The Earl's Practical Marriage. Louise Allen

      Looking back on it now, Laurel knew her feelings had been entirely innocent of any physical desire. There had simply been the certainty that she was Giles’s and he was hers and that this was an entirely satisfactory and inevitable state of affairs. Instinctively she had known that this truth did not need to be put into words or expressed in any way, any more than one needed to comment that rain was wet or that sheep were woolly. And, of course, Giles understood it, too, that went without saying as well. One day, when she was older, the words would be said...

      It had not been until two years later, when Giles had left England and she was in disgrace, that it had occurred to her to look properly at herself in the mirror, to look and see a gangly, skinny girl with a mass of unruly brown hair and eyes that seemed too big for a face that had the odd freckle and a threatening pimple and no discernible beauty whatsoever.

      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.