said, trying to explain.
“I don’t want biscuits,” Hugo said. He leaned toward her again, face intent, and kissed her precisely on the nose, on each eye. “Tea, glorious tea, is every Englishman’s delight. I never touch biscuits. Wouldn’t, even if you begged me.”
A smile curved on Ophelia’s lips despite herself. “Not even if I begged you?”
“Never.” His expression took on the stoic heroism of a British officer facing a French battalion. “Tea is enough to sustain me forever.”
“Huh.” Ophelia’s mind slipped away again, into a memory of her marriage—but she pushed that away. No thinking of Peter here, in bed.
Instead she pushed herself up against the headboard. She was still quivering, aware of a disturbing throbbing sensation between her legs, sweat behind her knees, a fast heartbeat. Evidence that—
Hugo shifted and moved to sit beside her. His legs were very hairy, his skin a darker color than hers. Obeying impulse, she leaned over and trailed her fingers over his knee and up his leg. She avoided the . . . avoided the private part of him, which was standing up in a very public fashion.
Her caress had an effect on it, and she heard a muffled sound in Hugo’s throat.
“Aren’t you going to put it to rest?” she asked, feeling her ears grow hot with embarrassment.
“To rest?” He turned, his face alive with pure delight. “Darling!”
“What?” she asked. “I’m sorry if I used the wrong terminology.”
“I rather like the idea that I have control over my privates.”
“Don’t you?”
“Not around you.”
Ophelia shook her head. The night was getting odder and odder, so odd that she could scarcely remember how it began. “I’m not that sort of woman.”
“I do not think you are a loose woman, if that’s what you’re saying.”
“I mean that I’m not the sort of woman a man loses his head over.” She took a shuddering breath. “In fact, we should be honest with each other.” She looked at him. “I don’t know why you’re in my bed, but it hasn’t much to do with me, has it?”
He looked at her, every inch of his expression conveying a stubborn belief that it did, in fact, have a great deal to do with her.
“I’m not the sort of woman who drives a man to desperation,” she said, trying again. “I’m short and fairly round.”
His eyes shifted to her breasts, and from the corner of her eye she saw his tool jerk forward, as if it was volunteering an opinion on her roundness.
“You seem not to mind that,” she added.
“I don’t.”
“Well, my point is that there are many roundish women in London.”
“They aren’t you.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I’m getting to,” Hugo said. “I like everything I’ve found so far.” He grinned, just in case she missed the innuendo. “I see your point, though.”
“You do?” The news wasn’t entirely welcome.
“We need to get to know each other better. May I spend the day with you?”
“Here? Why would you stay here?”
“To get to know you better,” he said promptly. His smile had a fiendish kind of pleasure to it, a ridiculously boyish stubbornness for a grown man.
“You’re a duke,” she said. “You have better things to do.”
He paused just long enough to give a semblance of having thought it over. “Can’t think of anything.”
“What do you mean by ‘getting to know you’?” she asked. Suspicions crowded into her head. After all, she was sitting in bed with him.
“Go riding together?”
“In the snow?”
“I’m trying to remember how people become friends,” he said. “It’s been years since I’ve had much to do with society, and all I remember of Marie, my first wife, was dancing, flirting, and kissing her in dark corridors.”
She elbowed him. “Remember the rule?”
“No spouses in bed,” he said obediently. “I won’t tell you how Yvette and I got to know each other.”
His voice cooled, just enough so that she noticed. She hadn’t known his second duchess, but she had heard gossip, after Yvette had fled England. The interesting thing was that Hugo had apparently thought his wife had been a virgin when they married.
Fairness intervened. Rumors were no more than rumors.
“We often read aloud to each other,” she said, avoiding Peter’s name.
“Ah.”
“Are you a reader?”
“I am reading a book of reflections,” he said. “Translated from the French.”
“Reflections on what?”
“Ridicule.”
She glanced at him and miraculously managed not to roll her eyes. “You’re jesting.”
“Unfortunately not,” Hugo said amiably. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested.”
A flare of temper went up Ophelia’s spine. She hated that men made assumptions about what would and wouldn’t interest a