“You should want something from me. And I wish to God I could give it to you.”

“Go home, West,” she said. “This can never happen again.”

She left the room.

He wished he was a different person, a better man. And that he was free to marry whom he chose instead of needing to marry for money, for his sisters’ honor and their position in society.

If he were free . . . but he wasn’t. And he couldn’t act like he was.

Chapter Twenty-Three

“This book feels different to me, almost as if it was written by a different person,” mused Isobel the next afternoon.

Viola and her friends were gathered at their clubhouse to discuss Daphne Villeneuve’s The Dastardly Duke’s Secrets, the final book in a Gothic romance trilogy which they’d all been waiting impatiently for.

Viola was glad to leave the house for a few hours to sort through the complicated emotions crowding her mind. There was no safer and more welcoming place to be than a book club meeting with her friends.

“The Mad Marquess’s Secret and The Wicked Earl’s Wishes were excellent, of course, but this one . . . it’s almost as if the author knows me,” Della gushed. “Oh, Daphne, I do wish you would reveal your identity to the world so that we could invite you here to give a lecture.”

“I want to ask her why Vespera was so stupid as to barter herself to that dastardly duke,” Isobel said. “I don’t find it plausible. She’s otherwise sensible, but when he appears, she turns into a blithering ninny.”

Viola could tell her friend a thing or two about that.

“This one was rather more . . . sensual than the other two,” said their shy and bookish friend Lady Philippa Bramble. “Like a kettle boiling over and filling a room with steam. I had to fan myself as I was reading.”

“And my spectacles fogged up because I was breathing rather rapidly,” said Lady Beatrice Wright. “Ford asked me if I was feeling quite well. I’ll give it to him to read next. That scene with the candle wax . . . I had no idea.”

“I know. And that scene where the duke was taking a swim in the lake and then he emerged wearing that soaking white shirt that didn’t hide anything,” breathed Della.

Viola tried to follow the conversation, but her mind kept wandering back to her own recent steamy encounter. Which was probably far steamier than anything that had occurred in the book.

The things West had done. Her wanton response. And then the sensual spell had been broken and she’d crashed back into the real world where they could never truly be together.

“You’re very quiet, Viola,” Beatrice remarked. “It’s not like you.”

“I’ve been so preoccupied of late with my pupils, my father, and the Christmas carol I’m composing.”

“And with a certain duke?” teased Della.