The Heiress Gets a Duke - Harper St. George Page 0,1

together by the strength of her corset, ribbon ties, and grim determination. The last thing August wanted to do was to say something that would break down her composure.

“Come, my darling,” her mother was saying. “Make me proud tonight, and we can go over to Tiffany’s tomorrow and pick up that emerald you’ve had your eye on.” As if that alone could make up for selling her daughter’s future to a man who offered her nothing beyond social standing.

Unable to hold herself back a moment longer, August said, “Camille—” Mrs. Bridwell’s stern glance cut off her words.

Speechless, August stepped to the side as they shuffled past. Camille did not glance her way. She walked as if she were made of stone, spine rigid and gaze focused straight ahead. Violet followed close behind their lifelong friend, her hands out as if she wanted to help but had no idea how to go about it.

“August?” Violet’s voice was a harsh whisper as she paused at the top of stairs, her face ashen and her wide eyes brimming with concern as mother and daughter descended.

“It’s a travesty.” August mouthed the words, so that no one would hear.

August slid an arm around her sister’s waist, and they both watched solemnly as Camille glided gracefully toward her fate. The girl had not yet reached her nineteenth birthday, but her future had been sealed. A future that would see her ensconced on some estate in the English countryside, far away from her family, friends, and everything that she knew.

Aware of the maids who had lined up at the railing to observe their mistress, August made eye contact with one of them. She could not have been older than Camille, but her eyes reflected pity. The maid, who was forced to work for her living, pitied them and their Society marriages. August could not maintain the eye contact.

“It’s horrible of me, but I cannot help but be grateful that Mother and Papa would never do such a thing to us,” Violet whispered as the pair turned at the bottom of the stairs and disappeared from their view.

August tightened her arm around her sister’s waist, but she couldn’t forget that pitying look. She turned her head to discreetly look at the maid again, but the trio had disappeared back into Camille’s room to tidy up.

She told herself the maid had no reason to pity them, but a niggling doubt in the back of her mind refused to go away. Their grandfather, Augustus Crenshaw, had made the Crenshaw fortune in the railroad and iron industries. Their family would want for nothing for generations to come, so they would never be forced to marry for money. But status was something else entirely. Railroad money—new money—closed more social doors than it opened.

The Crenshaws, like the Bridwells, had never set foot into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, the only ballroom that mattered to the Knickerbockers of old New York. No matter how much money one family possessed, dirty money recently earned wasn’t welcomed in those established social circles. Augustus’s ostentatious reputation had further confirmed their family’s status as outcasts. He’d been rumored to be a drunkard and a philanderer. His most renowned fete had involved a traveling troupe of French dancing girls clad only in petticoats for entertainment. If there had been any spark of hope for the Crenshaws to achieve respectability after that, he’d extinguished it when he’d married one of those dancers.

A duke in the family could open up doors that had been sealed tight for decades. Mrs. Bridwell had confided in them only last week how Mrs. Astor had paid a surprise call and discreetly hinted at an invitation to the engagement ball. In fact, the woman was downstairs now with everyone else, blissfully ignoring the atrocity. It wasn’t very often that a duke presided over a Fifth Avenue ball, social classes be damned. That revelation had created a gleam of interest in her mother’s eye that August couldn’t forget.

But would their mother do this to them? Would she marry one of them off to a stranger old enough to be their father? August knew very little about the English aristocracy, but she knew there weren’t very many dukes among them. The odds were that they would all be as old as Hereford, or worse.

August glanced at her sister’s pretty face, for if one of them would be forced to that fate, it would be Violet. She was everything August was not: charming, graceful, biddable . . . a lady.

Sensing an