Synopsis
All my life, I had been told I was beautiful. My mother used to tease that no man could resist me—that whether they intended to or not, they would fall at my feet.
But my fiancé, Julian Hawthorne, was the one exception.
He said my figure drew too much attention, my waist was too soft, my smile too radiant. He criticized the way my eyes lingered when I laughed, the effortless way I moved. “Not dignified enough,” he would say time and again. “Unfit to be the lady of the Hawthorne household.”
So he hired the most ruthless etiquette instructor in the capital—a woman notorious for molding willful noble girls into perfectly obedient wives.
I trained under her for three long years.
And still, I was never enough for him.
