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“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 woman.

She glanced at him; he had picked up her left hand and appeared to be examining her fingers. She drew her hand away. “Why wouldn’t I be interested?”

She kept her tone sweet, but Hugo’s eyes shot to hers. Perhaps being married twice had taught him something about women.