Page 33 of Sloth: The Fallen Earl (Seven Deadly Sins #4)

C ressida remained precisely where she’d been since Trudy took her leave.

Now Benedict knew exactly the manner of woman he’d let into his life, though unintentionally, of course. The memories of what they’d shared, of him sitting beside her, just talking with her in the servants’ kitchens as casually as if they were any happy wedded couple who’d stolen that early morning time for themselves to talk about their life.

Cressida’s throat worked. For a brief moment in time, she’d had a glimpse of what life might’ve been like and what it certainly was like for the fortunate people. People like the friends she’d made at the Mismatch Society, most of whom were now happily married and desperately in love with their husbands, and whose dashing husbands were in love with them in return. The hardest part of it all was now that Cressida had known that glorious, heartfelt intimacy, she could never forget it, and now she’d live the rest of her life remembering what it had been like, if even for just a brief moment in time.

Now came the next hardest part—trying to forget what it had been like for that very short while because retaining those memories were an impossibility. Cressida wouldn’t be able to survive the reality of her circumstances and her actual fate, not as long as she held on to those times she’d had here with Benedict.

“Oh God.” It was too much.

Curling up onto her side, Cressida brought herself into a tight ball and folded her arms up about her knees, simultaneously rocking and shaking. She stared emptily at the cheerful fire dancing in the hearth, those ebullient flames so at odds with the misery threatening to tear her asunder.

Cressida absently noted the damp tracks left by her own tears. There came a slight click. Silently cursing, Cressida hurried to wipe away the remnants and signs of her misery, but she wiped too hard. She winced, recalling her brother’s attack all over again.

She didn’t want to speak to Trudy now. She didn’t want Trudy to sit next to her and force her to open up her heart about Benedict. She didn’t want to hear any further about Trudy’s uncharacteristically optimistic outlook on Benedict’s interest in Cressida. Not as long as she’d known the woman, not in all her twenty-five years, did Cressida recall her nursemaid being the hopeful sort who hung her hat on hope and shiny stars.

Cressida felt Trudy searching her gaze around the room. Maybe all the nursemaid’s instincts failed her lately, for she always knew where to look for Cressida. The floor was where she slept. The floor was where they both slept too many times.

Cressida took in a shaky sigh. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore,” she said exhaustedly.

“Well, considering we haven’t spoken about it at all, I thought you might spare a moment if you are awake.”

Cressida gasped and sat up, straightening from repose. Her heart thumped unsteadily.

“Benedict,” she said, her voice quavering and her hands shaking frantically. She dusted and wiped at her cheeks, this time ignoring the pain. Self-preservation was all that mattered. “You came back.”

“I came back.” He didn’t join her, however. The gentleman that he was and always had been and always would be remained at the doorway.

“May I come in?” he ventured quietly.

No. “Yes,” she said instead, answering in the affirmative as he deserved.

Cressida detected another faint click and knew the moment he’d shut them away together. So soft were his footfalls, she failed to hear him and stand before it was too late and he appeared before her.

Cressida hastened to rise, but Benedict hurriedly rushed her off and sat down, joining her on the floor. They sat that way, both of them with their knees drawn to their chest, arms looped about their limbs, neither speaking.

It occurred to Cressida he was waiting for her, giving her the time she needed to compose herself to answer, to explain what she knew. Just that he was affording her the moment with which to speak first. He could keep waiting. Not because she was determined to make him sit in silence, but because she didn’t know what to say. There were no words. She had nothing to give him. He must have eventually realized as much.

Wakefield had spent a good part of his life hating people. The first most obvious target of his antipathy had been, of course, his father. The wastrel, the philanderer, the faithless earl. Then there had been his best friend, Andrew, Viscount Waters, who’d slid in as a new source of Wakefield’s loathing.

All the years of despising those two other men combined never came anywhere near the aberrance he now felt for himself.

Emotion wadded in his throat. He’d never been deserving of her reverence. In every way that mattered, Cressida had always been far greater than him. He’d spent years lamenting his own life for being difficult. Why? He’d had a dissolute father, who’d fathered another family and betrayed his wife and forgotten the children whom he’d sired upon the viscountess. But that was no strife, not really. He’d railed at the conditions the previous earl left he and his mother and sisters in, but that had been absolutely nothing compared to the squalor Cressida had known.

