“Leave them alone and hurry now. You don’t want to be late.” Bea started tidying up the bedchamber. “Walk straight. No hunkering over.”

Nora doubted she could manage that, but she would try. She was usually a confident individual who walked with her shoulders pulled back and her chest thrust out, her stride purposeful because she always knew her direction and what she was about.

But walking with her chest thrust out simply felt too dangerous. To do so, she risked exposing herself, and she was already a little out of her depth tonight. Dinner parties weren’t her strong suit. It wouldn’t do to bare herself in front of London’s finest.

She left Bea tidying her chamber and departed the room, soaking in Bea’s words, letting them fortify her as, alone in the corridor, she took a moment to lean back against her bedchamber door. The gown is not daring by London standards. The gown is not daring by London standards.

She pressed her palms flat against the door, using the time to gather her composure for the dinner that loomed ahead and reminding herself that she did far more difficult or unpleasant things all the time. It could not be any worse than excising a boil or drawing an infection out from a toenail.

“Miss Langley?”

Her head snapped up, her gaze searching the length of the corridor and landing on Sinclair.

“Good eve, Mr. Sinclair.” She lifted away from her bedchamber door, smoothing her hands down the front of her skirts.

He approached at a sedate pace, his tread muffled on the runner.

Her nerves crackled to life as she faced his advance, his clean masculine scent drifting closer. She had already acknowledged to herself that he was handsome. In a dark, brooding kind of way. He looked especially fine tonight, however, in his black evening attire.

“Going down to dinner?” he inquired. His voice was all politeness, but his gaze was far from well-mannered as it roamed over her.

She resisted covering the exposed flesh of her chest with her hand. The gown is not daring by London standards.

She took Bea’s words, wrapped herself in them and hoped they would console her in this most embarrassing moment, in her height of discomfort. What she wouldn’t do for one of her well-worn, modest and comfortable wool gowns now.

Certainly, that would be its own form of awkwardness—her dining with the most elegant and refined nobility in a brown sack of a dress—but she might actually prefer that to this. To a stare that was decidedly unlascivious.

Although lascivious looks were not his style. She already knew that much of him. He was much too rigid, much too impassive. The army must have bled the emotion from him. Or perhaps he was simply born to be detached and immune to females. Or at least to her.

Perhaps there were other females he would react to with emotion.