The Austen Playbook (London Celebrities #4)(41)

After a few seconds of fidgeting, nosiness won out over her conscience, and Freddy picked up another of the letters. This was one that Violet had written to Billy. Halfway down the page, she set the rest aside and felt for the small child-size chair nearby. It was built for baby backsides, but she perched gingerly, her fingers touching the ink as she read.

And as she read, the walls of the room seemed to shrink in around her.

When she reached the final words, she sat holding it. Then she reached for the next letter and started scanning through the sentences, her frown and an odd, buzzing sensation inside her growing. Pulling her phone from her bag, she found the website for her local library and searched through the catalogue until she found the classic texts in the e-docs section. She filtered to drama, and scrolled to the C section.

She opened the script for The Velvet Room.

“What’s the matter?” There was a rough undertone in Griff’s voice, and a hint of concern in his eyes, when she lifted her head some time later, jerked out of someone else’s past. He had cast aside the letter he’d been reading, and was back to going through dry-looking files.

“What?”

“You’ve been in a daze for almost twenty minutes. What, are they rife with the Wythburn Group’s so-called deviancy?”

“No.” Freddy looked at him silently. Their recent conversation was repeating in her head like a faulty audio file. She hesitated, then, carefully, she refolded the letter she was holding and returned it to the pile. “They’re beautiful.”

She pushed up from the chair and came back to his side, running the stack of letters through her fingers. “There was obviously a long separation, and then they met again, and they wrote to each other for months. They wrote beautiful things.”

Slowly, she handed them to him. “She must have been a remarkable person. To have inspired that. And everyone seems to have written her off as a nonentity.”

Griff’s eyes had narrowed. “That look isn’t because you’ve gone sentimental over someone else’s love letters.”

She rallied enough to retort, “Some of us do find other people’s stories genuinely affecting. Isn’t that fortunate for you, Mr. Filmmaker.”

“Freddy.”

“He’s Robert.”

“What?”

Freddy nodded down at the letters in his hand. “Violet’s Billy. He’s Robert. In The Velvet Room. Billy’s life, his family, the things he says in these letters. They’ve been ripped apart and laid bare in the play. And the romantic plotline in the script between Robert and Anna—it’s Billy’s relationship with Violet. From what’s been written and the bits and pieces people have said, I don’t think the replication is quite as explicit as the characterisation of Robert, but Anna is Violet.”

Griff didn’t question her judgment. He gave a silent whistle—and she didn’t miss the gleam that appeared in his eyes. Mr. Filmmaker coming swiftly to the surface. A new angle to play out onscreen, and one potentially rife with human interest possibilities. “Wanda wasn’t wrong, then. Henrietta wasn’t shy about making use of other people’s secrets.”

“No. I guess not,” Freddy said, and Griff suddenly put down the letters and cupped her cheeks in his palms, stroking his thumbs over the delicate skin beneath her troubled eyes.

“Freddy. Whatever you discover about Henrietta, whatever your father’s actions, whatever anyone else does, it doesn’t have any reflection on you. And it doesn’t have to have any effect on you unless you let it.”

She placed her hands over his, tracing circles on the bones of his knuckles and down to his wrists. The light scattering of hairs there were pleasantly silky, a sensual prickle that she felt in her spine as well as her fingertips. Her touch was as gentle as his, but her words were serious. “That’s not how life works, though. Is it? The decisions you make always affect other people. And if it’s people you care about—”

A small crease carved out between his brows. He ran his thumb over the curve of her own eyebrow, but whatever he was going to say was lost when the door opened and the butler, whom nobody had bothered to introduce yet, cleared his throat. “I did knock,” the man said, with heavy, ponderous disapproval. “I was unaware that you were...consorting.”

Under his minatory gaze, Freddy felt as if they’d been caught with her bra unhooked and Griff’s trousers around his ankles. She was uncharacteristically embarrassed.

She was yet to see Griff properly fazed by anything, but he’d recognised her discomfort. A new hardness came into the long lines of his body, and Freddy dropped her hands to rest on his chest, pressing there lightly to try to ward off the impending ice-blast.

“A small demonstration of how you handle people’s bullshit in a tactful way,” she suggested, turning her head away from their critical audience to murmur, and Griff’s arm went around her waist.

His hand moved, warm on her back. “For future reference, are you in the habit of remembering everything a person says and using it against them?”

Even in the slightly dazed cloud she was in, even with his frequently irascible remarks, and the looming upsets on the horizon, he had become this little thread of constant light to fix upon. Freddy looked up at him through her lashes. “I never said we didn’t have anything in common.”