My Last Duchess (The Wildes of Lindow Castle #0.5) - Eloisa James Page 0,6

friends with my husband, he can pay me a morning call, as did Peter’s other friends.”

“I know!” Maddie said, her face clearing. “He’s been told what a wonderful mother you are. Oh, Ophelia, you could be a duchess!”

“I’m not available to mother a flock of discarded children,” Ophelia said sharply. She was conscious of a sense of disappointment. Just once, she’d like a man to look at her for herself.

Peter had been shepherded in her direction by his father and her mother during her debut ball. They danced twice and sat together at supper. Pudding hadn’t even been served before he said, with his disarming smile, “I say, we get along pretty well, don’t we?”

They did. They had.

But Peter hadn’t the faintest idea what sort of woman she was when he asked her to marry him.

“Even to be a duchess?”

Ophelia frowned. “I’m perfectly comfortable as I am, Maddie.”

Her cousin sighed. “It’s true that I can’t imagine you in such an elevated role. It would be like hearing that the baker had been knighted.”

“Maddie!” Ophelia protested. “I’m hardly a baker.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll set him straight,” her cousin said. “You’d better leave unless you want to refuse him yourself; Lady Persell caught his arm, but he’ll be heading this direction again in a moment.”

Ophelia definitely did not want to encounter the duke. The man looked like a hunter, strolling across the ballroom in that pink coat, pretending to be a gentleman, which he wasn’t.

He absolutely was not.

She didn’t know why she was so sure of that, but she was. The Duke of Lindow was a nobleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the term. He probably had vassals, serfs, a county of his own, and an escutcheon.

She gave Maddie a brisk kiss and set out for the door. After a moment she sped up, practically diving toward the entrance to the ballroom. It almost seemed as if she could feel his approach like a warm wind at her back, even though that made no sense.

Just as she turned so she could squeeze between two groups of gossiping peers without her panniers bumping them, a hand closed around her elbow.

She felt the shock of his touch through her entire body.

“Yes?” she said, turning. She managed to keep her tone cool. What she saw in the Duke of Lindow’s eyes made her raise an eyebrow. “You must have mistaken me for someone else,” she said, her tone almost kindly.

No one had ever looked at her, at Ophelia, like that. Not even Peter.

Perhaps Lindow thought she was a girl he had loved in his youth.

“I am not mistaken,” the duke replied. His eyes were a dark, dark green, the color of spruce trees when they stood vividly against the snow.

His voice startled her because it was deeper than she would have thought. Like a bear’s growl. In fact, he looked like a bear emerging from a winter’s sleep, she thought irrelevantly. Coming into the world and looking for a nice rabbit to eat.

She was not a rabbit for any man’s consumption. She had no need of a husband, and no desire for a lover either. Still less did she want to nurture a flock of motherless children, no matter how sad that was.

Given that her own cousin thought of her as a baker, people would know exactly why he was courting her—to turn her into a glorified governess.

“Excuse me,” she said, allowing impatience to leak into her voice. Then she gently pulled her arm from his grasp and walked away.

Behind her, a moment of silence.

And then, to her horror, a shout of laughter.

Chapter Three

She was a delight. Hugo’s heart was pounding in his chest in a way it hadn’t for years.

Nineteen years, to be exact.

When he had walked into a drawing room in Windsor Castle and had seen Marie being fanned by a couple of impertinent puppies babbling nonsense and making her laugh. His future wife, his first wife, had been reclining on a sofa, a perfect lady from the tips of her scarlet shoes to the top of her extravagant, pearl-bedecked hair.

Marie was the one young lady whom every bachelor in London—and most of the married men as well—wanted for his own. She was a minx who delighted in every flirtatious glance and trill of laughter.

Remembering her made Hugo feel a nostalgic flash of love for those heady days. He had known from the moment he entered that room that he had to have her.

This lady was Marie’s opposite. She didn’t look as if she