“Leo has told me some of this.”
“My family, on the other hand, is obscenely rich, and when I inherit the dukedom, that will be my ‘job.’” He sighed.
“You don’t sound thrilled.”
“I am not thrilled. I am, in fact, deeply unthrilled. But the point is I don’t need to work. I just need to bide my time until my destiny comes crashing down on me.”
“There are reasons to work besides money.”
“Right,” he said decisively, as if she’d answered a test question correctly. “What are those reasons?”
“You said it yourself a minute ago. To have a purpose. For some people it might be doing something they believe does some good in the world.”
“But if I don’t want to work for Aquilla Mining, which for the record does not do any good in the world, what do I do? I don’t have any actual skills.”
“I don’t think that’s true.” She thought back to his Karina Klein story, both the real one and their silly made-up sequel. “You can tell a good story. You can talk anyone into anything.”
“That’s true. I’m not sure how to put that on a résumé.”
“Don’t you have friends who can get you some kind of rich-person job? Seats on boards?”
“Probably.”
He didn’t sound enthused. Maybe he wanted to do something under his own steam. “Well, you don’t have to figure it all out right now.” An idea popped into her head. She paused, letting it settle in her mind. Did she really want to propose this? Doing so would bind them together—if they took it seriously. It would make them into real friends, not just people who’d gone to the ballet and talked on the phone a couple of times.
It only took her a second to conclude that she liked the idea. “Let’s make a pact. By this time a year from now, we’ll be up one job and down one husband.”
He chuckled. “How are you going to do that? What about the custody standoff regarding my namesake?”
“He’s not your namesake. But I think I need a lawyer. Vince and I have been ‘amicable’ so far—can you hear the extreme scare quotes there?—meaning we’re using a mediator. Or not using her, because Vince keeps flaking on meetings. But you know what? Mediation was Vince’s idea. ‘We can act like grown-ups,’ he said. ‘We don’t need lawyers.’ I went for it because at the time, a mediator sounded great. After Vince left, I realized that he never listened to me. Which is a weird thing to realize ex post facto, but it’s true. He would listen, like, superficially, but whenever I said anything real—expressed a preference or tried to talk about a problem—it went in one ear and out the other.”
Max gave a gratifying sniff of disapproval.
“But I’ve decided that mediation is bullshit,” she went on. “One more way Vince is trying to control everything. I want to get divorced, and I don’t want to give Vince my dog, and I don’t think my waiting game is working. It’s time to lawyer up.”
“Good for you. Good for Dog Max. Aka my namesake.”
“He’s not your namesake,” she said again, but laughingly, and only because that was her line.
“We need new names.”
“I’m not giving my dog a new name because I happened to meet you!”
“Not new names, per se. More like nicknames. Name qualifiers.”
“I do sort of think of you as Human Max and Dog Max.”
“But that’s so literal. There’s so much else you can use to distinguish us.”
“Like what? Royal Max and Common Max?”
“No! I was thinking more about physical attributes.”
“I’m not sure Big Max and Little Max is any better than Human Max and Dog Max.”
“Daniela,” he said with performative censure in his voice. “Size isn’t everything. I thought smart women such as yourself were supposed to know that.”
She snorted. He was funny when he played his rake card. And his humor came with a big dose of self-deprecation. She hadn’t understood that about him when they met last summer.
She wondered if a lot of people didn’t understand that about him.
“I was thinking about my golden locks compared to his mangy gray, but— Oh, I have it. Max Minimus and, wait for it . . . Max Maximus! Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, I’m here all evening.”
That was actually hilarious. “I thought size wasn’t everything,” she deadpanned.
“Yes, but this isn’t size in a crass sense. This is a classy way of saying it. And you know me and Max Minimus. We are nothing if not classy.”
As he spoke, the background noise swelled. She could hear the countdown starting. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”
“Are you sure you don’t want to go back inside?”
“Yes.”
Neither of them spoke while the rest of the countdown happened. What a year it had been. Although Vince had left the summer of the previous year, this had been the year she really absorbed his absence. The first full calendar year she’d spent alone.
Except not alone. She’d had Leo for some of it, and of course she had her parents. She had people she could count on. Including, it was starting to feel like, her friend the baron. Max Maximus.
“Three, two, one . . .” The cheers of the crowd swelled. She could hear happy mayhem getting louder.
“Happy New Year, Dani.”
“Happy New Year, Max.”
Six hours later, Max was lying in bed in his hotel room not sleeping. After hanging up with Dani, he’d gone back into the party, trying to make sense of his astonishing outburst that he wanted to get a job. He had been thinking about the concept of meaningful employment, but in a back-burner way. When Sebastien got rolling on Aquilla Mining’s latest corporate social responsibility report, or when Marie talked about her UN work—or hell, when Leo was out working on a log cabin—it made Max wish he had a calling. Max had a certain reputation as a carefree playboy. Even though the “Depraved Duke” episode that cemented it had been misconstrued, he didn’t mind the reputation. Hell, he leaned into it. It wasn’t untrue in a general sense. He did enjoy female company, and he didn’t see the need to apologize for that. Women were fantastic.
He glanced at the figure under the duvet next to him. Carefully, so as not to wake her, he slid out of bed, grabbed his phone, and went to the bathroom.
Carefree. His slumbering companion had used that very word when she hit on him. She was an artist, and after a flirtatious exchange, she’d invited him back to her flat so she could “paint” him—and they both knew what she meant by that. She’d wanted to capture his “carefree masculine beauty,” she’d said.
Max didn’t consider himself carefree, but he had worked hard to become the kind of person who wasn’t injured by his father’s little cruelties—or by his big ones—or by the fact that he’d sacrificed so much for Sebastien apparently to no avail. He could see how that might be interpreted from the outside as carefree. And he truly didn’t care what people thought of him, so in that sense perhaps he was carefree.
But what his reputation never seemed to account for were his two degrees from Oxford. And though he hadn’t gone to boarding school like Seb, the tutor his parents had retained—the tutor Max himself had found once it became clear that he wouldn’t be able to go away to school—had been a strict though not unkind taskmaster. The point was, for the vast majority of his life, Max had been a student, and a good, if rather disorganized, one at that. So the past several months, with literally nothing he had to do, had been odd. After the stress of finishing his thesis and moving home, as well as the broken engagement, it had, for a while, been pleasant enough to drift around without any responsibilities. But eventually it started to feel uncomfortable, like wearing a suit that didn’t fit properly.