“I’ve been slowly gathering that my lady is not, strictly speaking, a fan of the beau monde,” Strange remarks, his voice dry as the desert, half-amused as always.

Which is the sort of acid-tipped censure he knows so well from her, but usually it’s not so sharp and open like this, audible in the middle of a ball. But he pauses, his gaze following Gwenaëlle’s and the taut lines of her shoulders, to the anonymous masked man who caught her attention.

One of the reasons he finds the masks so irritating is that he struggles to identify people by fashion and voice and absurd hats alone. Stephen does not know this man. He wouldn’t even know Marcellin bare-faced. An ex? She’s presumably got a score of them —

“Are introductions in order?” he asks, his voice quieter, glancing over her shoulder.