He’d believed he loved Marcia, and maybe, in part, he had. She’d been his first love, his childhood love, but never had he felt this wave of possessiveness, this all-powerful, unyielding, fiery passion to know a person inside and out the way he longed to with Cressida. She deserved so much. Certainly, she deserved so much better than him, but he would be her champion. He would stand beside her if she let him, if she’d give him another chance, if she’d let them start again.

Finally, he turned his head to look at her.

Cressida lay so still, her dark blonde eyelashes soft against her cheeks—her bruised cheeks. His heart cinched. For a moment, he believed she slept, and he contemplated lifting her into his arms and carrying her over to the bed so that she might have the rest she both deserved and needed, in order to heal. His gaze caught on the rapid rise and fall of her chest that indicated she didn’t in fact sleep, but more so was putting on the show of sleep because she wanted nothing to do with him. And why should she?

“I’ve never before frequented Forbidden Pleasures or The Devil’s Den or Lucifer’s Lair or any club.” He grimaced. “That is, any club that wasn’t White’s or Brooks’s. Rather, I haven’t visited them with any intention other than to rescue friends of mine who’d gotten themselves into some manner of trouble or other.”

Cressida opened her eyes but still didn’t say anything.

Encouraged, Benedict continued.

“I’ve always worried overly much about my name and reputation. Too much,” he finally admitted to her as much as himself. “I was invited to become a partner of The Devil’s Den.”

She went even more still.

“I haven’t shared that with anyone,” he confided. “just you.”

He knew he could trust her. He realized he’d known as much all along. The one he couldn’t trust, however, had been himself. He couldn’t trust who he was around her and with her. She made him feel things he’d never felt. She’d shaken him to his core and never before had he felt less in control of himself, or his faculties, or his heart, and it terrified the everlasting hell out of him.

At last, she angled her head. “You’re an owner of that club?”

He couldn’t make out disgust, only more of a curiosity.

He nodded. “Afraid so. My brother-in-law, Latimer, invited me to invest, and so I did. And he, along with Dynevor, wished to show me what my capital had gained me. Then I saw you, Cressida. You were up for bid.” He relived that night in his head. “Dynevor was telling me all about the club and the financial plans for it, and I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t see anything.” His throat worked. “I only saw you ,” he said, his voice thick.

Her fuller, lower lip trembled ever so slightly, and she caught it between her teeth and bit to still its quaver.

“Something about you bewitched me. Something about you commanded all my attention, and then the bidding went out of control, and if it had been purely about business, well, then I would have been all too happy to allow those bids to continue.” A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Rothesby wanted you and quite badly.”

The same rush of black, unreasoning jealousy that had besieged Wakefield at The Devil’s Den assaulted him all over again—this time, with an even more violent force.

He reined in the insidious emotions. “You were correct when you pointed out I’d never bid on you, Cressida. I didn’t. I called for Dynevor to stop the auction.”

Wakefield held her gaze with his. “All I knew was I couldn’t allow him to have you, Cressida. I couldn’t allow any man. I would've killed to have you that night,” he said gravely. “I’ve never felt that way in my life , Cressida.” A rueful chuckle escaped him. “Once, you mentioned Lady Waters. I would have you know, I never felt for her anything near the way I feel for you. I never have and never will, for any woman other than you.” Emotion thickened his voice. “From the moment I looked up and saw you on that stage, you captivated me, mind, body, and soul.”

She stared with an endearing confusion at him, wearing the look of one who sought to process what Wakefield was saying. And to be fair, so did Wakefield. His own startlement was reflected back in her clear brown eyes.

“My father,” he said softly, “was terrible with his funds. He wasn’t a wastrel in the sense that your—” he cut himself short.

“In the way my brother is,” she supplied for him without inflection.

“Yes,” he said, “he gambled, yes, but no more than the average gentleman, and he drank, but he wasn’t a drunkard. He provided for his family by the means afforded him as an earl, but he didn’t do anything to truly overlook the tenants who were reliant upon him, but nor did he put any or much thought at all into what should happen to his children and wife after he was gone. Maybe he thought he’d be around forever. Maybe he was too busy living to worry about the worst thing happening to him.”

