Royal Pain (11 page)

“What truth, Bron? You think I want to tell some guy who asks me out, ‘Oh, hey, by the way, I stand to inherit a massive fortune from my grandmother. And my father. And my mother’s estate.’ It’s ludicrous. The last thing I want is to be liked—or disliked—for
that
. That’s not who I am. And you provided the marquess”—Sarah shivered and smiled—“I’m sorry, but it is divine. Anyway, you provided him with the perfect petri dish to see if you loved him just for him. It sounds like such a cliché, but isn’t it what we all want most of all… just to know if someone loves us, for no reason whatsoever? They just do.”

Bronte stared into her wineglass. “Yes.”

Sarah smiled.

“But no!” Bronte cried.

Sarah frowned.

“I mean, I can see how he wanted that,” Bronte said, “but it was so obvious from the first moment, from the minute I practically tripped over him in the bookstore, that I was perfectly crazy about him. Seriously, I don’t think it would have made any difference to me one way or another if he’d grown up above the fish-and-chips shop or in a huge castle.”

“Oh! Did he grow up in a huge castle?”

“Stop that!” But Bronte smiled despite herself. “Yes. Huge. There are pictures online. If anyone cares to look at such a thing.”

Sarah’s eyes widened. “What is his name, Bronte? Holy crap. This is unbelievable.”

“Forget it. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. It has to be over.”

“Why does it have to be over?”

“Because we both failed each other. No one’s to blame. We both just… it wasn’t right. I can’t be a…”

“Duchess?!”

“Oh God. You are impossible.”

Sarah made eye contact with the waiter as he refilled their glasses. He asked if they wanted another bottle when their meals arrived, and Sarah’s
bien
sûr
practically made him blush with pleasure.

After he had left the table, Bronte asked, “Do you even know the effect you have on men, Sarah?”

“What effect? I’m totally clueless. You know that.”

And Sarah was, Bronte marveled. She just smiled and sparkled and spoke perfect French and thought the best of everyone and was completely unaware of the joy she engendered in others.
Someday
, thought Bronte,
someone’s going to quietly knock your (expensive, silk) socks off
.

“Never mind all that,” Bronte said. “Let’s talk about work for a while. I can only handle this emotional crap for so long.”

“Okay, for a while only. Then I want to get back to the
duke
.”

Bronte rolled her eyes and then launched into a string of ideas about how best to position the Sarah James store in New York, where it should be, how they should create the brand around Sarah’s personality. They spoke over lunch and well into the second bottle of wine.

“I still don’t understand why it’s all so impossible, Bron.”

“Nothing’s impossible. Your ad campaign is going to be a huge success. What are you talking about?” Bronte ate the last bit of pasta and rested her silverware at the side of the plate.

“You and the duke. Why is it so impossible?”

“Sarah. Look at me. I am not a duchess, for chrissake. It was an affair. A perfectly wonderful”—she stopped and looked down at her lap to control the emotion, then brought her eyes back up to Sarah—“affair. And now it’s over. I am just being a grown up. Everything has a beginning and an end—that’s what my mom always used to say. And it’s true. It was great while it lasted. And now it’s time to move on.” Bronte reached across the table. “I’ll be fine. Let’s focus on making you a star.”

The two of them were laughing and flushed when they finished lunch and stepped out onto Oak Street. Bronte toddled back to her office and hugged Cecily with buzzed enthusiasm. As expected, Brian was equally pleased with the idea of launching a satellite office of BCA in New York. Unlike Cecily, he welcomed the chance to spend a few days each month in Manhattan. Brian promised Bronte that he would give his full support to all the new projects, especially Sarah James, for whom he had developed a grudging respect after Bronte had convinced him that she was far more than a pampered heiress. They spoke for a few more moments, then Cecily put Bronte into a cab and sent her home. She slept for eighteen hours straight and woke up feeling ready to face the rest of her life.

Alone.

Fortified
, she amended.

Fortified.

After a few days of cell-phone silence, Bronte realized her disappointment at not hearing back from Max was tinged with a strange relief. It had all come to a fulcrum point when Max asked her to pack a bag. She tried to pretend that she could not have possibly realized the enormity of what he was asking at the time, but even then, she knew. She had been scared fucking witless. She was your basic, run-of-the-mill coward.

