Page 66 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
The redness in his face intensified.
“Let me spare you the time,” Cressida said bluntly. “I don’t have relatives you need to worry about. There is no family who’ll miss my presence.” That much was true.
He eyed her dubiously. “I find that hard to believe.”
He wouldn’t if he actually knew Cressida’s circumstances, or Stanley and the baroness, but he didn’t.
Cressida quietly watched him. By the erect way he held himself, poised slightly forward, he wanted to ask her for details about her response.
In fairness to the gentleman, any person with a brain would question how a young, virginal lady, part of theton, who on occasion moved in social circles with him, could just up and disappear. What other conclusion was he to reach?
In the end, he proved the gentleman the world knew him to be.
“I’ve only recently let this property but haven’t set up a mistress in some time.”
Cressida glanced about. So, this was the posh neighborhood where honorable gentlemen brought their fancy pieces and set them up with the same lavish lifestyles they would their wives. They gave them everything—just not the benefit and security of their names.
Benedict misinterpreted the reason for her silence.
“Not that you’re a mistress,” he said abruptly. “That is, not my mistress or—”
Cressida saved them both from further discomfort. “You needn’t worry, my lord. I have no intention of dancing about town and paying visits.”
The part she withheld was that there were few invitations that flowed her way anymore, only when her friends hosted. Those ladies at the Mismatch Society were so in love with theirhusbands and families, the events they now held were few and far between.
This time when Benedict stood, she jumped up.
“Do you intend to…?” Cressida bit her cheek at the needy desperation in her voice.
He stared patiently with a question in his eyes.
Cressida took a breath. “Do you intend to return?”
“I do not suppose unless there is a need.”
In other words, he’d come back in several weeks when he received word that she wasn’t with child. And if she was…
Her mind lingered with a dangerously tempting thought of a small babe with Lord Wakefield’s tousled blond hair and serious smile.
Were Adamson men born with such serious smiles or did life make them that way?
Either way, she was destined to not know the answer.
Benedict captured her fingers in his and drew them close. “If there is anything else you need or require at all, Cressida, not just when that time comes, please send word immediately. My servants are loyal. They’re here to serve you.”
Cressida nodded. “Thank you, my lord.”
His lips quirked up at the left corner in a crooked, boyish smile that made her wonder what kind of child he’d been.
“Given the circumstances of our meeting, might I be so forward as to suggest you refer to me going forward by my given name? My name is Benedict.”
Benedict. Yesterday she’d claimed it, but today, he’d given her leave to refer to him by his Christian name. It was an intimate offering. Gentlemen and ladies did not refer to one another by anything other than their title. He would not make that offer to just anybody, and that touched her somewhere in her heart.
“I am Cressida,” she murmured.
“Cressida,” he repeated, like tasting it for the first time.
This exchange of names between them, not in the heat of passion or in the throes of lovemaking, somehow felt far more special and far more intimate than anything physical that had occurred between them last evening.
