“Sixty-six percent of my daughters are unwed, and only thirty-three percent of them are,” her mother said crisply. “I know you’ve never been skilled with your numbers either but let me inform you that those numbers are decidedly failing, particularly as one of those daughters has so very little hope or prospects.” The dowager slid a pointed look Caroline’s way.

“Hey now,” Lettie protested, but Caroline put a staying hand on hers.

“Now, backs straight, girls,” their mother ordered. “Smiles on.”

Because she knew it was the only way to ensure the dowager marchioness would cease haranguing them and carry herself off to join the other vipers she called friends, Lettie forced her lips up into the requisite polite smile, the painful, measured, insincere one her mother now wore.

Her gaze lingered on her mother’s features, and it was as though she looked into a mirror and saw a glimpse of how she herself looked in this moment.

Lettie shuddered. There was nothing more horrifying than knowing she looked like that.

The dowager marchioness tapped her fan distractedly against her palm. “Where is he? Where is he?” she murmured. “I have it on the authority of the marchioness that the marquess would be here.”

As one, Lettie, Caroline, and their mother glanced off in the direction of the marchioness in question.

Lettie’s stomach clenched, and her efforts at smiling failed.

For there could be no doubting which he and which marchioness and which marquess.

None other than Wynn Masterson, the Marquess of Exmoor.

“Your smile, dear. Do remember your smile,” her mother said in a singsong voice as she searched the ballroom. “Why, is he not here?”

“Does this mean I no longer have to wear this ghastly grin?” she ventured, earning a startled laugh from Caroline. They would have no doubt received a good scolding from their mother if she had been at all focused on anything other than finding the gentleman.

He was a perfectly agreeable and affable and respectable gentleman, and he also would have been a perfectly suitable suitor…if Lettie’s mother hadn’t been so embarrassing in her attempts at pushing Lettie in the gentleman’s path.

Literally, she’d pushed her into the marquess at an affair at the start of the Season, and Lettie had tumbled head-first.

The papers had written about his heroic efforts, while in the next breath lambasting the clumsiness of the Brookfield Bluestocking, a moniker she was sure the gossips had arrived at only because of the lovely alliteration.

“I expect he should be here at any moment,” her mother murmured. “I will pay his mother a visit and see if I might find details.” She turned, and Lettie quickly plastered the requisite get-your-mother-gone grin on her lips. “Lovely, my dear. Just lovely.”