Chapter 5
Chapter Five
“Good morning.” Theodore’s greeting emerged more curtly than he’d intended, the syllables clipped and defensive.
He didn’t rise when Lady Cressida entered the breakfast room, though every instinct screamed at him to do so. Instead, he remained rigidly seated, his fingers wrapped around a coffee cup that had long since gone cold.
She paused in the doorway, and he made the mistake of looking up.
The dress—that damned dress—clung to her curves with the same indecent accuracy as yesterday’s gown, the morning light from the windows rendering the fabric nearly translucent in places.
The bodice strained across her breasts with each breath, and the way it hugged her hips as she moved toward the table sent heat coursing through him that had nothing to do with the fire crackling in the grate.
He forced his gaze back to his plate.
“Good morning, Your Grace.” Her voice carried a thread of uncertainty that hadn’t been there last night when she’d stood in his study, bold and defiant and utterly maddening.
Theodore gestured toward the chair beside him—not across, never across, though he couldn’t have explained why proximity felt necessary even as it tortured him. “Have a seat.”
She settled into the chair with careful grace, and he caught the scent of lavender soap. Mrs. Agnes must have provided it.
The knowledge that Cressida had bathed in his castle, in water heated by his servants, dipping her bare body into—
He cut the thought off savagely.
A footman appeared with fresh coffee and disappeared like smoke. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the continued assault of rain against the windows and the occasional rumble of thunder that suggested the storm had no intention of abating.
“The weather remains disagreeable,” Cressida ventured, reaching for a piece of toast.
“Indeed.” Theodore kept his responses minimal, a strategy that had served him well in countless social situations.
Brief. Impersonal. Safe.
“I suppose this means I’ll impose upon your hospitality for another day.” She buttered her toast with precise movements, not meeting his eyes.
“It would seem so.” He paused, then added with more gentleness than he’d intended, “I should send word to your family. They’ll be concerned about your absence.”
Cressida’s laugh was sharp enough to cut glass. “More about how my absence will harm them. Not about my safety.”
Theodore looked up sharply, caught off guard by the bitterness in her voice.
She set down her knife, staring at her plate. “I shame them by my speech. My appearance. My unsuitability. So long as I am quietly elsewhere, they are not concerned.”
The resignation mixed with hurt in her voice, so deeply buried she probably didn’t realize it showed, made Theodore’s chest tighten.
He started to ask what she meant, the question forming on his lips, but then he saw the expression on her face.
It was the same look she’d worn when she’d spoken of her friend yesterday, before defiance had risen to mask it.
He swallowed the question.
“The storm should pass by tomorrow,” he said instead, retreating to safer ground.
Thunder cracked overhead, so close it rattled the windows.
“I would hope so,” she replied, looking out the window.
Theodore stood abruptly, his chair scraping across stone. The sudden movement made Cressida flinch, and he hated himself for it.
“More coffee, Your Grace?” A footman had materialized at his elbow.
“No.” The word came out harsher than Theodore had intended. “Leave us.”
The servant vanished, and Theodore forced himself to sit back down, to regain the composure that had abandoned him thanks to this morning’s torture of watching her eat breakfast in that damned dress.
Cressida was looking at him with something that might have been concern. “Your Grace—”
“The castle is extensive,” he interrupted, desperate to redirect the conversation away from storms and dramatic changes. “If you wish to explore, I could… that is, you shouldn’t wander alone. You might lose your way again.”
She blinked at the abrupt shift. “Are you offering to give me a tour?”
“If you’re going to roam my home at will, you might as well do so with a guide.” He stood again, this time with more control. “Unless you’d prefer to remain here?”
“No.” She rose quickly, smoothing her skirts in a gesture he suspected was a nervous habit. “A tour would be… a good idea. Thank you.”
A good idea. As though spending more time in her company wouldn’t be exquisite torture.
The castle’s corridors stretched before them, shadows and light playing across ancient stone.
Theodore kept a careful distance between them as they walked, though he remained acutely aware of her presence beside him: the rustle of her skirts, the soft sound of her breathing, the occasional brush of fabric against his arm when she leaned closer to examine something.
“This wing was built in the fourteenth century,” he offered, gesturing toward the vaulted ceiling. “The architecture is—”
“Norman,” Cressida finished, tilting her head back to study the stonework. “You can tell by the rounded arches. Though there’s been modification since, hasn’t there? Those windows are much newer.”
Theodore found himself staring at her. “You’re familiar with architectural history?”
“I read.” She said it simply, as though everyone spent their time studying medieval building techniques. “Your library must be extensive, given your interest in such things.”
“It was my father’s library.” The correction came automatically. “I merely… inherited it.”
