Because ofhim. The man she’d thought a valet, who was, in fact, a duke.
Tears of hurt and anger threatened.
She’d been duped by a man, again.
How had she let that happen?
She’d gotten ahead of herself…again… and seen a future.
Truly, it had been so easy. For here was the thing: A dressmaker and a valet? They could have a future together.
But a dressmaker and a duke?
No future lay there.
Only a bit of fun.
Hisbit of fun.
That was all she’d been to him.
Oh, what a fool she.
Part of her wanted to find a hole in the ground and sink into it. But she’d never listened to that voice, and she wasn’t about to start today. She’d come to this part of England with a job to do, because, impossibly, the duke’s mother happened to be one ofGalante: Dressmakers Extraordinaire’s best clients.
She wouldn’t lose a valuable client over this bit of foolishness. She may have lost a man and a future that was never real, but she didn’t have to lose all.
“Face the world with a smile on yer mouth. Even when it kicks you in the teeth. ’Specially then.”
Even if behind that smile her heart ached, no one had to know. Wasn’t that what smiles were for anyway?
So, it was with a smile on her face that Nell was led through the sprawling castle. She didn’t care what Lucas…the Duke of Amherst… said. This “house” was a castle.
When she finally arrived in the dining room, which was surely lit by no fewer than one hundred candles, casting shadows onto gleaming sterling silver service and prisms through cut crystal, the family were already seated. The men rose at her arrival. She most decidedly tried to avoid Lucas—oh, it was impossible to think of him as a duke—but she couldn’t help herself. He was dressed in evening black and looking every inch the dashing duke, with his tousled blond hair, easy smile, and sparkling blue eyes.
Actually, she detected no small amount of concern in those eyes and a corresponding tightness about his smile.
But she wouldn’t think about that.
Not now.
She had a lifetime for those regrets.
How had she not seen him for the aristocrat he so clearly was?
Because she hadn’t wanted to.
That was the plain truth.
Because a dressmaker didn’t have a future with a duke.
Because a dressmaker could have a future with a valet, and she’d allowed herself to want it—to believe in it.
Fool.
The nearest footman—she’d counted no fewer than four—pulled out a chair for her, and she slid into it. She found herself seated with a lord to either side, presumably the husbands of Lucas’s sisters, the Ladies Elizabeth and Catherine, who were, of course, also Nell’s clients. The ladies sat on the opposite side of the wide mahogany table, with the Dowager Duchess at one end and Lucas at the other.
Nell had harbored the idea that she could slip unnoticed into her seat and partake of the meal that would surely taste like dust in her mouth, invisibility being a particular skill of hers. However, that skill appeared to be failing her tonight as all eyes fell on her.
