“The fact that I am here in London is predicated upon my deception!”
“Win,” he said, and he reached out and took her hand. “I’ve seen you lie to protect me. I know that you’ve lied to survive. But mostly I’ve seen you tell the goddamned truth—even when it did not serve you. You admitted straightaway that you used my name, that you forged the banns. I can still see you throwing yourself beneath me under that elm, for God’s sake.”
“That was—”
“Honest,” he said. “Real. Tell me about the jewels, Winnie. Where did they come from?”
She looked down at his hand holding hers in her lap. Their bare fingers tangled with each other, with ropes of diamonds and colored gems.
She had never told anyone. She had built a new life for herself. Had pushed the memories of her mother and their life in London down so far she’d thought she need never face them again. But the feel of the necklaces, the diamonds spilling between their fingers, burned on her palm.
She unlinked her hand from his, because… because she did not want to depend upon him. Because depending upon him terrified her.
And then she took a breath and told him about her mother. She told him the real reason she had left London a decade ago—her mother’s sudden frantic-edged brilliance, the rooms they’d taken and then left again the next week. Eliza’s final departure.
Take your pick, beauty. I’m for Paris. Do you want the Champs-Élysées, or the money?
She told him to whom the necklaces belonged as she refolded them carefully into their linen handkerchiefs and then tucked them back into her reticule. She described her plans to return the jewels directly to their owners and explained what she’d been doing in the leather-goods stall.
When she finally stopped talking, their carriage had long since reached the house at Number Twelve Mayfair. The grooms had unfastened the horses while they spoke, and now everything was quiet. The fading sunlight caught on Spencer’s hair, lighting it like cloth-of-gold, like glittering threads in a fine heavy weave.
He did not say anything. His gaze was steady, measured, fixed in the middle distance.
She breathed.
Finally his focus resolved back onto her face. She wanted to cringe away from those penetrating eyes. Her armor was made of a thousand splintered shards, and the will she usually marshaled to hold herself together did not seem in evidence.
“Did you not consider the post?”
Of all the things she’d thought he might say, that had not even—
“I beg your pardon?”
There was a bare thread of amusement in his voice. She could hear it, winding like a ribbon of honey through his warm baritone. “In the last ten years. You did not think topostthe jewels?”
The feeling of fragility receded. She would not shatter. Perhaps he had known—perhaps he had seen how close she was to collapse.
“Of course I thought of it,” she said indignantly. “I did not know their addresses.”
“You could have written to a solicitor, perhaps.”
She pursed her lips. “And revealed my interest in their whereabouts? The daughter of the woman who robbed them in the first place? If my identity had been discovered—”
“All right,” he said, “I understand. But Winnie—why didn’t you just drop them in the Thames? Why all the… the parrots and the subterfuge?”
Her fingers had risen to her coiffure without her noticing. She found herself worrying a lock of hair against her collarbone.
How to make him understand?Couldhe understand?
“I took the money my mother gave me to start my farm,” she said, “even though I knew it was ill-gotten. I used every penny of those seventy-two pounds to build my life. I used your name, though I did not know it belonged to you. I am proud of what I have made these last ten years, but every part of it is built upon a false foundation. These necklaces—they’re something I can fix. A crime that, for once, I can put right.”
He looked at her, long and slow. “I can understand that, I think.”
“You can?”
“That’s why you came, is it not? Not for me—not just for the annulment. You could have stayed in your cottage and pretended none of this affected you. But you wanted—what? Justice? Forgiveness?”
“The slate wiped clean.” Her voice was almost inaudible, but he heard her anyway. She knew that he heard.
