Page 113 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
Wakefield grabbed him by the front of his coattails and tugged him closer.
“What do you mean?” Fear lent his voice a harsher quality.
“The gentleman, Markham’s fellow, arrived with a note and the lady took off after him. He asked that I fetch you immediately. Said you’d know where she was running off to,” he gritted out.
To see her brother or to find Trudy.Either way, Wakefield tore off, thundering for his horse.
Cressida.
He’d be damned if he lost her now, not when he’d realized he was head over heels, upside down, and inside out in love with her.
Chapter 29
After having been on what seemed like an endless goose chase, Wakefield arrived home, or at least at the place which had begun to feel increasingly like home with the amount of time spent here.Or is it the manner of exchanges and discussions you’ve had with a woman temporarily living here?
Burgess, who’d fetched him at his clubs, had since returned and was there to greet him the moment he reached the top step of the entryway.
“Is she…”
Burgess cut him off. “She is, my lord, and I should mention…”
He didn’t need him to mention anything. “Where?”
“In her chambers, but…Lord Markham was here a moment ago. He only just left. The gentleman wished to speak with you.”
“If he’d wanted to speak with me, he could have stayed.”
“My lord,” Burgess called from belowstairs. Wakefield, at the top, landing kept on going. The minute he turned the corner that led to Cressida’s chambers, he stopped in his tracks.
A frowning old woman had positioned a hallway chair and now sat outside Cressida’s rooms.
Wakefield walked the rest of the way.
Frail of body, but possessed of a seemingly indomitable spirit, the old woman made to rise.
Wakefield urged her to remain seated out of gentlemanly habit.
The wizened weathered woman brushed off that allowance. When she stood, she couldn’t be more than an inch past five feet, if that. The fire in her eyes, however, sparkled with a fighting spirit and revealed her to be a woman who’d at one time been stronger and greater than time had left her.
She looked him over with critical eyes.
Wakefield bowed at the waist.
The suspicion in the old woman’s rheumy gaze deepened. “I take it you’re the protector.”
That assertion knocked him off-balance. With the frail figure’s bluntness, there could be no doubt she’d raised Cressida.
“I take it you are Trudy,” he murmured.
“The very same.”
That’s why he’d been summoned. That’s why Cressida stormed off. Not to meet her brother, but rather because she’d deduced the men Wakefield hired had located Trudy’s whereabouts, which also meant… She’d most likely gone back to Ratcliffe on her own.
A crippling pressure tightened his chest. “Miss Alby?”
Fear lent his voice a hoarsened quality.
“What business is she of yours?” Trudy said, as her staunch defender.
