” he said. “Now, I get another question.”

Her full lips pulled down into a frown, and she tossed the hat onto the table where she kept her guns. “I am finished with you for the day. You may go.”

“Not without my answer, I won’t.”

She made a sound that was remarkably like a growl.

“Get on with it,” she ordered, her hands deftly cleaning and oiling the pistols.

“Tell me how you came to be in England.”

“By boat.”

Guy couldn’t help laughing. “I don’t think so, sweetheart. I shall require a bit more detail than that.”

Her lips curved into a slight, self-satisfied smirk. “You asked a question and I gave you an answer.”

“I want a genuine answer.”

“That is the only answer you’ll be getting.”

“If you want me and Sin—or Smithy,” he added, recalling that Elliot had also rehearsed with her, although only once thus far, “to allow you to shoot at us wearing a blindfold, you’d better be more cooperative.”

Her head whipped up. “Why are you asking me these personal questions?”

He recoiled at the anger sparking in her dark eyes. “Because I’m curious about you.”

“I am not an item for curiosity,” she retorted, her accent heavier than he’d ever heard it. “If you wish to be curious, go find somebody else. I am not a toy for you to play with. Do you understand me?” She didn’t wait for him to answer before going on, the words coming faster, her accent thicker. “In fact, I do not need you—or your friends—to perform my act, so you needn’t bother coming to my rehearsals any longer.” She turned back to her guns, her hands shaking as she resumed cleaning them.

Her fury momentarily robbed him of words.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a long, fraught silence. “I didn’t mean to make you angry.” He lifted a hand to her shoulder and then—thinking better of it—dropped it to his side. “I asked those questions because you are unlike any woman I’ve ever met and I find you interesting. I didn’t mean any disrespect.”

She ignored his apology.

Guy looked at her tense shoulders and taut expression and felt a pang—more than a pang, actually—that he was responsible for making her look so strained and unhappy.

“I shan’t ask you any more personal questions,” he said quietly. “And I’ll be here again on Tuesday, as usual, and you may shoot at me as often as you like, with or without a blindfold.”

A nerve ticced in her tight jaw and she gave an abrupt nod.

Guy was at the door that led to the back of the stage when her voice stopped him.

“It was never my plan to work in a circus. My father was Michel Blanchet, the royal gunmaker to Louis the sixteenth, as was his father before him, and his before him—back to my great-great-grandfather, who made guns for the Sun King.” She turned to face him. “I was my father’s only child and he trained me the way he’d been trained, teaching me his craft.”