Page 97 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl
Benedict peered at her, and it was clear he searched for the truth of her claim.
“How could I not recall you?” His question came distant and low, as if he spoke to himself.
“How could you?” she asked drolly. Self-deprecation had become a skill to save face instead of laughing with her as she’d done with her friends.
Benedict’s expression grew dark. “Do not do that.”
“Do what?” she asked, truly confounded.
“Do not make light of yourself. My God. Cressida, you’re bloody remarkable. Any other woman would have been in tears and reduced to a shadow of herself were she to have gone through what you’ve gone through…” He flinched. “If they’d been put through what I’ve put you through.”
“You didn’t put me through anything.” It had been her brother.
He appeared as uninterested in her defense of him as he did in stopping his praise of her.
“You’re bloody courageous. You not only set out on your own for the worst streets in London, you didn’t ask for help and bloody hell. I both admire that and want to howl and seethe with frustration that you think nothing of going off on your own and facing the harm that you did. And that you could bake a bread the Queen would be honored to feature at her breakfast table.”
Cressida cringed. “Please don’t do that.”
Genuine befuddlement filled his features.
“Do what?” he asked earnestly.
“Just stop acting as though I’m this remarkable woman. You and I both know the qualities that are admired in a lady, and it’s certainly not baking bread,” she said on a hysterical half laugh, half sob.
Benedict stood and reached for her. “Cressida.”
She wrenched away from him.
“No,” she said, her voice pitchy. What he was doing was unforgivable, unpardonable. He was making her believe that he could love her and admire her when she knew the truth. He saw her as some kind of circus freak.
“I know who you—” She caught herself. “I know who you noble men seek as your wives. You want them to be polished on the piano forte, clever in their speech, possessed of a light winsome laugh and humor. I possess none of that. So don’t you sit here remarking about me as though I’m somehow special, when you and I both know that not to be true.”
His blond eyebrows flared. “Cressida.”
She took another hasty step away. “Because if it was true,” she said as if he hadn’t even spoken, “we also know that you bloody well would remember me.”
As soon as the pitiable lamentation burst from her lips, she hunched into herself, mortified that she’d exposed herself and her hurt at his indifference of her.
Chapter 24
Wakefield was no stranger to the complexities of women’s moods. It was a skill honed not in the ballrooms or boudoirs, but long before—born of necessity, shaped by family. As the brother to two sisters, each possessed of wildly different tempers and temperaments, he had learned early the art of reading the unspoken, of knowing when to press and when to retreat. One had been ruled by storms of feeling, the other by cool, cutting calm.
And then there had been his mother.
The Countess of Wakefield, widowed far too young, had been a study in elegant, relentless control—a woman with a will as sharp as cut glass and a grief she wore like a second skin. When fate had seen fit to name him earl while he was still too young to fill his father’s shoes, it had fallen to him to navigate the delicate, treacherous waters of both title and household—a world ruled as much by the countess’s moods as by the demands of the estate.
Those years, those women, had made him what he was.
And in the years since, he’d carried those lessons with him—applying them with effortless grace to the ladies he courted. It was a natural thing now, as instinctive as breath, to sense the tilt of a mood, the shift of a glance, the words left unsaid. He might have once thought himself a student of politics or estate management, but the truth was far simpler.
Wakefield had been trained all his life in a delicate, dangerous art—understanding women.
Though, given the two women he’d sought to make his wife had chosen another, one could argue easily and with good reason that he still had much to learn. But nevermore had Wakefield been or felt more out of his depth than he did in this instant. Maybe it was because though he’d been hurt twicebefore by the sting of rejection, he’d never himself hurt anyone in the way he had Cressida. And so he found himself at a loss. Armed with none of the proper responses, he also found himself utterly gut punched at the sight of her apparent grief. Grief which he had caused her.
Staring at her as she stared at him, her shoulders heaving, her face crimson red, her eyes angry and hurt all at the same time, it wrought a crippling tightness in his chest. Failing to have any of the right words, he gave her the only ones he had—the truth.
“You’re right, Cressida,” he said quietly.