What if she had said yes and then it didn’t work out?

Better to lick her wounds and settle for the really
good
they had already had rather than risk it all on the possibly
great
they might (or more likely, might not) have in the imaginary future. She knew all about imaginary futures, she reminded herself, and if she could not make a go of it with the easygoing Mr. Texas, she certainly was not going to get the brass ring with a fucking duke. (
No! He was just sweet Max
, the hopeless-romantic voice in the back of her head pleaded. She told that voice to sit down and shut up. He was royalty, damn it. And a bit of a duplicitous royal at that.)

It was much easier to distance herself from the whole mess if she built up this (patently false) historically revisionist depiction of Max as the scheming, unattainable, lofty noble instead of the tender, delicious, devoted lover he had, in reality, proved to be.

Yet again, Bronte realized how easy it was to disassemble her so-called life. The landlord’s son was moving back from Colorado and the little old lady had been secretly hoping the downstairs apartment would free up, as much as she loved having Bronte there. Within two weeks, Bronte had hired movers, signed a lease sight unseen on a one-bedroom apartment that had miraculously become available in her old friend April’s Gramercy Park doorman building (with coveted key to the park included), and negotiated a kick-ass raise.

To top it all off, Carol Dieppe’s negotiations with the venture capital guys who had approached her about starting her own agency had come to a screeching halt when one of them had asked Carol if she was willing to drop her pro bono work for Human Rights Council. She refused. A few days later, Bronte was able to convince both April and Carol to jump ship and open BCA NY with her.

Then, about a week after he’d left, in the midst of all that chaos, Max did return her call. She was in a meeting at work and didn’t have her cell phone when he called. She returned to her desk to discover his voice mail.

“Hey Bron, it’s me. Max. Thanks for your messages. Yes, I made it back in one piece. Everything’s pretty bad here, but my dad is hanging on, so who knows? So… well, you have my UK number now if you ever need to get in touch. Take care of yourself, Bronte.” He sounded conclusive. He sounded tired and defeated and so far away. Not just geographically far. Far from her. She cried and played it over and over to hear his voice and imagine him speaking directly into her, reliving the warm caress of his breath against her ear.

But she didn’t call him back. He hadn’t really asked her to, and even if he had, what could she say? She was no closer to diving into the deep end of the relationship pool than she had been the day he had left, and he’d been heartbreakingly clear that that’s where he was… and where he wanted her to be. In the deep end.

When she read about his father’s death a week later, a few days before she left Chicago (it was just Google alerts, not stalking, she rationalized), she wrote him a condolence letter. Her mother’s enduring influence—etiquette—made it impossible for her to let the sad event pass with no communication whatsoever. She was formal in her tone, relying on the solemnity of the occasion to maintain a cool distance through her words. She wanted him to know she cared but not to feel like she was trying to weasel her way back into his good opinion. An opinion she sought, but could never quite believe she deserved.

What would have been the point of hinting at something more? Of suggesting they get together if he was ever in New York? She didn’t even bother telling him she was leaving Chicago. She knew she couldn’t offer him anything, really. She was sure that he was simply too
good
for her. Not in any holier-than-thou, haughty way. Not because he was royal, whatever that meant. He was just a better person. He knew things. Things like how to speak honestly about his emotions. Like how to express sadness and loss when his father was about to die. Bronte didn’t think those things would ever be made available to her. He was right: they had been so good together. They had even loved each other. But she convinced herself it was what Max would have called a one-off. Better left in the perfect world of memory.

Ever the gentleman, Max did send her a letter in reply about a month later, as formal and distant as her own. Almost a mirror image of hers, she realized. He was not going to tread into the dangerous language of a potential future. Why should he? He’d already gone there and gotten a sad glimpse of the emotional wasteland and cowardice that rested in Bronte’s heart.

