Her father’s raised voice and implied accusation had Viola darting a look toward the window. It was eerily silent outside. Had the gardeners gone off to lunch? Or were they now listening?
Her lungs tightened.
“What else am I to do, Papa?” She tried to speak quietly, but her words emerged high and strangled, growing louder as she spoke. “I have tried to write this ridiculous story, but the words simply won’t come. I have realized that I can only write about the true woes of our society. To expose the wretched conditions of the working class that many, like Kendall, would prefer to ignore. I want to be remembered as a woman who braved criticism and censorship, not one who hid behind moralizing platitud—”
Tap, tap, tap.
The sound of someone rapping on the glass behind Viola sent her leaping from her seat, her heart a frantic rabbit in her chest.
She whirled and met the gaze of the Duke of Kendall standing outside the open window. As usual, His Grace appeared immaculately turned out in a top hat and green coat.
“Good afternoon. Dr. Brodure. Miss Brodure.” The duke tipped his hat as calmly as if encountering them upon a street in Mayfair.
“Your Grace!” Dr. Brodure moved past Viola, face wreathed in a nervously welcoming smile. “How kind of you to call upon us. Please, do come in!”
As if that were all the coaxing he needed, His Grace removed his top hat, folded his tall body, and stepped through the open window into the parlor.
Viola took an involuntary step back. Her father kept a strained smile on his face. Clearly, neither of them had expected Kendall to just pop through the window, though it was certainly large enough to be a makeshift door.
She didn’t think she had ever encountered Kendall in such a small space. His broad shoulders and humorless eyes desaturated the room, rendering the space as leaden as his gray hair.
More to the point—
How long had the duke been standing at the open window?!
Viola’s rabbity heart thumped and lurched.
“To what do we owe the pleasure of your company, Your Grace?” Dr. Brodure motioned for the duke to be seated.
Kendall ignored him, preferring instead to spin in a slow circle, surveying the room—the cold hearth, the stag horns, Viola’s writing desk to the right of the window. With two measured steps of his long legs, he crossed to the desk and surveyed her open notebook.
Herblanknotebook.
“Pray tell me, Miss Brodure . . .” Kendall began, words falling in a measured cadence. He tapped the notebook with the tip of one gloved finger. “Tell me about these moralizing tales you now refuse to write.”
The duke fixed Viola with his dark gaze. The tense set of his eyes and the tick in his clenched jaw told her all she needed to know—he had overhead much, if not all, of her conversation with her father.
Oh.
Her hands starting shaking in time with her frenzied heartbeat.
“Uhmmm,” her father whirled on her, expression frantic.
“Do not bother lying,” Kendall continued, voice like a winter wind and just as breath-stealing.
He waved a hand toward the window, indicating that he had heard all while standing there. Anyone else would feel chagrined at eavesdropping on a private conversation, but not a duke.
Kendall merely considered it his right.
“Miss Brodure,” he continued, “it appears that you do not wish to proceed with our plan. That you have not, in fact, been working on the story I requested of you. The one youagreedto produce.”
Viola placed a shaking palm atop the wingback chair to her right.
Her breath felt caught in a giant’s vise, her father’s worry and her own agitation constricting her lungs. But this confrontation had been too long in coming. She swallowed, forcing herself to take slow measured breaths.
“You heard c-correctly, Your Grace,” she said, cursing her stammering tongue. “I cannot do it. The words are f-frozen inside me. I need to write stories that f-focus more fully on societal ills. Stories that m-may not—”deep breath“—that may not conform with your ideals.”
There.
