Chapter 3 The Duke #2
“Be that as it is, my Lord Duke,” I stated.
“That is the book. That’s the outline I sent to my publishers.
That’s the contract I signed for a manuscript I received an advance to write for them.
And the advance was received. I have a deadline about six months from now I’m obligated to meet.
And they, too, aren’t overly thrilled with your demand to have approval of the copy. ”
“Then perhaps you should have finalized arrangements with me before you entered into those obligations with your publisher.”
Was he for real?
“Are you truly not going to allow me access to your records if you don’t have final approval of the book?” I asked.
“As my solicitors have asserted in my stead the last two months of negotiations, Ms. Dupree, allow me to communicate it directly to you. No. I am not going to allow you access to our records unless I have final approval of your manuscript.”
Well.
Shit.
I stood, and I did it angrier than I ever thought I’d been in all my life.
One could say I had a temper, but if that one knew me, they’d also say it was rare it reared its unpleasant head because I was usually pretty chill.
Now, I was not.
I was also freaked, because no way could I grant approval, and I had to write this book.
But who knew what his approval could mean.
He could scrap the whole manuscript I spent six months writing.
He could decide he’s suddenly a content editor and redline the hell out of it with suggestions of what he’d like to see that had nothing to do with the story that burst forth from me, or nothing to do with bona fide content editing.
Or he could see I was telling no lies and have no notes at all.
This could be a minor inconvenience.
Or it could be a nightmare.
What I knew for certain was that I was in a different kind of nightmare.
I’d sold a book I couldn’t write. Of course, I could, but it wouldn’t be as thoroughly researched as it needed to be.
I was (mostly) living off my advance.
So yeah, oh yeah, I was definitely living a nightmare, because this man was being a stubborn ass.
And it ticked me off.
He stood when I did.
And as I tipped my head back to catch his gaze, I declared, “Well, I guess that’s that.”
He cocked his head to the side. “I’m sorry?”
“I guess I’m not writing the book.”
He righted his head but said nothing.
“I’ll have dinner tonight with you all so I can spend more time with Prudence,” I went on. “Then I’ll get out of your hair tomorrow.”
Though I had no idea where I’d go, but it seemed I had no choice but to go.
I was about to walk out of the room when he spoke.
“You threatening to leave, take yourself from Prudence, truncate this visit she’s been looking forward to for months, is not going to get me to agree to your terms.”
Of all the…
“That’s not what I’m doing,” I denied hotly.
“As my grandmother always said, fish and guests stink after three days, Your Grace. If I had my nose stuck in journals and letters for two weeks, and you all rarely saw me, that’s one thing.
But now I have to figure my shit out, and I have no reason to be here, so I’ll be doing that elsewhere. ”
“And what will Prudence do?”
“I have a six-month lease on a cottage about an hour away.” That lease started in two weeks, but he didn’t need to know that. “If I have breaks from writing whatever I’m going to need to talk my publishers into wanting to publish, she and I can take some day jaunts.”
His attractive chin jerked into his corded-with-muscle neck, and he said, “Day jaunts?” like I suggested Prudence and I fly to Australia to have lunch on a cruise of Sydney Harbor and then fly back.
“Day jaunts,” I reiterated.
“Except to go to the village, Prue hasn’t left this estate in six years.”
I blinked.
And then I said, “But just at tea, she said we had to go to Glastonbury.”
Suddenly, it looked like he was seeing me.
Of course, it wasn’t as if he didn’t know I was in the same room for the last however long we’d been in the same room.
But now, for some reason, he was seeing me.
“She hasn’t left The Downs or the village in six years?” I asked softly.
“I take it in your online friendship, she didn’t share that with you,” he replied.
Perhaps we were getting somewhere, and his mention of “your online friendship” was what made me wonder if he thought I was some kind of reprobate, using a relationship I formed with Prudence to get through the front door so I could steal the family silver.
“No, she didn’t share that,” I informed him. “Is she…” I looked to the door and again to him. “Is she okay?”
“As years passed, Prue’s world narrowed. I don’t fully understand it. Tempie doesn’t. Nor does Chastity. It’s concerned us, she only felt safe in this house and its surroundings. Both my sisters talked to her. It makes Prue uncomfortable. So they stopped talking to her.”
