People didn’t just waltz up a garden path and demand to marry someone they’d never met before—especially dukes’ sons who surely had better things to do than playing at proposing to orphan girls with absolutely no prospects. Even she knew that much. Meggie, my love … please come to me… She shook her head hard, forcing herself back to reality. That was her private fantasy—nothing more. If she had learned anything in her life, it was that she could not afford to indulge herself in dreams. She was sensible to the core. She had to be missing something in this absurd offer of marriage that had come out of the blue. And then with a sudden flash of insight she realized what Hugo Montagu had really come for. Marriage, her foot. Her mouth dropped open in horror. “Do you still have nothing to say?” he asked, looking down at her with a wide smile, revealing two long, tantalizing creases in his lean cheeks.