So, other than the enormous, catastrophic cock-up that she now referred to (to herself only, of course) as The Deal with the Duke, things were actually looking up. Having already learned not to go around telling all her friends about the hot new guy she happened to be sleeping with, she didn’t have any explaining to do when she rolled back into the Big Apple that summer. Only Sarah James and a few of her friends at BCA even knew he existed, and even then, they only knew him as her British fling. At the time, they’d all joked that Bronte was certainly keeping a tight leash on her new boy toy and they all knew he was scheduled to go back to England mid-July regardless, so no loose ends to explain on that front either.

It all went quite according to plan, in a way—or so Bronte tried to convince herself. Her Transitional Man had served his purpose and she had successfully catapulted right back into her chic little New York world. The fact that she now knew she could, when presented with the challenge, burn through a hundred condoms in fewer than eight weeks didn’t hurt her confidence either.

At Christmas, Max left what was to be his final message: a simple holiday greeting wishing her well. He may have left the same message for his valet. Concise. Formal. As far as Bronte could tell, his passion had cooled and everyone was back on track.

Or at least he was.

Max stared at his father’s fresh grave. It seemed simultaneously appropriate and demented that the funeral would take place on one of the most glorious days of summer. The leaves were sighing contentedly in the background and the swallows and starlings were so cheerful that Max wanted to laugh out loud from the simple joy of it. Or get his shotgun out and kill some birds.

The early light of summer glinted off the beveled glass windows of the nearby family chapel. The funeral ceremony had taken place inside those thick medieval walls, but Max’s father had insisted on being buried outside, rather than in one of the family crypts.

“I certainly don’t want to spend eternity in that dank place if it comes to that,” his father had joked with Max just a few days ago, the supplemental oxygen giving his voice a reedy quality.

That had been one of the good days, when the doctors at the hospital had been sure His Grace was on the mend. Max had spent hour after hour sitting in his father’s hospital room, mostly reading or staring quietly out the window. It was an odd balance, to ask the in-case-you-die questions without seeming to hasten someone’s departure. By the second to last day of his life, it seemed that George Heyworth was quite certain about his imminent departure and wanted to take advantage of that small window of opportunity.

“Max. I think we both know what’s coming.” He had waited until Sylvia had left the room. She was a cold stoic in so many areas of her life, but in this episode, she had turned mildly hysterical. At one point, she tried to blame one of the visiting physicians for the fact that George had had a heart attack in the first place. Max and George had finally convinced her to return to Dunlear for a few hours of rest.

“Yes, Dad.” He pulled the vinyl hospital chair closer to his father’s bedside.

“You are going to be fine, Max. Really fine.”

Max stared at the linoleum floor, his eyes resting on the speckled turquoise.

“Max?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“What happened in Chicago?”

Max looked up quickly to see his father’s knowing glance. His father kept staring at him.

“I don’t know… I mean, I thought I knew. I thought I fell in love.”

His father’s smile widened and caused a crease around his eyes. He’d always been a hopeless romantic.
One
would
have
to
be
hopeless
to
fall
in
love
with
Sylvia
Beckwith
, Max thought ruefully.

“Where is she then?” his father asked.

“It’s not always a two-way street, is it, Dad?”

His father’s brows knit. “That’s impossible.”

Max burst out laughing and a nurse gave him a stern look as she passed the open doorway and shushed him.

“It feels good to laugh with you, Dad.”

“Tell me about the girl.”

Max looked at him again. Of course his father didn’t want to spend his final hours talking about the irrigation negotiations or the renovation of the medieval refectory at Dunlear. He wanted to hear about the girl.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. I guess I just thought what you did. That of course she would love me if I loved her. But when I asked her to come with me, as soon as Mom called to tell me you were… ill…” Max stopped for a few seconds to keep his thoughts straight. The endless hours in the hospital had curdled his brain a bit. “Well, she simply said no.”

The oxygen tube distorted his father’s expression somewhat, but Max still recognized the look of disappointment.

“What?” Max laughed. “She said no; what was I supposed to do? Drag her here by her ponytail?”

His father’s breath was strained again. It was becoming more of an effort to speak. “She has nice long hair, then?”

Max smiled again but repressed the bark of laughter that would have come out if that shushing nurse hadn’t been nosing around still.

“Oh, Dad. She is lovely.” Max allowed himself that brief honesty. “And smart. And funny. And kind of fierce and independent.”