But the worst thing had happened to him and in his dying, it had led to the worst thing happening to Wakefield’s entire family.

“My father had another family that he kept, a woman who was his mistress and who gave him two daughters.”

He felt Cressida’s gaze grow more intent upon him.

Throughout his years at Eton and then Oxford, there’d been plenty of gentlemen who knew about the previous earl: about the debts he’d accumulated wagering too much. A steady stream of lovers, and then one mistress whom the wastrel fell for. To Society, however, the greatest crime—the reason Wakefield had been treated poorly upon his father’s death—was because the financial state he’d left his legitimate family and bastard one, in. Those sins however, hadn’t been Wakefield’s. They’d alone been his sire's.

Unlike his father, Wakefield viewed his word as his bond. Vows had been taken between the late earl and Wakefield’s mother that had merited the earl’s devotion.

“After his death, I found his journals.” In his mind, Wakefield recalled the moment he’d discovered those books. The pain he’d felt reading them had stayed with him all the years after. “He loved his other family deeply,” he said, staring intently over the top of her blonde-brownish loose curls and into the merry fire dancing in the hearth, “and I didn’t begrudge my sisters for having known that love.”

His jaw worked. “What I did, and do, and will always resent, however, is that he involved himself with another woman and altered her life and the lives of their children. He took on that which he couldn’t take care of when he already wasn’t sufficiently looking after his own wedded wife and their children together. I was determined not to be him.”

In the end, Wakefield had proven to be just as blackened. No. Even more so.

The late Earl of Wakefield had loved outside of his marriage, but he certainly hadn’t treated the other woman like some whore or leveled hideous and heinous accusations against her as Wakefield had done to Cressida. Rather, his father had treated his mistress as he had his wife.

Through Wakefield’s telling, Cressida remained silent. Just as he knew this woman, she knew him so very well to have surmised he needed to speak about his past. Even while he found strength in her support, he struggled to face her.

Humbled and shamed, he had to bring himself to look at her. To not be a coward. “Cressida, I spent so much damned time worrying I’d become my father, I didn’t even realize I’d become someone even worse, a priggish fellow who’d make an honest, good woman feel badly about herself when it was I, all along, who bore the real mark upon my character.”

An adorable crease of confusion lined her brow. God, she really didn’t know.

“You,” Wakefield said gently, “I’m talking about you.”

“Me,” she repeated back incredulously. She snorted. “I’d hardly describe myself as having been honest. As you’ve rightly pointed out, Benedict, you don’t really know me. I didn’t share any part about myself with you. And, yes, I did that deliberately, so I…”

He reached up and touched a fingertip gently to her mouth and then promptly regretted that hastiness. She flinched ever so slightly that, had he blinked, he would’ve missed the telltale mark of her discomfort. But he’d seen it. His gaze went to the bruising upon her face.

What manner of woman had the strength and wherewithal to take such a brutal beating and remain as composed as she’d been? When she’d greeted him with Dr. Carlson, she’d remained, poised and calm even lying in bed. Certainly, she was the only woman he’d ever known who’d conduct herself with such grace and formidability in the face of what she suffered.

“I’m so sorry,” he said thickly around the emotion clogging his throat, “I hurt you. I didn’t mean to. I—”

“You didn’t hurt me, Benedict.”

She’s soothing me. She’s soothing me ?

“Please don’t do that,” he said, his voice hoarsened.

He didn’t even allow her to draw a full breath before he continued on a rush, “You do not need to assure me. You do not need to try and make me feel better. Cressida, you matter. You matter so damned much. And yet I’ve come to learn you’ve spent so much time worrying about others, looking out for Trudy, that you never put yourself first.”

Something that sounded very much like a sob tore from his chest. “Lord knows I am certainly the last of all people who is deserving of your coddling. You deserve to be loved and protected and cared for and cherished.”

Reaching down, he collected her left hand in his and drew it close to his mouth.

He pressed a tender kiss upon her knuckles and then moved his lips along the top of her hand. Wakefield turned her wrist over and delicately worshiped the delicate seam where her wrist met her hand.

