" Why didn't you return it to Michael?"
Needham sighed, throwing down his napkin and rising from the table, through with the conversation. "He was careless with it in the first place," he said simply before quitting the room, Lady Needham fast on his heels.
It might have been sixteen years since she'd seen him last, but a part of her still considered Michael Lawler, Marquess of Bourne, a dear friend, and she did not like the way her father spoke of him, as though he were of little value and less import.
But then, she really didn't know Michael- not the man. When she allowed herself to think of him, more often than she'd like to admit, he was not a twenty-one-year-old who had lost everything in a silly game of chance.
No, in her thoughts, Michael remained her childhood friend- the first she'd ever made- twelve years old, leading her across the muddy landscape on one adventure or another, laughing at inopportune moments until she could not resist laughing with him, muddying his knees in the damp fields that stretched between their houses and throwing pebbles at her window on summer mornings before he headed off to fish in the lake that straddled Needham and Bourne lands.
She supposed the lake was part of her dowry, now.
Michael would have to ask permission to fish there.
He would have to ask her husband permission to fish there.
The idea would be laughable if it weren't so... wrong.
And no one seemed to notice. "

― Sarah MacLean , A Rogue by Any Other Name (The Rules of Scoundrels, #1)