He blinked rapidly, his breezy facade dropping. On the surface, he was all confidence and swagger, but he would, from time to time, say something that startled her with its guilelessness. It used to be his proclamations about how much he liked her. Or his New Year’s Eve declaration about wanting to get a job. Maybe she could trigger another such admission.
It worked. He took a long drink of his champagne and said, “I’m unhappy because my father is a vicious drunk. Or perhaps I should say that my father is vicious, period, since he’s drunk all the time. He terrorizes all of us, but no one seems to mind except me.”
The word terrorizes gave her pause, but she didn’t want to interrupt him.
“I hate living on the estate. I have no purpose in life other than to consume resources while I wait for my father to die so I can become the Duke of Aquilla, which I very, very much do not want to do. Hell, I don’t even want to be a baron.” He laughed bitterly and raised his cup. “Poor Max, right?” He rolled his eyes, then closed them like he was sick of himself.
His little speech had made her want to cry. She patted the hand that wasn’t holding the glass. He whipped his head up and looked at her, startled by the contact. “Yes,” she said vehemently, “poor Max.” She started to retract her hand—she’d only meant to deliver a quick, sympathetic touch—but he rotated his hand under hers and held on, looking at her like she was his lifeline.
Maybe she was.
She knew Marie was Max’s best friend. But if he and Marie were anything like Dani and Leo, that relationship had taken second fiddle as the lovebirds embarked on their life together.
“Can I ask you some dumb questions?” she said.
“You can ask me anything,” he said with a strange vehemence and still not letting go of her hand.
“Could you walk away from it? Abdicate? Is that what you’d call it in your case? Pull a Harry-and-Meghan, basically?”
“I could, but that would mean passing all the shit to my brother.” He paused, pressed his lips together. “That is not something I will do.” He snorted. “Well, of course when I don’t produce an heir, he and his future children will be in line to inherit. But my father will be gone at that point, so I’m quite content to dump everything on him then. I just won’t . . . let him shoulder everything now.”
Ohhh. Something shifted in her mind as she thought about a few things he’d said over the months. “That’s why you didn’t go to boarding school and he did.”
He blew out a breath like he’d been busted doing something untoward. “In theory, I could have gone once Seb left at thirteen. But it turned out I’d made too good a case in the first place for why I should break with tradition and not go.” He wrinkled his nose, as if he were remembering something unpleasant.
“Your father wouldn’t let you go when your brother did.”
“It was all right. I only had two years left, and I actually liked my tutor. Well, ‘liked’ might be overstating it. But he was exceedingly qualified, and we rubbed along together well enough. I’d had to fight my father for him in the first place. Once Father had accepted that I wasn’t going away to school, he wanted me to continue on with my boyhood teacher. It was a real battle convincing my father not to send me.”
“How did you do it?”
“I feigned interest in learning about the dukedom.” His upper lip curled. “I gave magnificent speeches about family and legacy and destiny and said I didn’t want to be away for four years when I could be learning about the role I was born to inherit.”
“And did you learn about it?”
“I certainly did.” There was the lip curl again. “I learned I never wanted to be the Duke of Aquilla. But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”
“Why don’t you want to do it? What is ‘it,’ really?”
“‘It’ is using what we own—what our ancestors took—to make money. We had feudal land, land that tenants paid to work. Later we had—still have—mines all over Europe. Do the people who work in those mines share in the profits they generate?”
“No?”
“That is correct. So the job of the duke is to oversee the moneymaking, environment-destroying empire. Which my father does a half-assed job of because he’s usually drunk. But he has a steward who’s a decent person.”
“You’ve spent your whole life protecting your brother,” Dani said quietly.
“Well, no. I gave up when he decided to move home. But that was a mistake. Not that he needed protection anymore, but I shouldn’t have . . . abandoned him like I did. I understand now that even though he made different choices than I would have in his place, he had his reasons.”
“Have you ever tried to . . . talk to your father?”
“You mean an intervention?” She nodded. “We tried once. Well, mostly Seb tried, because he’s the best of us, but he rallied my mother and me. It did . . .” He made a face. “Not go well. While I understand the power of addiction and would extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone else in its grip, I can’t . . . let go of some of the things he’s done. The damage has been too great. I can’t fix him, and I don’t want to try.”
That seemed both reasonable and remarkably self-aware. “Understood. Can you move, at least, if Sebastien doesn’t need your protection anymore? You might have years before you inherit.”
“The plan was always to move to the palace with Marie.”
Right. It was still hard to wrap her mind around how close Max had come to marrying Leo’s fiancée.
“I wouldn’t have escaped my eventual fate, of course, but when I inherited, I’d’ve been able to run things from afar, and . . .”
“And what?”
“I don’t know. There was never anything romantic between us, but Marie and I were good partners. I felt like she would’ve been able to help me make the job of duke less bad. That sounds vague, I know, but she was . . .”
“A helpmeet?” Dani teased, wanting to lighten his burden, even if only momentarily, but it actually seemed like the correct word.
He chuckled. “Precisely.”
“You could still move. Wait out your fate somewhere else.” She had the sudden, silly notion to suggest that he move to New York. He liked New York, and they could have so much fun. But she didn’t say that because it was ridiculous.
“Right, but for that I would need money—my father will cut me off if I move off the estate for anything less than marrying into a family he deems suitable. And for that, I need a job.”
“And the mine project isn’t paying.”
“It could be. Seb offered to put me on the payroll . . .”
“But taking money from the family company isn’t that different from taking money from the family?”
He shrugged. “I thought about it. I am working. But I . . . need to not entangle myself with my father any more than I already am.”
She thought back to the word terrorizes, and to Max saying he no longer wanted to try to help his father. “Max, did he . . . did he hurt you?”
“He hit Sebastien once.”