“Sounds like your mother.” George winked, knowing the comparison would drive Max crazy.

“She is also quite affectionate,” Max said, effectively insulting his mother.

“Now, now, Max.”

“Fine, I won’t waste our time on that.” Max started to feel the double barrel of loss push into his sternum. His father was slipping away before his eyes, and Bronte was already gone. When she had mentioned, on her uncharacteristically brief voice mail, that he
might
have
mentioned
that he was a
duke
, he knew they were through. “I don’t think she was too happy to learn I was the next Duke of Northrop.”

“Now, that really must be impossible. What woman doesn’t want to be a duchess?”

Max smiled again as he looked at the floor. “I may have found the only one.”

His father wheezed a bit. “Of course, she secretly does.”

“Father. Really. It is the twenty-first century. I honestly don’t think any woman
secretly
does anything. She is quite forthright. It’s one of the things I really love—loved—about her.”

“So what did she say when you told her about the title?”

“Well… I never actually told her.”

His father started to laugh but it turned into a raspy cough and then a hard racking attempt to catch his breath. The bossy nurse came quickly into the room with a scowl for Max and a soothing word or two for his father. She adjusted his oxygen levels, checked his IV and vitals, then tossed Max another disparaging gaze as she left the room.

“Max.”

“Yes, Dad?”

“That’s not the type of information a girl wants to happen upon willy-nilly.”

“I’ve gathered that now. But it’s a bit too late.” Max straightened his shoulders. “But enough about her. I think it was all a bit of a flash in the pan.”

His father looked at him for another long minute. “I am glad I got to see the look in your eyes when you talked about that flash in the pan.”

“Me too,” Max said.

And then two days later, his father was gone. The hospital personnel had been efficient and kind—especially in the face of Sylvia’s histrionics. And three days after that, here he stood with the summer wind lightly caressing the leaves of the alders that surrounded the centuries-old churchyard.

Everyone else had finally gone back into the castle to rest for a few hours before dinner, so Max was blessedly alone for the first time in as long as he could remember. He kept looking at the perimeter of grass where the gravediggers had done a very neat job of edging the hole into which the casket had been lowered. The bright green turf fluttered in the light breeze, and then it simply ceased and the black hole began. A perfect delineation.

Over the past two weeks of his father’s brief recovery (and then rapid decline) from the heart attack, everyone had been watching Max. The press and representative members of the Royal Family had all been there, if respectfully distant. Those types of inquisitors were almost easier to deal with. The family had a press secretary, and protocol dictated nearly all of Max’s actions in any case.

The more difficult observers were closer to hand. His mother kept looking at him with a cruel demand in her eyes, as if to say,
I
told
you
to
hurry
up
and
get
married… now your father will never have the comfort of knowing the line is secure
. His sisters had looked to him for strength and direction. It was surprisingly easy to act like he knew what he was doing. He was good at logistics. So was Devon. His younger brother looked to Max as an adjutant would look to a superior officer: mostly to make sure they were on the same page, to keep their mother from becoming hysterical, to keep their sisters comforted.

But most of all, his immediate family looked to him because they wanted to make sure they were relieved of the burden of having to handle the brunt of what was coming down the pike. That Max was on it. Because Max was always on it. He could handle it. Just like his father used to handle it.

Max had a momentary recollection of when the family had moved from Yorkshire down to Dunlear, after his grandmother had died. George’s father had asked them to move in and begin taking on the ducal responsibilities in the late eighties. The family had been like a little troupe of (very well-to-do) tinkers. Displaced. His father had seemed particularly mindful. Max remembered how his dad kept asking the young ones (Max, ten; Devon, eight; and Abby, six) how they were adjusting. How they liked their new home. If they’d found any good hiding places.

Max scowled.

His father could not have cared less about securing the line. His mother was an idiot. She was more concerned about where to seat the queen’s representative, the Duke of Gloucester, at supper that night than about Max’s marital happiness. Max felt the familiar resentment bubble up and did his best to toss it aside. For whatever reason, his father loved his mother—
had
loved
, he corrected—but that was a love that somehow skipped a generation. Sylvia, Lady Heyworth, the Duchess of Northrop, had no love for her eldest son. And the (lack of) feeling was mutual.

