Roxbury’s necklace was ghastly, made of enormous pink stones that Winnie told him were topaz, but Lord Brownbrooke’s was easily the worst.
“It’s an acrostic style,” she said. “That’s why the stones don’t match.”
Spencer gazed at the gold-bezeled stones, a heavy line of brilliant colors. “What does it mean?”
“It spells out a name. Fire opal—that’s anF,you see. Then lapis lazuli forL.Onyx, ruby, amethyst.”
He tracked the glittering orange, then brilliant blue, then black and red and purple. “Flora? Did your mother go by that name? Or was this stolen from someone else?”
He read amusement at the corner of her mouth. “Neither. He gave this one to my mother—she did not steal it. But Flora was his wife. He lifted it straight from her jewelry box without realizing what he’d done.”
Spencer coughed.
She looked up at him, the corners of her pale green eyes crinkled on a laugh. “I have to admit, I did consider selling this one. I’m not certain he deserves it back.”
“I’ll support your decision either way.”
Her face was so expressive—the little flicker of movement at her mouth, her eyes, the angle of her head. She was pleased, hesitant, still a little amused. She folded the necklaces back into their handkerchiefs. “I don’t believe I deserve it any more than he does,” she said finally. “It’s not mine to sell. We ought to find a way to give it back to his wife.”
Spencer had seen all kinds of talking in his years in the Lords—great grand speeches about what was right and proper. The pinch-faced responses to his sisters’ antics from matrons who’d once been friends with their mother.
He could not think of one single time he had seen someone with a sense of fairness like Winnie’s. A desire for her own clear-eyed justice and a determination to bring it into being.
“We’ll do it,” he said. “We’ll figure out how.”
He made his excuses then—he needed to see a solicitor—had to review his correspondence, meant to meet with the estate manager for his property in Norfolk.
Mostly, he needed a cold gulp of October air, because it had become suddenly and inescapably clear to him that he had developed atendrefor Winifred Wallace Halifax.
The woman who just might be his wife.
He had been attracted to her from the first. Well, perhaps not the very first, when she had been covered in sheep shit—though he had certainly felt an unexpected flash ofsomethingwhen he’d pulled her up against him on his horse, her body pressed hard into his own. But his initial attraction to the physical properties of her person—which were numerous, compelling, and increasingly impossible to stop thinking about—seemed suddenly secondary to the appeal of her. Of Winnie.
His sheep-farming, jewel-returning, clever, stubborn, ethical counterfeit countess.
These sentiments seemed ill-fated.
He recalled with precise clarity the look of horror on her face when he’d announced her as his wife. The desperate pitch to her voice when she’d talked of returning home—everything going back to the way it was. She did not want to be here, in London, with him—she was here only temporarily, to repair the situation her mother had set wrong.
She wanted to go home. In a few weeks—when the necklaces were returned, when their annulment was achieved—she would leave.
His sudden inflorescence offeelings,blooming in his heart like late-autumn Michaelmas daisies, did not enter into it.
After meeting with the various people who all excellently managed his earldom, he went to his club. He spoke to a number of his friends from school, none of whom he could recall specifically later on. He stayed for dinner. He thought to write Winnie a note explaining his absence, took up a stray quill, and then tossed it back down again.
She was not actually his wife. He did not need to explain his whereabouts.
But she would expect him. She would be alone at the table, her heart-stopping face flickering gold in the candlelight. She would—
He picked up the quill, dashed off a note, and gave it to the porter to send to Lady Warren at Number Twelve Mayfair.
And then he sat down again with someone—probably a friend, he had no notion—and chose for his first course French brandy.
When he finally made it home—after dinner, after Winnie should be asleep, given how early she’d woken that morning—he nodded to Fairhope and slipped into his dimly lit bedchamber. He closed the door softly behind him, not wanting to wake her. He knew how well sound traveled between their chambers.
How close she was.
But inside the bedroom, as he took off his jacket and made for the door to the dressing room, he realized Winnie was not in bed. He breathed in, and a lemon-scented swirl of humid air met his nose.
