She had a moment of sheer agony—scarcely adulterated by the part of her that told her she ought to be glad.This was what you asked for, Win, wasn’t it?
And then Spencer started to speak. His eyes were on Lord Brownbrooke. “Winnie is not her mother.”
She froze on the cusp of flight.
“Winnie is nothing like her mother,” Spencer told Brownbrooke, “and I know that even though I did not know Eliza. Winnie is good and generous and fair-minded down to the bone. She could run rings around me if she wanted to with that dazzling brain of hers, but she doesn’t, because for some benighted reason, she seems to like having me along.”
Winnie had no idea how Brownbrooke or the duchess or anyone else in the room was responding to Spencer’s sudden torrent of words. She could not tear her eyes from his face.
He regarded the man across from him steadily. “I knew who Winnie was from the first. I fell in love with her exactly as she is. She’s honest and brave as the devil, and you’d realize that if you took one damned look at her and stopped seeing someone else.”
He swung his gaze to Winnie. “I met her in a little town in Wales,” he said. His voice had dropped, his words for her now. “And I was hers from the moment I saw her.”
“Spencer—”
She did not know what she meant—whether she wanted him to stop or say it a thousand times.
She realized she was crying when his thumb brushed her cheek. “Winnie,” he said. “My Win. You are an adventure. You are a marvel. You are the love of my life and everything I want—in Wales or here or wherever you’ll have me. But if the annulment is what you want, then I will not forestall you.”
Spencer… loved her?
Her mind seemed to have snagged on the words, tumbling and tripping over them. Spencer loved her. He did not want her to go.
Her lips parted. She looked at him—at his beloved face, serious and tender and hopeful and afraid. “I don’t want that,” she said. “I don’t want the annulment.”
His gaze was locked on hers. “Say it again.”
“I don’t want the annulment, Spencer. I never did.”
“Jesus, Win,” he said, and took her face in his hands and kissed her. It was quick and frantic, loving and true, and then he broke away from her. He turned to the people encircling them, whom Winnie had largely forgotten.
“Brownbrooke,” he said. “Your Grace. It’s been—ah—a lovely evening.”
Lord Brownbrooke was staring in arrested shock at Spencer. A small crowd appeared to have gathered behind him.
The duchess, meanwhile, looked mildly electrified. Her feathered headpiece appeared to have doubled in size from the sheer power of her excitement. “Indeed it has,” she said. “Go home, you absurd creatures, and stop creating an uproar in my ballroom.”
“Thank you,” Winnie said, “for your help—for—”
“Never you mind,” the duchess said.
And then Spencer was dragging her outside and tossing her rather vigorously into the carriage, and then he was beside her and beneath her and around her. His mouth was on hers.
The world was in his kiss, and then the world was hers, because Spencer had given it to her.
“Wait,” she gasped, breaking away from his mouth.
He lifted his head. Somehow she was in his lap, pulled against his chest, his arms wrapped round her body. “I would wait forever,” he said, “for you.”
Quite thoroughly and dramatically, Winnie burst into tears.
“Win,” Spencer murmured. He brought her fingers to his mouth and kissed them one by one. “Don’t. Please don’t. It’ll be all right.”
“Why would yousaythose things?” she demanded.
Through the haze of her tears, he looked somewhat dismayed. “To Brownbrooke, you mean?”
“Yes.” She yanked her hand out of his grip and wiped at her face. “Were you… trying to rescue me again? You needn’t. I did not ask you to.”
