And there was their paltry supply of small talk exhausted. Kilmuir shifted on his feet and looked suddenly uncomfortable. In fact, he looked like a man with something on his mind.
“In Italy,” he began and let the words drift on the wind.
Juliet felt a flush begin in the center of her chest, heating her up by slow degrees. She didn’t want to talk about Italy. Especially not with this man. Yet she found herself asking, “What about Italy?”
“In the olive grove,” he began again. “Did I do something to cause you offense?”
Juliet pasted a false smile onto her mouth. “Of course not. You’ve always been most courteous.”
His head remained slightly cocked to the side. He wasn’t satisfied with that answer.
And why should he be? She was almost as terrible an actress as he was an actor, and she had no talent for false smiles.
She reached for her boots and hastily pulled them onto her feet. The stockings could wait until she arrived back at Dalhousie Manor. She grabbed her canvas bag, deciding now would be a good time to make her exit.
She gave Kilmuir a polite nod of farewell—her manners hadn’t entirely deserted her—and pivoted on her heel. Clootie galloped to her side, demanding her own proper farewell as she placed her head beneath Juliet’s hand. She stroked silky gray-and-white ears and muttered, “That’s a good girl. Now you return to your master.”
“Miss Windermere?” she heard at her back.
She’d ventured deep enough into the woods that she felt she could reasonably ignore Kilmuir. But curiosity, as usual, got the better of her, and she turned. “Yes?”
Kilmuir was holding a journal open in his hands, giving its contents a once-over. He glanced up, his eyebrows knitted together in mild bafflement. “Did you leave this?”
A thin ribbon of anxiety fluttered through her. Kilmuir was reading her words. “I did.”
“Whose is it?”
“Mine.”
A little frown turned down the corners of his mouth. “Yours?”
“It belongs to me.”
“But—”
His eyes swiped across another page as if seeking some sort of confirmation. Juliet felt as if she were about to jump out of her skin.
His gaze lifted. “Who wrote it?”
A tick of time beat past as Juliet weighed the truth against a harmless lie. She was no good with lies, so the truth it would have to be. “Me.”
His finger traced the paper as he read more. “A poet wrote this.”
She watched the truth dawn across his too-handsome face.
“Miss Windermere,” he began, stunned, “you’re a poet.”
Even as Juliet felt herself blush to the roots of her hair, a wave of gratification swept through her. Unlike practitioners of other arts, writers created in the isolation of their own minds, committing words to paper that might never be read—never even be acknowledged. But Kilmuir was reading her words with an expression of awe. Taking them in…acknowledging them…enjoyingthem.
Until this very moment, she’d thought it was enough to merely commit her words to paper. That therein lay the satisfaction. But now another view opened to her. That words on paper were merely their potential. To reach the fullness of their expression, another person had to experience them, and only then could the piece be complete.
And that it was Kilmuir reading and appreciating and enjoying her words felt better than good or gratifying.
It felt strangely—possibly irritatingly—right.
*
“You’re more thana poet,” said Rory, scanning line after line of perfect iambic pentameter. “You’re agoodpoet.”