Suddenly, the carriage ride seemed fraught with peril, and all the peril involved his own traitorous eyes and the way they wanted to rest upon the elegant planes of her body. His fingers, and how they wanted to brush across that full lower lip.
He absolutely could not think that way.
The woman was a forger. A criminal. She lived in Wales and lied about her name and feuded with a neighboring sheep farmer. She was the furthest thing imaginable from the proper countess he ought to want.
At school, Henry had been the studious one, the methodical one. Spencer had been wilder, more adventurous. He’d pulled Henry into radical coffee shops and houses of ill-repute. He’d shown his best friend an entire erotic library stocked behind the counter of a sweetshop and had once persuaded Henry to steal a marble bust from Clare’s Court for the purposes of a raucous costume party.
And then his parents had died. He had become the earl. He was not like his father—he did not take to it naturally. Henry would have been better—far better—in charge of the earldom, as careful and responsible as the old earl had been.
Spencer’s own inclinations were to ride on horseback all the way to Wales, to pull an utter stranger out of jail, and then haul her with him to London. But he had to be more cautious—he had to be other than who he naturally was. He was the Earl of Warren, and he had to hold on with both hands to the role he’d found himself in, lest he forget himself entirely.
“I am relieved to hear you favor the stairs,” Winnie Halifax said, “as I’ve already gone tumbling into a muck-heap once in recent memory. If I recall correctly, this particular room looks out over the manure pile. The staircase seems safer by far.”
Spencer was not so certain. As he followed her down the hallway, he could not stop himself from taking in the line of her neck, bared by the way she’d pulled her hair over her shoulder. Her skin was losing its rosy flush, fading to lightly tanned gold.
The damp fabric clung to her hips. Her figure was athletic—he could recall the taut curve of her waist beneath his arm when he’d held her to him on the horse. She was strong, this woman, from shearing sheep and making thread and everything else she did to survive.
Strong and clever. Lovely beyond belief.
He gritted his teeth, fixed his mind upon her crimes, and did not look at her arse again.
They were a good ten miles east of Llanreithan when Winnie saw the flash of yellow out the window.
She’d persuaded the earl to stop by her farm before they’d departed from the village, and she’d had the devil of a time attempting to keep him from following her into her cottage. No doubt he thought her a wayward, unpredictable sort; he seemed loath to take his eyes off her. But she’d eventually persuaded him that her sheep needed counting and had managed to redirect him toward the pasture.
She could not have him watch while she hid the necklaces in her traveling bag. God knew what he’d think.
Actually, she could rather guess what he’d think, and it wouldn’t be so very far from the truth. He would think the necklaces were stolen, which they were. He would think that she, Winnie, was the thief—perhaps he would think she meant to pawn them in the city.
She’d considered it, from time to time. When her first ram had died of a sudden colic, and the winter had been long and lean. When a storm had demolished a full mile of fencing, and her roof had leaked, and the cobbler had told her that her boots couldn’t bear another year of resoling.
Yet even then, she hadn’t pawned the necklaces. They weren’t hers; they’d never been hers.
She was going to give them back.
But the Earl of Warren would not believe that, of course. She could not tell him.
So she’d packed the necklaces at the bottom of her travel bag, beneath her two dresses and the lovely, foolish slippers she’d brought with her from London a lifetime ago, silvery and spangled and a decade out of fashion now. And when she’d emerged from the house with her bag and made for the pasture, Spencer Halifax, the Earl of Warren—her counterfeit husband—had been engaged in a friendly chat with Tommy, Mrs. Upholland’s only son.
Tommy had taken charge of her sheep while she’d been briefly imprisoned, and she’d need him to do so again for as long as she was in London with Lord Warren. Three weeks, at most—surely it would not be longer than that.
But it made her feel itchy and uncomfortable to ask Tommy for help; almost as discomfited as she felt watching Tommy and Lord Warren chat as though they’d been friends since boyhood. When Tommy saw her, his expression grew serious, and the more she tried to press funds upon him, the more he resisted, his shoulders rising stiffly toward his ears.
This was how she’d always felt in Llanreithan, though it had been a decade since she’d come to the little Welsh village—never quite at ease. Always just slightly on the outside, not quite certain how to please. She had discerned from her mother how to seduce and charm and trick, but her mother had not taught her how to befriend. Winnie had never managed to learn that.
Eventually she’d argued Tommy Upholland into submission, given him enough coin to make his brows go up, and related probably far too many instructions for a man who’d grown up around sheep. She knew Tommy; he was a good sort, quiet and earnest. And yet she could not quite stop the lecture on fly-strike that pushed its way past her lips. By the time she and Lord Warren left the farm, Tommy had gone silent, and she’d wanted to kick herself.
She did not know how to ask for help. Never, in her entire life, could she recall having someone whom she trusted enough to ask for assistance nor from whom she’d known it would be freely given. She did for herself. She did not know how to do otherwise.
But she’d put her discomfort forcibly from her mind when she’d gotten into the carriage with Lord Warren. She’d thought to question him about his plans for their arrival in London, but to her surprise, he removed a book from his traveling bag, opened it in one large hand, and appeared to lose sight of the rest of the world.
It was disturbingly attractive, the small book resting on his knee, his gaze as entranced as though he were charmed by a faerie. Her ginger Viking husband, it seemed, liked to read.
So instead of speaking with him, she’d admired him briefly from beneath her lashes—purely as an aesthetic object, of course, like a statue or a painting or a particularly luscious and toothsome dessert—and then resorted to staring out the window.
Which was why, when she spotted a little flash of gold behind a screen of trees, she was at the glass in an instant.
Lord Warren looked up from his book. “What is it?”
