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Blondes
The Dressmakers #4
The Dressmakers #4
By: Loretta Chase
Releasing December
29, 2015
Avon
Avon
Lady Clara, the fan-favorite character from Loretta
Chase’s New York Times and USA Today bestselling Dressmakers series, finally
gets her own happily ever after!
Convenient marriages are rarely so…exciting. Can
society’s most adored heiress and London’s most difficult bachelor fall victim
to their own unruly desires?
Biweekly marriage
proposals from men who can’t see beyond her (admittedly breathtaking) looks are
starting to get on Lady Clara Fairfax’s nerves. Desperate to be something more
than ornamental, she escapes to her favorite charity. When a child goes
missing, she turns to Oliver Radford—a handsome, brilliant, excessively
conceited barrister.
Having
unexpectedly found himself in line to inherit a dukedom, Radford needs a bride
who can navigate the Society he’s never been part of. If he can find one
without having to set foot in a ballroom, so much the better. Clara—blonde,
blue-eyed, and he must admit, not entirely bereft of brains—will do. As long as
he can woo her, wed her—and not, like every other sapskull in London, lose his
head over her…
Small
Drawing Room of Warford House Monday 31 August 1835
Clara did not run screaming from the
room. A lady didn’t run screaming from anywhere unless her life was in immediate danger.
This was simply another marriage
proposal.
The Season was over. Almack’s had
held its last assembly at the end of July. Most of Society had gone to the
country. Yet her family remained in London because her father, the Marquess of
Warford, never left before Parliament rose, and Parliament still sat.
And so her beaux lingered in London.
For some reason—either they’d joined a conspiracy or had made her the subject
of wagers in White’s betting book—they seemed to be proposing on a biweekly
schedule. They were beginning to wear on Clara’s nerves.
Today was Lord Herringstone’s turn.
He said he loved her. They all said so with varying degrees of fervor. But
being an intelligent girl who read more than she ought to, Clara was sure that
he, like the others, merely wanted to claim the most fashionable girl in London
for his own.
She’d inherited the classic Fairfax
looks—pale gold hair, clear blue eyes, and skin that seemed to have been poured
like cream over an artistically sculpted face. The world agreed that in her
these traits had reached the very acme and pitch of perfection. So had her
figure, a model for one of those Greek or Roman goddess statues, according to
her numerous swains.
Her single flaw—on the outside, that
is—the tiny chip in her left front tooth, only made her human and thus,
somehow, more perfect.
She was like a thoroughbred everybody
wanted to own. Or the latest style of dashing vehicle.
Her beauty surrounded her like a
great stone wall. Men couldn’t see above, beyond, or through it. They certainly
couldn’t think past it.
This was because men only looked at women. They didn’t listen to
women, especially beautiful women.
When beautiful women talked, men
merely made a greater pretense of listening. After all, everybody knew that
women did not really have brains.
Clara wondered what women were
imagined to have in their skulls in place of brains or what men thought women
did their pitiful excuse for thinking with
. . .
“. . . if you would do me the
inestimable honor of becoming my wife.”
She came back to the present and said
no, as she always did, kindly and courteously, because she’d been rigorously
trained in ladyship. Moreover, she truly liked Lord Herringstone. He’d written
odes to her, and they were witty and scanned well. He was amusing and a good
dancer and reasonably intelligent.
So were dozens of other men.
She liked them, most of them.
But they had no idea who she was and
did not try to find out.
Perhaps it was quixotic of her, but
she wanted more than that.
He looked disappointed. Yet he’d
survive, she knew. He’d find another woman he would look at and not listen to,
but that woman wouldn’t be so unrealistic as to expect him to. They’d wed and
rub along together somehow or other, like everybody else.
And one of these days Clara would
give up hoping for more. One of these days, she would have to say yes.
“Either that,” she muttered, “or
become an eccentric and run away to Egypt or India.”
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