“But you use it.” Her gaze was too perceptive. “Those books in your study show signs of frequent reading. Wordsworth, particularly.”
He’d forgotten she’d been browsing his shelves last night before he’d found her. And he didn’t care to discuss Wordsworth.
“This way.” Theodore turned down another corridor, putting distance between himself and that memory.
They passed through a gallery lined with portraits, generations of Yeats ancestors staring down with varying degrees of severity. Cressida paused before each one, studying faces and frames with genuine interest.
“Your family has quite a distinguished lineage,” she observed.
“Distinguished is one word for it.” Theodore kept his tone neutral, though something bitter crept in regardless.
She glanced at him sharply. “What word would you use?”
“Complicated.” He moved past the portraits without looking at them. “All families are, I suppose.”
“Some more than others.” There was understanding in her voice that made him uncomfortable. “My own family is… complicated.”
He thought of her comment at breakfast, that her parents likely hadn’t noticed her absence, and wondered what precisely “complicated” meant in her home. But before he could formulate a question that wouldn’t seem intrusive, they’d reached another portrait gallery.
Rain-gray light filtered through tall windows, illuminating dozens of paintings. Landscapes mostly, though there were several portraits interspersed among them. Cressida drifted toward a particularly fine rendering of the moors in autumn, her expression softening.
“This is beautiful,” she breathed. “Look at how the artist captured the heather. The color is perfect… that shade between purple and pink that only exists for a few weeks each year.”
Theodore found himself watching her instead of the painting, taking in the way her face transformed when she looked at something that moved her. No artifice, no careful social mask. Just genuine appreciation.
“You admire art,” he observed.
“I admire beauty.” She moved to the next painting, a seascape wild with storm waves. “My grandmother—Lady Norwell—used to take me to exhibitions when I was younger. Before…” she trailed off, then seemed to catch herself. “Well, before ‘complicated’ became very complicated.”
There was a story there, Theodore could sense it. Something that had shifted her life from exhibition visits with an indulgent grandmother to whatever ‘complicated’ meant.
He wanted to know it, wanted to understand what had dimmed the light in her eyes. But before he could ask, Cressida had moved to the far end of the gallery, where a portrait hung behind a heavy velvet curtain.
“What’s this one?” She reached toward the fabric.
“Don’t.” The command came out sharper than he’d intended, and he crossed the space between them in three long strides, catching her wrist before she could draw the curtain back.
She looked up at him, startled. “I was only—”
“It’s none of your concern.” He released her hand as though it burned him, stepping back. “That portrait is private.”
“Private.” She repeated the word slowly, studying his face. “You keep it in a gallery but hide it behind a curtain. That seems rather contradictory, Your Grace.”
“Everyone has something to hide, Lady Cressida.” He met her gaze steadily, refusing to flinch from whatever she saw there. “The difference is that some of us are simply more practiced at it.”
Her expression shifted. “Is that what you think? That I’m hiding something?”
“Aren’t you?” He couldn’t hold back the question.
She stopped abruptly, her eyes lowering.
A mistake. Without her vivid gaze to distract him, his attention shifted inexorably to her smooth skin, to the curves pressing against the restraints of her gown.
The air between them grew charged, electric. Theodore felt it in his bones, that same pull that always manifested around her. They were standing too close again.
Then, her face tilted up toward his, her lips slightly parted.
He could kiss her. Should kiss her, perhaps. She wanted him to; he could see it in the dilation of her pupils, the rapid flutter of her pulse at her throat.
But this woman had traveled across the country to stop her friend’s wedding. Had been willing to cause a public scandal, to ruin herself, all because she believed she knew better than everyone else what was right.
She was reckless and impulsive and everything he’d spent seventeen years learning not to be.
“I need to attend to estate matters.” The words came out wooden. “I’m sure you can find your way back to your chambers from here.”
Hurt flashed across her face before she could mask it. “Of course, Your Grace. Forgive me for taking up so much of your valuable time.”
“Lady Cressida—”
But she’d already turned away, spine straight and shoulders set with the kind of dignity that came from long practice at hiding wounds.
Theodore watched her go, his hands clenched at his sides, and hated himself for the relief that coursed through him, even as something that felt dangerously like regret twisted in his chest.
He’d done the right thing. The safe thing.
So why did it feel like he’d just made a terrible mistake?
Thunder rumbled overhead, and he turned back to face the curtained portrait, Charles’s hidden face seeming to mock him from behind the velvet.
You’re becoming just like him, a voice whispered in his mind.
But Theodore decided that he could not waste his time dwelling on useless things, so he forced himself to walk away before he could do something foolish.