Page 118 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
“I don’t have a pup, Trudy. You know that.”
She hadn’t had one since she’d been a girl of eleven. Her brother had released the beloved hound, who’d never returned.
Trudy snorted.
“Ye also don’t have any skill hidin’ in your misery either, girl. You are the one who ran the boy off.”
Cressida’s heart squeezed. She had.
“I know what’s going on in that head.”
Her nursemaid couldn’t even begin to imagine.
“Maybe I’m just sore from Stanley’s latest work,” Cressida suggested.
Trudy stopped gliding those bristles through Cressida’s hair and jabbed the brush at her reflection. “That pillock’s gone hurt you heaps worse than your current condition.” Trudy scowled. “The bloody bastard,” she spat. “But this wouldn’t be the strike to take you down, girl.”
That was the problem that came from living with someone who knew Cressida’s existence inside and out.
What an outsider might see and judge to be the greatest horror, Trudy knew was, in fact, only a glimpse. A mild inconvenience of one, in comparison to the other horrid abuse she’d suffered at her brother’s hands.
Trudy resumed brushing Cressida’s hair. “The fellow was angry.”
“Which? Dr. Carlson or—”
The nursemaid jabbed the brush again at Cressida. “Don’t you dare start with me again, gel. You’re not wiggling out of this one. You know exactly who I’m talking about. The fine, fancy gentleman who looked like he was going to dismember your corpulent brother.”
Cressida angled her head back, and in so doing, she caused her hair to tangle in the bristles of Trudy’s brush.
It bought Cressida some time.
Trudy proceeded to gently disentangle Cressida’s hair.
“I’ll allow you the earl was angry with Stanley for his treatment of me, but only because Lord Wakefield is noble and gallant and charitable.” Benedict might be angry with a person—of which he decidedly was with Cressida, but he’d never countenance mistreatment against any woman.
“I saw the way that lad looked at you, Cressie. He wasn’t angry at you. He was angry with himself.”
Hope briefly crept into Cressida’s heart.
Trudy’s lips cracked a rare smile. “Never saw a man more ready to kill than the earl seeing you hurt. That wasn’t just anger, girl. That was the look of a man protecting what is his.”
Her old friend’s words continued to fan the flames of that hope. Cressida lifted her gaze to Trudy’s. “He believes we’re one and the same, Trudy.”
Trudy frowned and set aside the brush. “On what do you base that, my girl?”
Cressida went on to explain the million and one things that had transpired since they had been apart from one another.
When she’d finished, Trudy wore the darkest frown she had that day. “That isn’t a man who’s mad at you, gel. That’s a man who’s furious and about ready to kill the baron, as he should have been killed long ago.”
“He can be angry with me and want to kill Stanley too, Trudy. Both of those things can be true.”
“You’re his mistress,” Trudy said unexpectedly.
Heat filled her cheeks. “No, as I mentioned…”
“Yes, yes, you said he purchased you at that debauched club, but I take it you are here now because you warm his bed.”
Cressida tried to make out whether there was disapproval, or whether she sought to understand the entirety of Cressida’s relationship with Benedict.
