“If he was 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.