“Do you know nothing at all about the game?”

She blushed, and he was glad the mask was gone, so he could watch the swath of scarlet traverse slowly over her face. “We have a billiards room, of course, where the gentlemen retire whenever we have guests. The ladies aren’t allowed in. The gents smoke their cigars and drink their scotch. I rather imagine they don’t always discuss topics appropriate for a lady’s ears.”

“I’m sure they don’t.” Just as there were topics they’d not discussed. She spoke of her siblings, but not her children. She had children, surely. Providing an heir was the first order of business. It had taken his father two wives before he produced one. He imagined she’d have given her husband an heir within a year of exchanging vows. But for the remainder of the night, he wasn’t going to ask about children or anyone else in her life because he wanted to create an atmosphere in which only the two of them existed. He tapped the end of the stick on the table, near where the three balls rested. “The red ball is the target. You need to select the white ball or the white ball with the dot.”

“The dot.”

“So that one is yours. The plain white one is mine. The system regarding the accumulation of points involves a series of additions and subtractions, but we’re going to do away with that for tonight and play using simpler rules. You hit your ball in such a way that it bounces off the sides of the table and hits both remaining balls, in any order. Each time you hit both balls, you get a point and another go. If you hit one ball or neither ball, the turn comes to me.” He placed the red ball near one end, the white balls near the other, then smacked his ball and set it sailing against one of the sides where it bounced off, raced to another side, hit it, rolled until it struck the red ball, carried on to clack against the white ball with the dot, and came to a halt a short distance away from it.

“You’re very good,” she said hesitantly.

“It’s a matter of geometry. By figuring out where exactly to hit your ball, how hard to strike it, where it will hit the sides, you can plot its trajectory, determine its path.”

“Which you no doubt learned by reading your books on real matters.”

Her response pleased him, that she understood he wasn’t a ninny. “I’ve always loved mathematics, numbers. It’s one of the reasons I gravitated toward owning a gaming hell. I liked figuring the statistics, the odds.”

“I daresay you have me at a disadvantage.”

“I’ll go easy on you. As long as you hit one of the balls, we’ll let it count.”