A Duke for the Unseen Wallflower

“I could not have picked her out of a crowded room. After one hour, I could see no one else.”

Charlotte Barnwell has spent three Seasons in the chair behind the pillar, where the candlelight does not reach and nobody expects her to dance. She is three-and-twenty, tall and plain, with four hundred pounds to her name and a gift for arithmetic that no one has ever asked her to use. She mends torn flounces, reseats a supper for a hundred and four in under a minute, and carries other women’s shawls through ballrooms without anyone learning her name. Now her aunt has given her twelve weeks to settle her future, or go home to Hertfordshire to keep her father’s books and grow old there.

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