He arched an eyebrow at her, and she pursed her lips, the plush lower one thrust forward into a pout.
“Fine, yes,” she said, “I suppose they’d know if they had a Welsh cousin. Could I be a new business partner?”
“Staying in our home?”
“A veryfriendlybusiness partner? No?” She tapped a finger on her lower lip. He wished she would stop doing things with her mouth. “Perhaps you’ve inherited me as a ward. No, that won’t work, given my age.” She tilted her head and widened her eyes. “Can I pass for an ingenue of twenty?”
“No.”
The innocent expression transformed into a scowl. “How polite of you to say.”
“We shall simply have to tell them you are Lady Warren. There will be no stopping the annulment from making the papers anyway, once we begin legal proceedings.”
She had a stubborn look about her, something to do with her chin. “We do not yet know if a legal proceeding will be necessary. You needn’t tell your sisters a defamatory tale about yourself that may not even be true.”
He did not, in point of fact, particularly want Margo and Matilda to think that he had married in haste and was now repenting in—well, also haste—but he could not think of a way around it. He tried to project an air of responsibility around his sisters. They no longer had their mother and father, and he was a poor consolation prize. It was the least he could do to try to be steady for them.
He felt sometimes that he’d spent the last nine years trying to transform himself, trying to become the decent and thoughtful man his father had been. His father would have known what to do with Margo and Matilda—how to care for them properly, how to make sure that they were at once protected and given space enough to grow.
He’d not known that. He’d only tried—he was still trying—to keep their heads above water. To keep them as safe and happy as he could make them.
“You are either my wife to the household,” he told Winnie, “or an unmarried woman living in my home without a proper chaperone. As you have been posing as my wife for the last decade, I think that continuing the charade has the lowest chance of harming your reputation.”
Her lips parted. Spencer added that to his running tally of Things Winnie Must Stop Doing with Her Mouth.
“My reputation?” she said incredulously. “I am a thirty-year-old Welsh sheep farmer, not a debutante. I am not trying to ensnare a duke on the Marriage Mart. I don’t care what people say about me.”
He shook his head. “I’ve seen what a scandalous reputation can be like for a young woman. There are whispers, rumors—a bookshop in town stopped admitting Margo and Matilda some years back. It would be unpleasant for you.”
It had been unpleasant for Margo and Matilda. He knew it had, despite their bravery.
“My reputation can go hang. Spencer—” She broke off, seemingly as startled as he at the sound of his Christian name on her lips.
He recovered first. “Yes. Call me Spencer. It will strengthen the pretense that we are wed.”
“You needn’t try to protect me,” she said. “I am responsible for my own deception ten years ago. I can accept the consequences.”
“Winnie.” That stopped her in her tracks, just as the sound of his own name had. “I know I don’t have to protect you. But it does not hurt to try.”
When they arrived at Number Twelve Mayfair the following afternoon, however, his sisters were not in residence.
Spencer stared blankly at Fairhope, the family’s grizzled and melancholy butler, who had been reduced to wringing his hands.
“Lady Matilda left first,” Fairhope explained. “And then Lady Margaret followed along with Mr. Mortimer. They’ve, ah—I believe all three have left you some form of correspondence, my lord.”
“Where the devil did they all go?”
“Scotland, my lord.”
“For the love of God, why?”
Fairhope’s long face had the greenish cast of someone whose dinner of jellied eels had just begun writhing in his belly.
“Never mind,” Spencer said. “Better to have the story from their own hands. Henry’s letter at least should reflect some semblance of sense.”
Fairhope did not look as relieved as Spencer might have expected.
Winnie, on the other hand, appeared absolutely delighted beneath her blackened eye, for no reason that Spencer could discern. She caught his hand and dragged him away from Fairhope before he could manage to introduce her.
