They were in the library when everything went to hell.
Winnie stared down at her very excellent hand of cards and then up at Spencer’s smothered grin. “You made that rule up.”
His amusement broke out around the edges, which presented itself as a vexingly attractive smirk. “I didn’t. It’s calledrepique.”
“And you havedoublethe points I have now?”
He gave in and laughed outright. “I win. Your forfeit, my lady.”
The morning after the opera, they’d received a beautifully engraved invitation to a ball hosted by the dowager Duchess of Vale—the former radical to whom Spencer had introduced Winnie in the Western Exchange. Her Grace’s ball would host virtually all of the aristocrats who’d chosen to remain in town for the coming Christmas season, and Winnie’s close attention to the gossip columns suggested that Lord and Lady Brownbrooke might be there. Spencer had accepted for both of them.
The days since then had been bitterly cold, and so they’d stayed inside where it was warm and charmed. They had laughed a great deal and had not spoken of the last remaining necklace.
Winnie was afraid to talk about it. She wanted to return Brownbrooke’s jewels—was desperate to do so. And yet, when they were finished with that task, what more held them together?
The annulment, she supposed. They were not done with one another yet.
In the ten days since the opera, she’d seen her man of business again, then sent several pages of notes in response to a sunny letter from Tommy Upholland, along with a substantial order of mince pies.
By the afternoon before the duchess’s ball, she and Spencer still had not made a plan of action. He seemed disinclined to bring it up, and when they had finished their very late breakfast—the man was utterly slothful in the mornings, and she enjoyed it far too much—he offered to teach her to play piquet.
She’d grasped the rules rather quickly, to her mind, given that every lost hand required her to remove an article of clothing. This, Spencer had assured her, was not how it was usually played at his club.
“I hardly think this is fair, given your perfidy,” she said, pushing her lips into a pout. He liked that. He had told her so, under circumstances that made her blush to think about. “I propose we both take something off.”
“Do you know, I’d thought to suggest the very same.”
She was down to her chemise and stays and one single stocking. Spencer, the toad, had lost only his cravat. She’d insisted on the cravat’s early departure—she liked to look at the bare triangle of skin at the base of Spencer’s neck.
“How about your jacket?” she suggested.
“I’d thought perhaps my shoe.”
She added a flutter of the eyelashes to her pout. “Your jacket for my stays. I will extend no further quarter.”
“You lost,” he protested. “Why do you get to make conditions?”
“I only lost because you did not properly explain the rules!”
He peeled off his jacket, hooked a finger into the top of her stays, and towed her, laughing, up against him. He tangled his fingers in her hair and pressed his mouth to her neck.
“Mm,” he mumbled. His mouth was warm on her skin, and she shivered. “You know, if you’d surrendered your hairpins first, you’d still be fully dressed.”
She dragged her hands up his back, relishing the taut slope of his body. “I thought of that, in fact. Thought you’d be more distracted this way.”
“Scoundrel,” he said. His mouth came to hers on a honey-rich laugh. “Wicked little minx.”
He tasted of honey too—like sweet July honey drizzled over tea cakes. His kiss was as warm and infinite as summer, as a grove of lady’s bedstraw golden under the sun.
There was a knock on the library door.
They sprang apart. With a muffled exclamation, Winnie grabbed for her dress—tossed heedlessly over the back of an armchair—and yanked it on over her chemise and stays. She fought with the hooks at the side seam. Spencer smiled at her, one fleeting roguish dimple, and kicked her petticoat beneath his desk and out of sight.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“It’s me.” The voice was male, and obviously familiar to Spencer, because his eyes widened. “Us, actually. Margo and me. Fairhope said you were in here.” The voice hesitated. “He said to knock?”
Winnie felt heat boil up to her cheeks as she wrestled her way into her second stocking. Her shoes—where the devil were her shoes?
