Her Father Paid Her a Compliment Loud Enough for Six People to Hear — One of Them Was the Duke

Thomasine Croft has twenty-six years, a father who announces her intelligence in entrance halls, a library inherited from a great-grandfather who had better taste than the rest of the family combined, and a reputation in three London drawing rooms for being the sort of woman who argues political economy at balls and means every word of it. The place is London — Mayfair and Grosvenor Square and the lending library on Piccadilly, where the Season runs from April to August and a single misread gesture can follow a name for years. What Thomasine does not anticipate, at the Harwick ball on a Tuesday evening in May 1814, is a man of business standing three feet from her father when the famous remark is made — and forming, on the spot, entirely the wrong opinion of her. Laurence Pell came to London at nineteen with eleven pounds, an introduction from a dead man's employer, and the working assumption that the world would not give him anything he did not take by competence alone. He has spent a decade being correct about this. He manages Lord Harwick's affairs, three mill owners' accounts, and a solicitor's portfolio in Derbyshire, and he has made himself, by careful degrees, into the kind of man that men of consequence choose to trust. What he has not made himself into is a man who is wrong gracefully. He watches Thomasine hold a drawing room full of people and concludes she is performing. He is wrong. It will cost him a season to understand how wrong, and considerably more to say so. ❤️ Subscribe for a new love story every week: @RegentLoveEra 🔔 Turn on notifications so you never miss an episode. 💬 Would you have made the same choice? Tell us in the comments. ✨ Stories about love, family honour, hidden sacrifices, and the quiet battles behind powerful surnames. ——— ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: All characters, names, events, and storylines in this video are entirely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This is a work of historical fiction set during the Regency Era (c. 1795–1830) in England. #RegencyEra #RomanceStory #Duke #HistoricalFiction #LoveStory #Regency #PeriodDrama #romantic