“Please let me, Cressida Everly Alby. Let me be the one. Marry me.”

Marry me.

For a minute, Cressida believed her brother had struck her too hard on the head this time. How else to explain the dream that she had long carried, a dream of Benedict and she together, and now to have him before her, pleading with her, asking that she allow him to be the one to love her and cherish her?

Cressida lay motionless, unblinking. If she blinked, if she closed her eyes for so much as the span of a second, she’d awaken and the dream would come to a swift and likely death.

“Is this real?” she whispered, afraid that in speaking aloud, she’d shatter the most glorious imagining she’d ever allowed herself except…

A somber, solemn Benedict nodded his head almost awkwardly but also in an apparent confirmation. Tears filled Cressida’s eyes, blurring his sculpted visage. His pain-filled groan filled the room, and he stretched out his fingers to caress her face, and this time he caught himself.

“Please don’t do that,” he said.

“I’m not unhappy.”

“I despise the sight of any of your tears, Cressida Everly Alby. You deserve to smile. Your entire days ought to be filled with gladness and goodness, and I intend to devote my life to that goal.”

This time a sob ripped out of her.

Using his shoulder and elbow, Wakefield dragged himself closer to her.

“If my proposal brings you sadness, what must I do to bring you to smile?” he murmured, part wistful, part contemplative.

A watery laugh bubbled from her lips.

His expression grew serious.

“Do you know it occurs to me, Cressida Everly Alby, that I’ve arrogantly made an assumption? You merely asked if this was real, but you did not, more importantly, answer yes to my proposal.”

There it was. His proposal. Hearing him utter it aloud made it real in ways that it hadn’t been. And reality came crashing in. Her happiness withered on the vine with which stupid hope grew.

There’d been so much Benedict found out on his own about her, and yet so little she’d truly shared. But this omission hadn’t been deliberate. Cold reality intruding, Cressida rolled onto her back and lay there, staring fixedly at the ceiling once more.

His head propped on his hand, Benedict angled his head over hers and searched her face concernedly.

“What is it?” he asked gravely.

What was it? she thought to herself. It could be everything. It could be absolutely nothing. She knew not what the betrothal her brother arranged entailed or her legal obligations or how powerful the enemy she’d make. More importantly, the enemy Benedict would make if she defied the agreement that had been reached between the duke and Stanley.

As much as she’d been guarding her pride and circumstances, she’d also kept Benedict from knowing her truths, but she didn’t want to do that anymore with him. She wanted to be open and honest in every way that she could because he deserved it.

Benedict didn’t push her, which made sharing even easier.

“I mentioned before…my brother made arrangements for me to marry.”

While she spoke, she directed her explanation up at the ceiling. His body, but a breath apart from hers, went so taut, she felt his muscles flex against her.

“Who?” he asked, as rage trembled in his deep baritone.

“He is a duke.” Cressida couldn’t bring herself to face him because to do so would require her to confront the impossibility her arrangement with that duke made of any future with Benedict.

“Who?” Benedict repeated, this time in the commanding tones of a gentleman accustomed to being answered in the way he wished.

That wasn’t, however, the reason Cressida answered him. The desire to be forthright with Benedict still compelled her.

“He’s the Duke of Harrowden.” Benedict went silent for so long, Cressida turned and looked at him. The angular planes of his face were arranged in a terrifying mask.

“The Duke of Harrowden,” he repeated.

This time, it was Benedict who didn’t look at her, rather his gaze, sharp and piercing and fury-filled went all the way through Cressida.

“You know him,” she said tentatively because she had to say something, but obviously he did know him. The Earl of Wakefield was connected, well-connected, with all the peers of the ton.

“I do,” he bit out. “He is a vile, depraved lecher with one foot and a half in the grave. And this is who your brother would marry you off to?”

She nodded. “You don’t know my brother.”

“Oh, I’ve met him.” A vein pulsed at his right temple.

“You’ve…” Cressida’s blank question trailed off, and she recalled what Trudy predicted regarding the source of Benedict’s fury. “Tonight?”

“Yes,” Wakefield confirmed.

When he said nothing more on that meeting, she looked over. His hands were balled up tight, drawing her gaze to his bruised and battered knuckles.

