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“No.”

“Because I haven’t agreed to marry you?”

“Yes and no.” He started dotting kisses on her face. “I’m enamored. I’m metaphorically at your feet. I don’t want to muck this up. I want to know everything about you. I could happily do nothing but kiss your breasts for hours.”

She couldn’t think what to say to that.

“Except I’d probably spend in your bedsheets,” he added, in the most matter-of-fact tone imaginable.

Ophelia shook her head. “I don’t think—”

“You’re not ready for this?”

“Is that terrible? I’m sorry.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m supposed to be a merry widow, and I was feeling . . . But this is just all so new.”

He brushed his lips over hers. “Absolutely fine. Deliciously fine. You allowed me to kiss your breasts. Bloody hell, the man who wasn’t grateful for that would be dead. Why do you look so worried?”

“It’s like . . . It feels as if the maid has served tea but no biscuits,” she 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.