Confounding the Earl by Lexi Post

He made her successful. So why does he feel like he’s failed?

Lady Dorothea Ansley knows she baffles her mother and annoys her father with her prattle. Luckily, her fellow Curious Ladies are patient with her and great company during the season. But the season is coming to a close, and she is still without an offer of marriage. She needs a proposal quickly before her mother’s wandering eye causes a scandal and all chances of marriage disappear. As she stands alone at the final ball, she unwittingly catches the attention of the Earl of Harewood, but in a very different way than she expects.
The Earl of Harewood is quite good at predicting what will occur next, whether it be an act in Parliament or the next couple to be betrothed, but he never would have predicted Lady Dorothea’s conversation at the season’s final fete would be of any interest to him. Curious if the moment was simply a serendipitous occurrence, he ensures that she’s invited to his family’s upcoming house party. She is the perfect lady for whom he could find a suitor and achieve his goal of improving the reputation of the Belinda School for Curious Ladies to best honor the woman after which it was named, the only woman he ever wanted to marry.
Though his social experiment is a success and multiple men have become enamored of Lady Dorothea, he is not at all happy. Yes, the lady has changed according to his sage advice, and she has taught him a few lessons on happiness in the process. By all rights, he should be basking in the glow of a goal reached, a victory hard won, but for the first time in his life, he fears he may, just possibly, have been wrong. Has he done the greatest disservice to Lady Dorothea, to the school, and to himself