“Thank you,” she said, turning serious.
“You’re welcome,” he said, doing the same. “Send me your preferred travel dates—but please come for a nice long stretch if you can; I promise you’ll have lots of time to work—and I’ll take care of it.”
Chapter Twelve
“Oh!” Max was startled as he exited his cottage and almost bumped into Sebastien, who was standing there in the November sunshine with his knuckles raised, poised to knock. “Hello.”
“I was hoping to speak to you.”
“I can’t right now. I’m off to meet Daniela Martinez’s plane. She’s coming for the wedding. She’s Leo’s friend,” he added, though he had no idea why, as characterizing Dani as “Leo’s friend” didn’t begin to cover it.
“I know who she is,” Seb said.
Of course. Everyone knew all the details about the royal wedding. The wedding that was supposed to be Max’s. And chief among those details were the salacious ones—the fact that not only was the groom a nobody from the Bronx, his only attendant was also going to be a nobody from the Bronx. A female nobody. Mother had been talking about it nonstop.
“Can’t you just send a car?” Seb asked.
Max studied his brother’s face. His forehead was deeply furrowed. “Is everything all right? Has something gone wrong in Innsbruck?”
“No, no. Everything’s fine. I was merely going to . . . Never mind. We can talk later.”
“You want to ride to the airfield with me?” The plane was landing on a private airfield an hour’s drive from the estate.
“May I?”
“Of course. I’ll appreciate the company.” Not really, because Max was a selfish bastard and he wanted Dani to himself. But he and Dani had three weeks to talk. Three glorious weeks. He had convinced her to make such a long visit by assuring her she could spend the first half of it working on the estate. Then they’d go to the palace for the wedding, then to Innsbruck to see the mine and have a holiday.
“So you’re having an affair with Leo’s friend,” Sebastien said as their journey got underway. “Is that wise?”
Ah, here they went. “I am not having an affair with her. We’re friends.”
“I thought she was Leo’s friend.”
“She’s not allowed to have more than one friend?” Even with his eyes on the road, Max could feel Seb’s wince, and yes, that had come out a little snippier than Max had intended, but honestly. “I invited her to spend some time here before the wedding, since Mother and Father are away.” Their parents were holidaying on Sardinia and would be back a few days before the wedding, by which point Max and Dani would already have left for the palace—ostensibly because their man of honor and best woman duties required them to be there early but really because there was no way he was going to subject Dani to his parents. She would meet them at the wedding, of course; it was unavoidable. But their impact would be diluted there—he hoped. “And after the wedding, we’re going to Austria with Leo and Marie.”
“Isn’t that a little odd? You’re tagging along on the honeymoon?”
“Really, it’s them tagging along with us.” He’d mentioned he was taking Dani to see the mine, and suddenly they had extra hangers-on. Marie insisted that they wanted to spend some time with Dani—he knew the feeling—and see the mine project in progress. After a couple of days in Innsbruck, Marie and Leo were going to continue on to a posh Indonesian resort, alone.
“What’s going on with you?” Max asked his brother. The point of him being along for the ride was so he could talk, not so he could interrogate Max about Dani.
“Oh, nothing.”
“So you’re spending two hours round-trip with me in this car because you love me so much.”
Seb rolled his eyes. “I think you love yourself enough for both of us.”
Max grinned. One of the unexpectedly delightful dividends of his repaired relationship with his brother was that they could needle each other again. They’d lost that for a long while, but one thing Max had never lost was the ability to tell when something was bothering Seb. He had a certain way of picking at his fingernails when he was anxious, and he was doing it now. “What’s wrong? Out with it.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I just . . . have something I need to tell you.”
“All right.”
He glanced over. Seb lowered his hands to his lap and looked Max in the eye in a way that made Max fear something might be seriously wrong, but Max had to return his attention to the road. “The thing is,” Seb said, “I’m . . .”
As he trailed off, Max’s mind got to work filling in the blanks. Seb was in trouble of some sort? Angrier than he’d expressed for all the years Max had been mentally checked out? Deathly ill? “What? You’re what?”
“Don’t run us off the road, but I’m gay.”
Of course he was. Max didn’t know why he hadn’t seen it earlier. He huffed a laugh.
Seb sucked in a breath and turned toward the window, hurt.
“Seb.” Max let go of the steering wheel with his right hand and grabbed his brother’s left. “I’m sorry. I’m laughing at myself. At how obvious it was—or should have been. I’m sorry I didn’t see it.” Another glance over showed that Seb’s eyes had gone wide, and Max rushed to add what he should have led with. “It doesn’t make a whit of difference to me. In fact, it makes me happy. It makes me happy to think of you being more authentically yourself. I’m glad for you and glad you told me. I’m sorry if you felt you couldn’t previously.”
“Really? That’s it?”
“Well, excuse me for forgetting to pack my rainbow confetti.”
Seb laughed and took his hand back. “I was expecting more of the opposite reaction, to be honest.”
“From me? Really?” That stung.
“No, not really. I’m sorry. That’s not fair. You’re just so . . . heterosexual.”
“I am not!” Max protested reflexively.
“You’re not?” Seb’s jaw dropped.
It was Max’s turn to laugh. “No, I am. But I like to think I’m a modern sort of heterosexual. I’m very live-and-let-live.”
Seb smiled. “I meant that you’re such a playboy.”
Right. He used to be, anyway.
“You’ve been chasing girls since you were a teenager.”
“Whatever reputation I have doesn’t mean anything about my character,” Max said, not telling Seb that he was in the middle of the longest dry spell of his life. “Expect a negative reaction from Father, not me.” His stomach grew heavy wondering if perhaps Father had known somehow. If that was what had been behind the tea-party tantrum all those years ago. “You haven’t told Father, have you?”
“God, no. No. I can never do that.”
“You could, though. If you wanted to. I’d have your back.”
“He’d disown me.”
“Probably,” Max agreed. And when Max inherited, he would re-own him. It was a pleasant thought, the idea of undoing some of his father’s damage. One good thing about becoming the duke. “It would definitely mean a change of career, though, as he’d probably have you fired in addition to disowning you.”