Definitely Not Mr. Darcy

After Grace and her chaperone were helped out of the chaise, the footman handed Chloe out and helped her balance on the steel platform pattens strapped to her pale pink bal room slippers.

Chloe looked back at Bridesbridge Place. She missed Mrs. Crescent, however pregnant and persnickety she might have been. How could she pass this final test—the bal —on her own?

Cameras were everywhere and it made her uneasy. Granted, going with Grace meant she got to ride in the chaise-and-four. Stil . Stil , she was going to the bal with one of Cinderel a’s evil stepsisters, and she knew it.

Grace, in her wedding-white gown, looked down on Chloe from the first landing on the stairs. Chloe stretched her bejeweled neck toward the bright open doors of Dartworth Hal . She lifted her silk gown and pelisse and took a deep breath. Back home, everybody was eating cheeseburgers because it was the Fourth of July, but she got to go to a bal in one of the grandest country estates in England.

She teetered her way to the palatial staircase a good four inches off the ground in her pattens. They made a sucking sound every time she took a step in the mud. Everyone laughed as a footman’s shoe stuck in the mud and he had to hop around in his stocking foot. How would she trek to the ice house in al this? And who knew it rained so much in England?

The maids ushered the women into the ladies’ cloakroom, where one of them took off Chloe’s Greek-key-trimmed pelisse and her pattens. The maid even retied her bal room slippers, fastening the spaghetti-thin pink straps around her ankles a little too tight, but Chloe didn’t complain.

She looked in the same mirror in which she had beheld herself after the hedge-maze debacle and hardly recognized what she saw. This time, instead of seeing a madwoman, she saw a peach-gowned princess with a tiny Empire waist trimmed in sparkly gold. Her arched eyebrows, blackened with ripe elderberries, beckoned. Candle-soot eyeliner brought her bright eyes to life. And this time she hadn’t eaten her rouge. Was it the strawberry stain, or did she actual y have cheekbones now? The weeks of not eating haunch-of-venison soup, raised giblet pie, and Florentine rabbits had paid off. She could market this Regency diet when she got home. She wished Abigail could see her now!

She smiled at her stick-straight hair that Fiona had transformed into a splendor of curls. But the pin curls and yel ow beaded silk ribbon that swirled around her hair reminded her of—question marks. Were her feelings for Sebastian real? Or was she just projecting her idealized vision of Mr. Darcy onto him? Did she know him wel enough to even say yes to a made-for-television marriage proposal?

“Miss Parker!” Lady Martha clapped her hands at Chloe.

Grace’s chaperone always clapped at Chloe, as if she were a dog or circus animal.

Lady Martha put her hands on her silver-spangled hips. “Are you quite ready?”

“Real y.” Grace rol ed her eyes.

Chloe was incensed, and with a huff she spun and led the way through the foyer. Video cameras rol ed and cameras clicked away as she marched through the gal ery, past rows of oh-so-serious Wrightman family portraits, toward an archway at the end of the marbled foyer that was flanked by two footmen and two candelabra. But, when Henry stepped out from behind the arch in a black cutaway coat, gray knee breeches, white stockings, an elegant ruffled white shirt, and gray gloves, she came to a screeching halt. He bowed. Then, from the other side of the arch, Sebastian appeared, looking as dapper if not more so in his black coat and buff-colored breeches. He bowed, too.

The only thing better than one gentleman was two.

Once again imagining a book on her head, Chloe floated along with video cameras at her side, her gown flowing at her ankles. She glided toward both Henry and Sebastian, who stood waiting in the anteroom. She was ready to glide, on both of their arms, into the pale yel ow bal room bedecked with gilt floral molding and sparkling with candles reflected in gilt mirrors when Henry, with his eyes, and a flick of his gloved hand, signaled her to step aside. She slowed her pace. She had forgotten to let Grace precede her. How could she have forgotten that?

Suddenly the bal of her right foot stuck to the ground, her heel lifted out of her slipper, and she stumbled. Grace had deliberately stepped on the back of Chloe’s slipper!

She felt her face flush with color. Of course the cameras got that.

“Bal room blunder number one,” Grace whispered out of the side of her mouth as she slithered past Chloe.

Chloe shot a look at Lady Martha, who just lowered her eyelids in disdain. “You must enter the bal room in order of rank. You must always remember your place, Miss Parker,” she sneered.

Chloe leaned back on her heel and crushed the back of her slipper.