“And have you talked to her?” I asked.
“I don’t need to talk to her.”
Okay.
I was getting mad again.
It wasn’t my business, but Prudence was a friend. If that friendship formed online or not, she was still my friend, and if she was dealing with something so huge she’d made herself a kind of hermit, well…
“Why not?” I demanded.
“Because Prue has always been what many consider odd.”
Oh dear.
I was getting madder.
“She’s always had her head in the clouds,” he continued.
“She’s clumsy. She gets distracted easily.
She enjoys reading far too much, drawing even more, she lives in imaginary worlds most of the time, and she has far too many pets.
If I allowed it, the place would be crawling with animals. As it is, she has six cats.”
Six?
Normally, that was a lot.
In a house with more than a hundred rooms that sat on more than five hundred acres, not so much.
I hoped I got to meet them before I left.
“As such, she was bullied at school,” Battle carried on, making my heart squeeze. “Brutally,” he added, making that squeeze tighten. “Our father thought it best not to intervene. He believed it would toughen her up. And therefore, it never stopped. As such, it went on for years.”
Again, with the getting madder, just this time, not at him.
“But instead, it made the interesting girl, the one who wasn’t like all the other girls, she was better, precisely because she wasn’t like all the other girls, feel weird, wrong,” I deduced, and I kept on deducing.
“And to protect herself from a world that doesn’t understand her, she’s allowed her world to become one that does. This house and the village.”
He jutted his chin. “Precisely.”
“Has she seen a therapist?”
“And how, exactly, do we tell our sister we think she needs a therapist when we don’t want her to feel she’s strange, or worse, feel we think she is, when we don’t, but she’ll take it that way?” he retorted.
He had a point.
Slowly, I looked to the door again, my heart still hurting for Prudence, though, on the flipside, much of her behavior was now explained.
I went back to him when he ordered, “Stay the two weeks.”
“Without the book to work on, I’m not sure I’d be comfortable doing that. Although you might not feel my friendship with Prudence is real, it is. However, we still just met, and I don’t know any of the rest of you at all.”
“Then please explain further why you would take such a drastic step to scuttle this book you so wish to write when I’m simply asking to protect my family’s reputation.”
“I would think that’s obvious.”
“Since I’ve been clear it’s not, humor me.”
Okay, was it just me?
Or was this guy an arrogant ass?
“Because I can’t spend six months on a book you scupper within weeks of deadline,” I explained.
“You have an editor, yes?”
“Of course.”
“And you make changes he suggests.”
“She suggests, sure. But not all of them. Though I take them into account.”
“Is this not the same thing I’m requesting, however, likely with a much lighter hand?”
“I don’t know,” I returned. “Can you promise you’ll have a light hand?”
His natural purr was a scoff when he replied, “I don’t want to write the book for you, Ms. Dupree.”
“And I’m afraid you’re asking me to give you permission to do a version of that by giving you the power to decide if it’ll be published or not.
By giving you the power to stamp it approved or denied after I’ve finished it.
I don’t know you. Maybe you have a creative outlet.
If you don’t, then allow me to educate you, just writing it knowing what might happen at the end will impede my creativity.
Every writer has a different process. For me, my characters exist, not just the historical ones, the fictional ones too.
The story is already there, real, even if the fictional part exists in my imagination.
My part is to breathe life into the characters and their story.
If I’m not free to breathe, how am I going to tell the story? ”
“Perhaps we could come to a compromise?” he suggested.
“And that would be?” I asked warily.
“You share each chapter after it’s written.
I’ll read it, and if something is concerning me, we’ll discuss it immediately in order that you don’t move forward worrying about what might befall the final manuscript.
I would assume, after a few chapters, we would be on the same page and this process would become routine.
Obviously, I’d want a final read through, but that should be no issue if you don’t change anything or add anything in between. ”
I’d never done anything like this.
So could I do this?
To buy time to make a decision, I asked, “Would you want some kind of acknowledgement or something?”
“Hell no,” he answered so forcefully, I was now pissed that he clearly didn’t want anyone to know he’d had any part of one of my babies.
“Well, I wouldn’t wish to insult you by giving the reading world an indication you had anything to do with one of my books,” I said snottily.
“Again, I’m not writing your book for you, Ms. Dupree. I don’t need an acknowledgement.”