“I heard you left Michael Stretton with a broken nose,” she said.

He frowned. “What made you think of that? It was years ago.”

She shrugged. “Did you? Break his nose, I mean.”

He glanced away. “I didn’t wait to see the result, but it was a good solid punch, so it wouldn’t surprise me. Serve him right for—for what he did. I don’t like being lied to.”

Because Michael Stretton had sent the duke to punish her for ruining the hunt? And lied to him, suggesting she was male? She recalled the duke’s horror when he realized he’d roughly dragged a girl off her horse.

He’d broken his friend’s nose for her. It shouldn’t have pleased her, but it did. Immensely.

“Thank you.”

“For breaking Michael Stretton’s nose?” He gave a quizzical half smile. “You didn’t like him?”

“No.” But she wasn’t going to explain. There was no need to tell him of her embarrassing infatuation with Michael Stretton when she was a green girl, how she’d thought him the handsomest boy in the world, the best rider.

She’d watched him from afar, adoring him from a distance, expecting nothing from him, knowing she was well out of his class in all the ways that counted. They’d never even talked.

And then came the night of his twenty-first birthday. His family held a ball. Hidden in a tree, George had watched through the long ballroom windows as he’d danced with all the prettiest girls in the district. She wasn’t even jealous—perhaps a tiny bit envious, but more wistful, really. And admiring.

And then he’d come outside with a friend to smoke a cigarillo, standing below her tree. And the way he’d talked about some of those girls—girls she knew were decent, virtuous girls—had shocked her. She must have dislodged a twig or something, because his friend had looked up and said, “I say, there’s a girl up there in your tree, Stretton.”

George had frozen, mortified.

And then Michael Stretton said, “I know. She follows me everywhere, the dirty little slut. She’s too scrawny to screw yet, but her day will come.”

George’s infatuation had shriveled and died on the spot. And when a year later he’d come sniffing around, presumably deciding she was no longer so scrawny, she’d rejected him emphatically.

Later, when he discovered she was the one disrupting the hunt, his anger had become personal. And vindictive.

So the thought that the duke had been responsible for Michael Stretton’s broken nose delighted her.

“It wasn’t the first time Stretton had crossed your path, then?”