“Oh, Benedict,” she whispered, her voice catching.

Hands shaking, she twined her fingers with his.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said tightly, his features strained.

He met Cressida’s eyes. His glittered with a sheen. “I wanted to, Cressida. I almost did.”

Her heart trembled. Inside, she shriveled with shame in thinking what that exchange between the two men had entailed. How she hated that Stanley was the brother she was—

“Cressida, look at me.” Benedict’s statement was an order, but it contained a gentleness and warmth that nearly brought her to tears.

She lifted her gaze to his.

“Your brother is a vile, wretched monster who doesn’t deserve a place on God’s earth.”

He slid his gaze over the marks Stanley had left upon her with such an infinite and aching tenderness that it brought tears to her eyes. Benedict lightly stroked the tip of his index finger ever so lightly in a feather-soft caress along the curve of her cheek.

“You are not your brother, Cressida. You are you. And it is my greatest sin that I automatically assumed you’d be working with him.”

“You didn’t know,” she said.

“Please,” he implored. “I’ve already asked you to stop trying to assuage my guilt. I have two sisters and a mother, all of whom were left either a widow, as my mother was, or my sisters, who were just about to have their come out and had no one to look after them. I was a boy at the time. I couldn’t do anything. I was helpless and hopeless to be the steady figure they needed. In that time, I discovered how powerless women truly are. And instead of reflecting on my own life experiences and understanding about this unfair world to women, I lumped you in with the baron.”

Cressida listened to him, her awe and admiration for Benedict, the Earl of Wakefield, growing. His life hadn’t been easy, not when he’d been a child. The steady presence she’d taken him for and that he was amidst Polite Society had once been a lost little boy at the mercy of the world.

Despite that, he’d risen up and become a man of honor, a man who’d observed his late father’s mistakes and the strife that had been brought to his mother and sisters and resolved to be better and do more than his father had ever done. How many other men simply followed in their father’s footsteps and continued on a trajectory of accumulating debt and overspending while they lived the grand life?

Abruptly, Benedict sat up, and she reflexively followed suit so they were seated, knees touching, and directly across from one another. Leaning over, he took her hands in his, clasped them, and drew them closer to his chest.

“Is the only reason you’re rejecting my offer because of the duke?”

Is that what he thought? she mused silently.

He thought she was rejecting him. She’d never rejected him. She had feared they couldn’t wed, given her circumstances and connections to the duke, but rejection had been furthest from her mind and nowhere near it or in it.

“Yes,” she confided, “it is.”

“I may be just an earl,” he said with a crooked smile, “but I have a good deal of power and certainly greater connections than Harrowden. He won’t be an impediment to us marrying.”

To us marrying .

Her heart skipped a dozen beats, and she was rather certain it’d never again relearn the correct tempo. He drew her hands to his mouth one at a time and kissed the tops of them.

“I’m going to handle this, Cressida. I’m going to sort this out. You needn’t worry. Do you trust me?”

“More than anything,” she answered, honesty pulling the response from her lips before the question had fully left his mouth.

With a contagious enthusiasm, Benedict jumped to his feet. Cressida made to rise, but he’d already caught Cressida by the hands and drew her to her feet in one swift, gentle motion.

“Worry not, love. I’ll have this settled and sorted out.”

And the ease with which he’d taken control over the mess that had been her life left her light and buoyant. This feeling of not having to solve her every woe proved heady. Potently intoxicating.

Benedict lingered. He stared at her mouth and his gaze darkened, passion turning his sapphire eyes nearer obsidian. He’d awakened her in every way—mind, body, soul, and spirit. As such, she understood the look of longing there and felt like desire coursing through her, heating her veins.

She leaned up and tipped her head back to take that kiss—That didn’t come.

“Rest, love. Just rest. I have the doctor coming around later this afternoon to check on you.”

And this time, the kiss that did come Benedict placed ever so gently upon her forehead. Choked with emotion, Cressida stared as he quit the room. It turned out she’d been wrong all along. Dreams did come true for women like her after all.

A fortnight later

Over the next fortnight, Cressida achieved something she hadn’t known since she’d been a small girl in Somerset—peace.

