“I ask questions.”
“Do you.”
He noted she had raised her eyebrows back at him but had kept her tone flat, not rising in pitch onyou.
“Yes, I do. Here’s one. What has made you come to tell me you’re Puddlewick? Something must have happened since yesterday.”
Something besides the kiss they had shared, the kiss that had allowed no room for spoken confessions, only carnal ones. That all-encompassing kiss that had not even begun to be enough.
Even though he had decided it had to be enough. And he thought she had decided that, too.
Her shoulders drooped, and her arms fell to her side. “I need some money.”
He had been right to guess her telling him she was Puddlewick had nothing to do with the kiss, nothing to do with him. He was right, and he was disgruntled by his rightness.
She went on, “I found out this morning I need some money to live. My brother’s getting married.”
What had she said in the churchyard about women? Yes. Her brother was trading one unpaid keeper for another.
She glared at him. “You think I’m lying.”
“No. I am very familiar with the concept of needing money to live.” But when he’d been poor, Henry had had no stories to sell, only his title.
“I meant about being Puddlewick,” she said.
“It never occurred to me that a woman might have written Tommy Treadwell. He’s a very convincing boy.”
“Yes, he is.”
A silence. Henry could hear the jingle of the harnesses behind him as the horses moved a little. She crossed her arms, and now they were mirrors of each other.
He uncrossed his arms. “All right. How did you come to write such a convincing boy, Miss Beasley?”
“Brothers. Five of them who all knew the only way to get a story was to stop hitting each other and get into their beds.”
He tilted his head. “What did Tommy find buried under the oak tree?”
“Three golden acorns. Ask a hard one.”
“What’s the last sentence of Chapter Five inFurther Adventures?”
She looked stricken. “I don’t know.”
He had set her an unfair test. Henry knew the answer—Then Tommy and the faeries built a bonfire and danced around it all night long—but the book must have been written a quarter of a century ago, and Miss Beasley had not read it twice a week for the last year as Henry had.
“In terms of payment, I know nothing about an author’s fees.”
“Hodge got ten pounds for the first book, and Jory got eighty for the second,” she said quickly.
“I see.” A downy piece of something floated between them, and Henry snagged it between his fingers. “Much more for the second. A seventy pound increase.”
“Jory was very good at bargaining. And he heard tell the first was well-liked.”
“I see. Well. One hundred and fifty pounds for the third book seems reasonable to me.”
It was a wildly extravagant present for a five-year-old child, but he had been thinking about getting Mina a pony and that could cost even more, depending on the breeding. And Mina would much prefer a Tommy Treadwell book to a pony. And a hundred and fifty pounds was a respectable amount for a woman with humble tastes to live on for two or three years.
Miss Beasley’s eyes darted to the side. He could almost see the pen scribbling in her head, totting up numbers.
