By the time Ophelia’s carriage—not the elegant one with the broken axle, but the sturdy, family-sized barouche—reached the Frost Fair, Viola had at least twenty words and counting.

“How is this possible?” Ophelia said aloud, laughing. “You went to bed with the same two words you’ve had for weeks: ‘No’ and ‘Mama.’ You woke up a different person. Not a different person, but with different skills.”

“Pills,” Viola offered, and patted Ophelia’s cheek.

Ophelia was fighting off one of those urges known to widows and widowers, a moment in which one desperately wishes to talk to a person who is no longer there.

She pushed away the image of the Duke of Lindow as an alternative to Peter. “He’s getting married!” she told herself, aloud.

“Mawied,” Viola said, nodding.

“And not to me,” Ophelia told her. “He moved on directly, didn’t he? I said no, and he didn’t even try to change my mind. He strode into another ballroom and picked out a different woman to mother his children.”

Somehow that made her more furious than the fact he was planning to marry again.

He had replaced her with Lady Woolhastings, who was not old, exactly, but she wasn’t young either. Her daughters were frightfully well-behaved and rather dull.

Hugo . . . He couldn’t be planning to bed her. Not the way he offered to make love to Ophelia. He couldn’t.

But he had said that he was looking for a woman uninterested in bedding him.

The problem with having red hair was that it proverbially goes along with a temper, and in Ophelia’s case, it did go along with that temper. To this point, she’d been feeling disconsolate about the fact that the duke had so easily thrown her aside and snatched up another available lady.

But now a flame of anger began to burn in her chest. He had said things to her and she believed them. He had implied that he was falling in love. He had refused to make love to her unless she married him.

He had made her feel special, as if bedding him was an admission ticket to a wonderful life.

But even furious as she was, she couldn’t imagine that Lady Woolhastings had paid the price of admission. But then . . .

To be a duchess?

Who wouldn’t sleep with a handsome, younger man in order to be a duchess? It was just so . . .

So what?

She turned him down. She had no right to decide that he was making a horrible mistake, that he was an idiot who should have come back the next day and pleaded with Ophelia. Begged her.

The fact of the matter was that he hadn’t wanted her enough to do that.