Free Have You Any Rogues? by Elizabeth Boyle Page B

the door, for her mother had always said nothing good ever came from eavesdropping, but she had to know what Crispin was going to say to his aunt.
    She had to know what was in his heart.
    Especially after she’d spent all these years wondering if he had wanted her for marriage or . . .
    And it was all as she feared. She was naught but a dalliance after supper to him.
    How like a Dale to use their pretty words and lying hearts to get what they wanted.
    And here she’d worried over him, cried for him, carried her secret love for him all these years. Felt a traitor for marrying Astbury only because her heart had belonged to another.
    That horrible year his aunt had spoken of—it had nearly killed Henrietta. And now she discovered he thought of her merely as a dalliance?
    Wretched, lying Dales. Curse them all, she fumed.
    But foremost in her thoughts was how to get as far away from Crispin Dale as she could. She never wanted to see the man again.
    And woe to him if he ever did cross her path.
    Ill-bred lot indeed! She’d show him exactly how ill-bred she could be.
    And in this state of fury and a blinding need to lash out, she raged around a corner and nearly bowled over a tall figure out for an evening stroll.
    “Well, well, what have we here?”
    Henrietta glanced up to find Lord Michaels stubbing out a cheroot, grinning at her unlikely arrival. “I had thought you weren’t—”
    It really didn’t matter what he was going to say, for Henrietta needed to know something very important. “Lord Michaels, am I a dalliance to you?”
    “A wha-a-t?” he managed, taking a step closer to her, taking in her tumbled appearance, his eyes narrowing.
    “You heard me, a dalliance?”
    His features shifted from the rakish demeanor of a few moments earlier to an expression Hen hadn’t thought him capable of.
    “No,” he said, simply and plainly. “Never, my dear Lady Astbury. I’d carry you to Gretna Green this very night if I thought—”
    And in a very impetuous, Seldon sort of moment, she made the most scandalous decision of her young life.
    “Then take me.”

 
    C HAPTER S IX
If the wind has changed, so has a Seldon’s heart.
WELL - KNOWN DALE MAXIM
    Owle Park, 1810
    C rispin got up from where he’d been sitting on the steps and paced the short distance across the cellar. “Michaels?! Of all the madcap, idiotic—”
    Henrietta held up her hand to stave off the rest of Crispin’s censure. Hadn’t she heard much the same from everyone of consequence in her life since the day she’d made her fateful decision to run off with the fellow?
    And they were all correct. It had been a disastrous decision. For her. And for Michaels—whose heart, very much like her own, had belonged to someone else.
    What a pair they’d made.
    “I will never understand why you married that bounder,” Crispin said, taking a bottle off the shelf and examining it.
    Hen sighed. It was all so complicated. More so now than it had been then. “You know why.”
    Crispin stalked back toward her, bottle in hand. “That doesn’t mean I understand. If only you’d trusted—”
    “Trust? A Dale?” she shot back. “It has been drummed into me since birth that trusting a Dale is like trusting the devil.”
    “As faithless as a Seldon, ” he shot back.
    Hen flinched a bit. “I was willing to look past your name.”
    “Look past my name?” He set the wine aside and crossed his arms over his chest, stubbornly defiant. “It would have been your name.”
    She rose to her feet to face him, unwilling to let him tower over her. “And that of our child’s,” she snapped back before she could stop herself, her darkest secret spilling out. She clapped her hand over her mouth, as if that could put the words back where they belonged—locked tightly in her heart.
    Yet there they were. Spat right out in the open.
    In the cool shadows of the cellar, her secret brought a light that left them both frozen and blinking at its stark glare.
    Crispin’s