Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 650(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
“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?”