Max looked up to the sky and watched as the flock of starlings was spooked and flew away in a sweeping arc from the cemetery where he stood. His father would have loved that. Bronte would have loved that. The temporary, ephemeral, beautifully orchestrated moment. And then nothing.

His father would have loved Bronte.

And, damn it, that’s what finally made him cry after all. He had withstood all the cool, empathic glances of his relatives and the well-wishers in the chapel and then out here in the beautiful open air. He hadn’t even felt the slightest press of emotion. It was logically too soon to miss his father—he’d been alive three days ago, for goodness’ sake—but missing Bronte was starting to ferment.

He smiled bitterly as the tears slowly rolled down his cheeks. At least he could stand there, unassailed, and weep for the loss of a woman who had revealed a part of him to himself that he’d never been able to admit was present, or perhaps a place into which he had never allowed himself to admit anyone. She had slid into his soul through a strange alchemy of bitter humor and raw vitality. It wasn’t the sex. (Of course it was, but not in the way it sounded.) He hadn’t told anyone about her.

Max had kept her as some sort of secret. At the time, he’d thought he was savoring those first few precious months of private intimacy in anticipation of what he’d thought was going to be a lifetime of shared public happiness. Now he regretted that he hadn’t relayed every anecdote to Devon or Willa or David, so he could call upon them and ask them to tell him (over and over) that it had been real. That she had been real. Of all the people he could have shared his feelings with, why had he chosen the one who was now there in the ground at his feet?

He reached into the inside pocket of his gray morning coat, pulled out the perfectly pressed linen handkerchief, and rested it slowly against each of his eyes. Willa and David had been the last to leave him alone at the graveside. Willa had looked like she wanted to say more when Max thanked them for passing along his contact details to Bronte a few weeks before. He probably appeared barely interested, as his attempts to avoid thinking or talking about Bronte led him to appear wooden when her name came up. As much as he thought he was “processing” his father’s death in a healthy way—and that may have technically been true—if he was honest, the effort it took to stay in control of that particular grief meant that everything else had to be very carefully carved out, wrapped up, and put away. Especially thoughts of Bronte.

To people on the outside—the press, his family—it was justifiably difficult to balance his life in the face of the unexpected loss of his father. If he confessed that he was more likely to have a nervous breakdown at the loss of a woman he’d only known for a few months, they really would have had him committed.

So he allowed himself to mourn. And if he was mourning the loss of Bronte as much as the loss of his father, then that was his business, and no one else really needed to know. One was the loss of what might have been and one was the loss of what was. Neither was more or less real to him at that moment. He figured he could wring it all out together and be done with the whole bloody mess in a few months’ time.

Two weeks later, he received the condolence letter Bronte had written. It gave him the courage to let her go altogether. It was so devoid of any true feeling. So perfunctory. He replied to every condolence letter he had received. By hand. Eight hundred and twenty-three to be precise. He replied to Bronte’s just as he replied to the queen’s. Politely.

By Christmas, the combination of sexual frustration and desire had started to push him to the breaking point. He had finally confided in Devon, who was beginning to worry about the cause of Max’s perpetual irritation. In a moment of pique, Max had been uncharacteristically short-tempered with a group of labor leaders who were representing the agricultural workers at Dunlear Castle. After Max had clenched his hand into a fist and slammed it on the negotiating table, Devon had hastily called the meeting to an end, citing a family emergency, and then summarily punched Max in the face once everyone else had left the room.

With Devon furiously grabbing the lapels of Max’s chalk-stripe suit jacket, Max had finally collapsed into a chair and told him the whole sorry story about the
chit
from Chicago.

“So let me get this straight,” Devon said. “You fall madly in love with this woman and now you are letting her go?”

“Damn it, Dev, you sound just like Dad. I can’t very well make her love me.”

“Of course she loves you!” Devon waved his hand in the air. “You are the lovable one, remember? I’m the rat bastard around here.”

Max smiled as he poured them both a few fingers of scotch. They had gone back to Max’s house in Fulham after the labor meetings had ended so disastrously. Devon took one of the glasses from his brother and continued speaking.