“I do. I definitely do.”
“All right. We’re on the boat. I assume we are alone. Because it’s a boat. At sea. Suddenly, though, we hear the sound of a motor, and it’s growing louder. The playwright begins to panic. It’s her husband, she says, approaching on a speedboat. No sooner has she said this than we can hear him boarding. Unfortunately for me, we are poolside, we are naked, and our clothing is below deck. There is, however, a discarded article of clothing near the pool that I only later learned was called a ‘onesie.’ The playwright, it turns out, has a teenage son who is accomplished at video games and plays them on some kind of online gaming platform while people spectate. He does so wearing these ‘onesies.’ So what do I do?”
“You put on the onesie. Oh my god.”
“Indeed. And it gets worse. The playwright stops the frenzied panicking she’s been doing and starts chanting, ‘He’s going to kill me,’ over and over, such that I start to worry that perhaps she’s being literal. So I jump overboard.”
“No!”
“Yes! I don’t want to be responsible for anyone’s death.” He’d been trying to make his tale entertaining, but he sobered, remembering his panic when he started to fear that the husband was going to become violent. “We weren’t that far from the shore, so it wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds. So, to return to the narrative, over the edge I go. I swim to the shore, and I walk to my hotel.”
“In a onesie,” she said through laughter.
“Just so.”
“I wonder why there aren’t more pictures.”
“That is entirely thanks to Mr. Benz, the king’s equerry. Did you meet him last summer?”
“I did. He seems very . . . thorough.”
“Yes, he’s ex-military. I called Marie after I made it back to the hotel, and she put him on the case. He has mob boss–style abilities to make problems go away. There should have been more photos. There should have been close-ups showing that the onesie was, in fact, printed with tiny unicorns.”
She burst out laughing, and he was genuinely glad his pathetic story was making her laugh. It almost made it worth it.
“Why was there the one photo from the boat to begin with? Did the husband take it?”
“I have no idea. There was a staff member captaining the boat, but the playwright assured me he would be discreet.”
“Well, that was a mistake.”
“It certainly was.” Hence the development of his rules of engagement. “The larger point of my tale of woe is that the ‘Depraved Duke’ sobriquet is incorrect. The . . . proceedings themselves were rather mundane, all told. The more accurate phrase would be ‘Idiotic Duke.’ Or ‘Dumb Duke,’ if we want to preserve the alliterative qualities of the moniker.”
“But you’re not a duke.”
“Not yet, thank god.”
“What’s the last item on the list?”
“Hmm?”
“You said you had three other rules in addition to always wanting to hook up on your turf. You said no married women. And no repeat performances so as not to encourage anyone to get any ideas about marriage. But there’s one more, I think?”
“Ah. Yes. No lying.”
“Why would anyone be lying?”
“Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me it means not telling anyone what they want to hear merely because it might be convenient.”
“Huh.”
“What does that mean? Are you against honesty?”
“No! I admire it. You’re very honest. Relentlessly honest, I might even say.”
He didn’t know what to say to that.
“So no false declarations of love is what you’re saying.”
“That is what I’m saying.”
“How come you can’t sleep?” she asked suddenly. “Too much to drink whilst picking up beautiful artists?”
He had not said the artist was beautiful, but he didn’t correct her. “No. I know this is probably difficult to believe given my enthusiasm for negronis the other night, but I don’t drink much.”
He wanted her to ask him why.
“Why not?”
“My father is a drunk of the worst sort.”
Saying that felt like a lot. He’d wanted to say it, but once it was out, he found he didn’t want to elaborate beyond the topic-sentence version of the mess that was life with his parents. But he was finding this exercise in truth-telling strangely exhilarating, so he told her another one—a different one. “I couldn’t sleep because I was ruminating about my job situation.”
“This may be a stupid question, but if being a duke is a job, why isn’t being a baron? In historical novels, aristocrats are always, like, overseeing the manor or visiting sick tenants or something.”
“My title is a courtesy title, meaning it’s a meaningless title given to the sons of aristocrats.”
“You people are so weird.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“So being Baron of Aquilla can’t be made into a job?”
“The title is actually Baron of Laudon. The duchy is Aquilla; the barony is Laudon.” He thought about her question. “I don’t think it can be made into a job. Unlike with the duchy, there are no lands or holdings associated with it.”
“What does your brother do? Is he also a lie-about?”
“No, he works for the mining company.”
“For real? Or is he just on the books?”
“He’s legitimately employed there. We have a non-family CEO, but my brother is the executive vice-chairman and chief science officer, and he sits on the board.”
“Wow, a genuine passion for mining.”
“It would seem so.” Though to hear Sebastien and Father over the holidays, it sounded as though Seb’s passions lay more in this “garden project.” Max had no idea what that meant. He probably hadn’t been paying attention at some point. He couldn’t give a damn about Father, but he didn’t used to be the kind of person who ignored his brother.
“Okay, how about this?” Dani said. “Let’s make a plan to each do one small thing toward our resolutions this week. First week of the new year—baby steps toward divorce and job.”
He could get behind this. But the phrase new year made him remember his point in calling her. He pulled his phone from his ear momentarily to check the time. It was quarter past six. “Oh, damn it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I got distracted by my ‘woe is me’ routine. And by telling the true story of the Depraved Duke. I was going to make you do a countdown.”
“Eh, it’s fine.”
“All right, well, this is our year, then?”
“Yes. The year of divorces and jobs,” she said through a chuckle. “Doesn’t sound that glamorous when you put it like that.”
“It’s going to be good.” For the first time in a long time, he believed it—that the future was going to be good.
She yawned. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
He felt like he could probably sleep now. He wished he could get the artist out of his room, but he could hardly wake her and ask her to leave. Perhaps he would go sleep on the sofa. “Happy New Year, Dani.”