It had been so long since she’d known the simple pleasures of life—helping the staff in the kitchens, tending flowers, playing the pianoforte, embroidering. Embroidering not for the simple reason of darning socks and repairing other families’ linens for the pences it brought, but rather for the sheer sake of creating. She’d forgotten how much she loved to create the canvas of a garden landscape. Like keys on a keyboard that had never been played before into a medley, she’d created colors and images upon the palette of an empty embroidery frame.

Bent low over the hydrangea bush that was just beginning to bloom, she paused to wipe sweat from her brow and then drew her bonnet back into place to shield her face from the relentless sun. In truth, it’s not that she’d forgotten all these simple but greatest pleasures of life. It’s that she’d made herself forget because the alternative of living in the hell she’d been left with, after her father’s and mother’s passing, had made it entirely too painful to think about how life used to be. Life could be good and kind and wonderful. She knew because that’s what her world had become these past fourteen days.

A shadow fell over her, blotting the too radiant spring sun, and she didn’t so much as startle this time, already knowing who had joined her.

On cue, Benedict offered Cressida pruning shears, which she accepted. “Thank you. You, Lord Wakefield, are late.”

“Yes, my apologies,” he said effortlessly, coming down to join her in the garden as though it was the most natural thing in the world for a powerful earl to kneel in the mud and grass.

From out of the corner of her bonnet, she slipped a glance his way. As he always did when joining her, he’d already shed his jacket and wore nothing more than his long white shirtsleeves, brown trousers, and boots. His skin had since developed a golden-brown hue to match Cressida’s sun-bronzed skin.

“You may rely on the fact, my future Countess of Wakefield, that I’d far rather be spending the afternoon with you and not on the various meetings I’ve had to deal with.”

Her heart danced. His future Countess of Wakefield. They’d not yet determined the date when their nuptials would take place. Those were some of the details Benedict was seeing to. But it didn’t matter. Every day they spent here together, they felt more like a happy husband and wife than had the vows already been performed before the eyes of God and in a church. Perhaps this was why many women were so content to be mistresses. Maybe those gentlemen treated them with the loving regard that Benedict treated Cressida, even though they were not yet wed.

Having dug as much as she’d been able to clear this portion of the beds, Benedict, knowing the next part of their goal for this place, collected the axe and began chopping at the roots of a thick birch that had overtaken the garden that Cressida had cleared in his absence.

Partaking in the rest he’d given her from her morning work, she sat with her legs stretched out and watched him while he made quick masterful work of the large roots. He paused periodically and sank on his haunches, using all his strength to pull at the gnarled pieces. Every now and then, he’d pause to wiggle the branch back and forth before then taking the axe to the root. He continued to work in that way, the two of them silent.

They weren’t always silent. They’d spent so much time here talking about their pasts, their favorite times of year, the seasons, everything down to their favorite desserts and least favorite foods. But with all the moments they’d filled with their chatter, they’d also found they were just as comfortable with the quiet too. There wasn’t a discomfort or need to fill a void. There wasn’t a void.

Benedict finished up his latest task here in the gardens and tossed his axe aside. The moment he sat down to join her, Cressida scrambled over several feet. She carefully withdrew the glass carafe of water and two glasses she’d packed early in the morn, after she’d seen to the baking. After providing him with a drink, she fetched a Cornish saffron bun. In their time together, she’d learned that, unlike most of England, he wasn’t keen on ices. Interestingly, he could do without fish as an entree and far preferred venison and beef, and she had learned that he’d never, before her, had a Cornish saffron bun, but he favored them greatly.

Even as he took a bite, he closed his eyes and groaned. “Bloody hell,” he said around the mouthful of pastry. “This is your best yet,” he said, his words slightly jumbled as he spoke around a sizable mouthful.

Her lips twitched.

“You say that about everything I cook or bake.”

He opened his eyes. “Because it’s all bloody delicious, Cressida.”

He gave her a wink, that slight sensuous flutter of his golden lashes did the strange things it always did to her heart. Benedict took a long sip of his drink. He didn’t finish it, but instead he handed his over for Cressida to share. She took it and sipped, even though her own glass sat beside them. That was another thing they did. They’d come to share items almost intuitively, offering what they had to the other person.

