Who Wants to Marry a Duke - Sabrina Jeffries Page 0,84

to believe that this handsome fellow, with his rumpled hair and well-muscled body, would soon be hers.

And what were all these papers strewn across his desk? They didn’t look like business letters or contracts or whatever other kind of work she’d assumed he was performing. With a furtive glance at Thorn to make sure he wasn’t awake, she picked a page up and stared at it.

It was written in the form of a play. One of the characters was named Felix. How odd. She picked up other pages and read them. This was definitely one of the Juncker plays . . . but not one she recognized. She’d seen—and read—them all, and this one wasn’t familiar to her.

Perhaps Thorn was reading Mr. Juncker’s latest manuscript to give the man a critique of sorts. Writers did that sometimes, didn’t they?

She carefully scanned through the pages on the desk, but she couldn’t find a single one with markings in a different handwriting. And she knew Thorn too well to think he wouldn’t have marked up Mr. Juncker’s manuscript. He would have taken a fiendish delight in correcting his friend’s mistakes.

Could Mr. Juncker have given Thorn the play as a gift, sort of like a poet offering a friend the first copy of his poem that hadn’t yet been published? If he had, it would have only been to mock Thorn for being jealous of him. While that fit with what she’d observed of their relationship, she couldn’t imagine Thorn reading Mr. Juncker’s latest play and referring to it as work he had to do.

A thought crept into her mind that was too awful to comprehend. Thorn had grown up in Germany just as Felix had. Mr. Juncker’s style of speech had been more poetic and flamboyant than the crisp wit of the dialogue in “his” plays.

Dear heaven, what if Konrad Juncker had merely given his name to Thorn’s plays? It would explain why Thorn was so grouchy around him. It would explain Thorn’s seeming jealousy. He wasn’t jealous of Mr. Juncker’s success—he was annoyed he couldn’t acknowledge his part in that success.

But why wouldn’t he at least tell her? It made no sense. If he was the true author of the plays, she would think he’d confess it if only to make her stop going on and on about Mr. Juncker’s brilliance.

She leaned over the desk to note the quill still in Thorn’s hand, and the words at the end of it on the paper in a sentence only half written. That Thorn had been writing when he fell asleep. He was the author. He had to be.

He’d created the wonderful characters that so delighted her. Felix was surely based on him. Lady Grasping—who might she be? Not to mention the amusing Lady Slyboots, with all her attempts to snag a husband . . .

Her gasp of horror awakened Thorn.

Her. Slyboots was supposed to be her. And Grasping was Mama. They were the basis of the characters all of London laughed at and mocked. That’s why he hadn’t told her he was the author.

“Olivia?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. Then he saw what she’d been looking at, and said, in a lower, guiltier voice, “Olivia . . . it’s not what you think.”

“You mean, you aren’t writing plays under your friend Juncker’s name?”

He blinked. “Well, that is . . . what I’m doing, but I never meant . . . it wasn’t . . .”

Slyboots. He thought of her as some deceitful woman like Slyboots, always scheming for a husband. Oh, Lord! That was how he saw her? With a broken cry, she turned on her heel and headed for the door.

“No, no, no, no . . .” he chanted as he jumped up and came around the desk. “Damn it, Olivia—”

“Call me Slyboots. That’s who you think I am, isn’t it?” He caught up to her and grabbed her by the arm. “You’re not Slyboots, I swear.” When she shot him an arch look, he added, “Not anymore. You might have been at the beginning, but only because I was angry at what had happened, and I . . . I wanted to feel . . .”

“Powerful,” she snapped. “In control. The almighty Duke of Thornstock surveying his domain as people curtsy and bow to him. Instead of the young man just landed in London whom people might mock for his odd sayings or awkward behaviors.”

“Yes! You do understand.”

She shook her head. “I understand you decided to take your anger out