“It looks like our angels got in a . . .” She shivered—a big, involuntary one. “Catfight.”
“You’re freezing.” He moved behind her and started brushing snow off her shoulders and upper back. As he made his way down toward the butt zone, he pulled the coat away from her body and brushed the snow off the fabric without touching her body. At the hem of her coat, he crouched with his hands poised over her calves. “May I?”
“Uh, sure. Thanks.”
Another thing that felt too good? Max’s hands, which were improbably warm, on her legs. It was only her calves, and he was only brushing snow off them, and there was a layer of pantyhose between his skin and hers.
He finished the snow removal, and for a moment, his big hands squeezed her calves, like he was trying to warm them up. It worked too well. There was a kind of zingy sensation on her skin beneath his fingers. She stepped away from him—again.
“This was a terrible idea.” He stood. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it was fun.”
“Still, I think I should call the car. Do you agree?”
She could not deny that she was wet and shivering in earnest but also dealing with the echoes of those odd zings his hands had summoned. “But isn’t the car on its way to Long Island with my mom in it?”
“Oh, but there are more cars where that one came from.”
Of course there were. “Yeah, okay. Thanks.”
He produced his phone and had a murmured conversation while he led her to the path, and by the time they’d made it back to Central Park West, another magical Mercedes was waiting.
The driver had a blanket for her. She would have rolled her eyes—it was too much, almost—except she was so cold she took it gratefully.
Once they were installed in the back, Max said, “You want to swing by Bergdorf’s on the way home, or are you too cold?”
“I would love to swing by Bergdorf’s.”
She was still freezing as she slid out of the car at the store, but this was going to be worth it. Max appeared at her side with the blanket and settled it over her shoulders. Her first impulse was to refuse it, to protest that she would look like an idiot standing on the street with a blanket around her shoulders. But, really, who cared? They strolled, taking in the mannequins in crazy scenarios and even crazier clothing.
“This is what I mean about New York,” Max said, gesturing first at a mannequin wearing a silver ballgown riding a mythical creature of some sort over a cityscape made out of gears—and then at a person viewing the scene dressed in an Elmo costume. “New York is a goddamn delight.”
Back in the car, Max gave the driver her address and raised the privacy screen between the front and back seats.
“We’ll drop you at your hotel first, though, right?” she asked. It was a few blocks away.
“I’ll ride along with you.” He tucked the blanket around her legs and started fiddling with the heat vents so they were aiming at her.
“There’s no need.”
“I want to.”
“Why?”
“I like you.”
“You are so weird.” She couldn’t help but smile inwardly, though. It was still kind of painful to hear such an earnest expression of fondness, but it was turning into a good sort of pain. Anyway, here was her chance to ask him about his life.
“So you grew up with Marie?”
“Not literally. She’s in a village called Witten. Well, she’s actually in a palace on a hill next to the village, of course.”
“Of course.”
“My family is in Riems, which is on the other side of the country. Not to be confused with the island of the same name in the Baltic.”
“I wouldn’t dream of confusing them.”
He smiled. “Eldovia is bisected by a mountain range. Marie—and the capital—are on one side, and I’m on the other. It’s not a large country, but to get from one side to the other, you have to drive over the mountains along a series of switchbacks. So while we saw Marie and her family quite a bit when I was young, it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. But our fathers were friends.”
“Yes, I heard. They wanted you and Marie to get married in order to ‘unite the houses’?” It boggled the mind.
“Indeed. The houses of Accola and Aquilla had bad blood going back centuries. It hadn’t been active bad blood, mind you, since the nineteenth.”
It was such a strange thing, to be able to trace one’s family so far. Dani, with her immigrant parents, knew the grandparents on each side, and her dad’s mom talked a lot about her own mother, but that was as far back as she had any meaningful knowledge.
“There was a cessation of hostilities in 1898,” Max went on. “After that, the animosity was limited to fighting each other in Parliament and snubbing each other at parties. But then Marie’s father and mine ended up at the same French boarding school and struck up a clandestine friendship. Our family supplies some of the trace minerals used in the watches the royal family’s company makes.”
“So aren’t the houses ‘united’ at that point? Why insist on marrying off their children?”
“I’m not defending it by any means, but I think they liked the idea of grandchildren in common. There’s nothing to seal a newfound truce like a baby. Anyway, you’re post-love, aren’t you?”
Post-men was what Dani had been saying, but she supposed it amounted to the same thing.
“And you’re a scholar of the nineteenth century,” Max went on. “You of all people should understand that the idea of marrying for love—and the idea of romantic love itself—is a modern construct. In many ways, the aristocracy hasn’t modernized. Political marriages are still common in our circles.”
“But Marie bucked the trend.”
“She did indeed.” He looked so wistful all of a sudden that Dani half wondered if the Depraved Duke was carrying a torch for Marie. His insistence that he was happy for her and that theirs had never been a love match had seemed genuine, but she was also getting the sense that something deeper was going on with him.
But she didn’t know how to ask that. “So you grew up in a castle in this place called Riems.” She started to make a mental note to google it but checked herself. She had already googled Max. She wasn’t going to google his castle, too. A person had to have standards.
“No, no. It is rather a large old house, though.”
“You still live there?” As much as she loved her parents, she had no desire to live with them. But she supposed the size of the “rather large old house” might be a mitigating factor.
“I live alone in a cottage on the grounds. It used to be occupied by my grandmother, but it had been sitting empty since she died, so I moved in when I returned from university.”
“How many bedrooms does this cottage have?”
“I’ll have you know that it has only one. Though I suppose there is also the library. But it’s small. It is rather a privileged life, though, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
She could picture him in a cottage. As worldly as Max was, with his designer suits and his razor-sharp wit, she could also see him pottering around a library, drinking tea. “But what do you do all day?”