After they had sipped and snacked, they sat back. A quiet breeze wafted around them, stirring the air and providing a gentle but welcome sough left by the heat of the sun and their hard work. Benedict drew his knees to his chest and looped his arms around the long muscular limbs.

“We can’t stay here, Cressida.” He grimaced. “You can’t stay here, and I certainly am not going to stay here if you’re not here.”

Her heart stilled. “What do you mean?”

Benedict bestowed a gentle look upon her.

“Cressida, this is where I keep…” He paused and grimaced. “This is where I was to keep my mistresses. You are going to be my wife. You are my betrothed. You do not belong here. You cannot be here.”

She knew as much. As it was, with the way he cared for his reputation and honor, it would have been a great struggle for him to come and meet her here and keep her here, when only questions and scandal would ensue. Granted his staff were as loyal to Cressida as they would have been to the king himself, but eventually someone would find out.

“Mind you,” he said gently, scooching over to join her so their shoulders touched. “This is a good thing, you know. Right?”

She managed to nod. “I know.”

She knew and yet, at the same time, she did not. She knew no such thing. Here, she and Benedict existed on the fringe of the world in a universe that included only the two of them. The minute she became officially betrothed to him and they became husband and wife, the whole world would suck them back in. There’d be balls and soirees and gatherings in which she’d be upon his arm, earning questioning looks as to why the most sought-after bachelor, the Earl of Wakefield, should have married beneath him to an Alby girl. They’d receive invitations to all the most coveted events of the Season, only because Benedict’s presence would be desired, and she’d come along as more of an afterthought and only because of who her husband was.

“Nothing has to change, Cressida,” he said quietly.

“Everything is going to have to change. You know that, Benedict.”

It was funny how it was possible to both love and hate that he should know her innermost thoughts.

“We can carry on as we have, just in my official holdings.”

“But I like your staff. They’ve become like my family.”

“Then we can bring them.”

Her lower lip trembled. How easily he sought to soothe her and solve whatever problems she brought to him. He’d move an entire staff to another location and find a home for them there, just so that they might be with her.

“We can spend time in the country, Cressida.”

“Yes, but your business is here. You have a seat in Parliament.”

The reality awaiting them, more specifically her, sent her careening.

“And there’ll be gossip, and there’ll be whispers, and there’ll be talk that you’ve never before encountered.”

“I assure you, Cressida,” he said lightly, “I’ve faced plenty of gossip.”

“Yes, but never because of anything you’ve done. Only because of who your father was.”

“Just as you’ve been treated unfairly and unkindly because of who your brother is. It’s really not different, Cressida,” he said, so simply she could almost believe him.

“It’s not the same, and you know it. I was born in the country. I wasn’t a lady. I’ve never been a lady. At best, I’ve been a lady by country standards.”

He touched a hand to her lips, “It’s going to be all right, Cressida. I’m not going to lie to you and say it’s going to be easy. It’s not. I understand that, and I understand the reason for your fears, but I am here. I am with you. I will stand beside you, and we will brave all of that together. And you’ll find your way. And the ton are going to see, at last, who you truly are, Cressida.”

“Who is that?” she said almost bitterly, and yet she felt far warmer by the assurances he gave and the confidence with which he spoke.

“You are a woman who is bloody fearless and courageous, and you’re capable in ways that most men are not, let alone women. You are a queen among mere mortals. You are a goddess. And do not let every person who is lesser than you, in every way, make you doubt your self-worth. Do you understand me?”

Tears filled her eyes, and Cressida nodded.

“I do,” she said, and somehow, she did. In the time they’d been together, he’d helped her to see herself and believe in herself in ways she never had, not even before her parents’ passing.

“And we aren’t going to be alone in this either, Cressida. I have friends. Powerful ones. I have family, good, kind family—my sisters, their husbands, and their children. They will all stand beside us.”

“Us,” she murmured softly to herself.

“Yes, that’s right. Us. You’re not alone anymore. You have me. We have each other.”

They had each other. Just like that, all the fear dissipated. All the dread and horror about what was to come next vanished. And as they settled in to work in the gardens, Cressida found a peace like none other.