Spencer stared blankly at her over his coffee. She had discovered that he preferred it to tea, though he liked it so creamy and sweet that she was surprised he could tell the difference.
“How would you obtain access to his brandy decanter?” he asked.
She chewed on her lower lip. “Or perhaps I could place it inside the lid of his pianoforte.”
“I do not understand how you mean to get inside Roxbury’shouse—”
“I could pretend to be a piano tuner.”
He gazed impassively at her.
“Do you think it necessary that I know how to tune a piano?”
He laughed, and—God, she was doomed—her heart performed a smallgallopade.
It had been five days since they had returned Lord Noake’s necklace. In the intervening time, they had attended a host of social engagements in a fruitless attempt to cross paths with the two remaining necklace owners. At each event, Winnie had played at countess, trying to charm Spencer’s staff and his friends and even his political enemies. She did not think it could hurt.
Spencer was the very picture of gentlemanly behavior during the day—pulling out her chair, fastening her pelisse, escorting her with careful strides so that she needn’t lengthen her step to match his. He woke late, and slowly, and over breakfast he liked to ask her questions and listen to her ramble, a half-smile alight on his mouth.
At night he was—well, at night he was also the picture of gentlemanly behavior, she supposed, except that the picture would have gotten someone arrested.
He liked her ankles round his neck and her stockings on. His hair grew darker when he perspired, and it felt delicious in her hands, particularly when his red-gold head was lodged between her thighs.
He was shockingly solicitous. Nothing in her very small store of experience could possibly have prepared her for such a thing. He brought her to climax with his mouth and his thick freckled fingers, repeatedly, every night. Sometimes he teased her—making her wait, blowing a cool stream of air right where she was throbbing with heat—but mostly he seemed rather more invested in her repeated, cascading orgasms, as though he might win a prize for the number of times he toppled her over the edge.
He kept his trousers on, or a sheet between them, and he was so damned decorous about it that occasionally she wanted to scream.
He was always in control. She ought to have appreciated—no, shedidappreciate—how careful he was. How concerned for her well-being and the future of their entirely separate legal lives. He was a man who cared very much for doing the right thing, and she admired that about him.
She also wanted to tear his trousers off. She wanted to wrap her lips around his member and suck until he couldn’t speak. She wanted—
Bloody hell. She was so very, very doomed. She wanted him to tup her into the mattress whilst declaring his passionate and irrevocable love for her, Winnie Halifax, his true and forever countess.
It was a catastrophe. Here in the creamy morning light of his dining room, with his eyes warm on her over his coffee cup, she could see clearly how alone she had been in Llanreithan. How lonely.
She had not known how to let anyone in, and after the first year or two, no one had tried. But Spencer—he slipped past her defenses so easily. With a milky teacup prepared just how she liked it. With a question about her thread. With a thumb brushed over her cheek in a room stippled by starlight.
Her return to Wales was going to break her heart. In the mornings, when she woke at dawn to the soft London din of coal-cutters and cart deliveries, she resolved to end it, or at the very least to seize control of the situation somehow, to do something to protect herself against future pain.
But then he woke as well, and smiled drowsily, and pushed down the bedsheets beside him. “Come back to bed,” he would say. “You look cold.”
And she went, helplessly, to her ruination. She did not know how to stop it.
“What about a Christmas gift?”
She blinked, rousing herself from her tragic reverie. “A Christmas gift?”
“Mm.” Spencer pondered his coffee. “Roxbury, I mean. If I can find him at our club, I could perhaps pay one of the porters to present him with a festive anonymous package.”
She pursed her lips. “Absolutely not. This task is not yours. I won’t have you darting about the city with a fortune in stolen jewels on your person.”
“And you should?”
“We have been over and over this—”
He sighed and set down his coffee cup. “Yes. We have. I’m sorry.”
Her heart trembled in her chest. He was so kind. So respectful. Sobloody infuriating.
