The Earl's Practical Marriage

Why would Giles have thought me anything but a plain child? she asked herself then. I have no looks, not like Portia whom he does want. He was kind to me, that was all it ever was.

She had grown up, of course, and found her looks—not conventional beauty, but something that was not so far from it—but by then it was too late, Giles had gone. And besides, better to learn early the lesson that all men are interested in is the externals, in beauty, dowry, breeding. Sex. Giles had kindly tolerated an awkward fledgling of a girl child several years his junior and she had not understood that until it was too late.

‘Yes, the fête,’ he said now. ‘Lord, I had forgotten that. It was good fun, was it not?’

‘Certainly it was,’ Laurel agreed, getting her smile firmly fixed in place. ‘Such fun.’ The most magical hours of her life and, for him, a long-forgotten piece of fun.