If Wishes Were Earls by Elizabeth Boyle Page A

unwanted mongrels.”
    Mr. Muggins walked him past him and slanted a glance at the earl that said all too clearly there would be no talk of mongrels. Not in his hearing.
    Roxley was still watching the dog amble deeper into the garden when Harriet came alongside him and caught him by the hand, saying, “Drowned us, indeed! Truly, Roxley, it is nothing like that.” She pulled him through the narrow garden to an alcove in the back, where they could stand in the shadows and not be seen from the house. “But he and Lady Timmons are furious.”
    “Is that regret I hear in your voice?” he asked.
    “For helping Tabitha?” Harriet shook her head most adamantly. Of course she didn’t regret her part in the scandal.
    Any more than he regretted coming here.
    At least not yet. Then he realized she was still holding his hand, her warm fingers wound with his. This wasn’t the first time they had stood so—with their hands entwined, bound together—but why, how had everything changed? The heat from her hand moved through his limbs, and with it came this sense of belonging.
    For someone who always held society and life at arm’s length, the sense of coming home left him a bit breathless.
    “We are all to return to Kempton tomorrow,” she was saying.
    That caught his attention. “Tomorrow? Whatever for?”
    Harriet let out a breathy sigh. “Because Tabitha is ruined.”
    That hardly made any sense. “Isn’t Sir Mauris planning on calling on Preston first thing on the morrow? Though I wouldn’t recommend it, for when I last saw the duke, he was headed in the direction of White’s—he’ll still be half-seas over at dawn. Not that it will matter either way. He won’t marry her.”
    She scoffed at this. “He will indeed. The duke loves Tabitha. Any nobcock can see that. Besides, it is how it is done—she’s ruined, after all—he’ll ask her to marry him, even if he must follow her to Kempton to do so.”
    “Oh, Harry—” Roxley began, not knowing how to tell her that not all men were so honorable. And a man of Preston’s reputation  . . .
    Harriet scoffed at this. “You’d come after a lady, if you ruined her. You’d never abandon her—”
    Roxley shifted uneasily at this, for all she had to do was change that sentence a bit.
    You’d come after me, if you ruined me. You’d never abandon me.
    For it wasn’t her confidence in him—that unwavering faith that he wouldn’t disavow her—but his desire to test her theory that left him shaken.
    Kiss her, Roxley, and find out.
    What the devil was he thinking? Ruin Harry? Good God, no.
    He straightened and tried to look impervious to her prodding. “Since I have no intention of ruining anyone in the immediate future—”
    “You’d follow,” she said as if she knew him better than she knew herself.
    And it struck him that perhaps Harriet Hathaway was the only woman in all of England who knew him just that way. Always had.
    She glanced over her shoulder at the house. “However did you know which window was mine?”
    “I didn’t,” he told her. “I just kept tossing up stones until you arrived.”
    Harriet swatted him on the shoulder playfully. “You’re lucky it is me out here and not one of Tabitha’s loathsome cousins. I doubt you’d want to be found in the gardens with one of them.”
    Roxley shuddered. “No, not in the least.” Especially given Sir Mauris’s infamous temper, and Lady Timmons’s well-known desire to see her daughters rise up in society. He’d be in the parson’s trap before dawn.
    “Remember when you thought my window was Chaunce’s and you sent that rock right through it?” Harriet was saying. “I don’t know how you mistook the matter—”
    “Yes, perhaps I was a bit squiffy,” he murmured, caught by the way the moonlight cast her dark hair with an almost bluish hint. And it hadn’t been a mistake—he had come over from Foxgrove that night looking for Harriet. He’d hoped then . . . Well, never mind what