He didn’t know how she had intended to finish that sentence, but he supposed if you were the younger daughter of Harald and Larissa von Bachenheim and you had an intellectual bent, life could be difficult. “When one is expected to ‘marry well’?” Max finished.
“Yes,” she said vehemently. “You know.”
“I do indeed.”
“I thought, well, perhaps you wouldn’t be the worst option, given my circumstances.” She winced. “That sounds terrible. I’m sorry. I’m not good at this. I’m socially awkward.”
“On the contrary, you were very kind at dinner. There’s no need to apologize. I know exactly what you mean.”
“I had no idea you were attached. The last thing I’d ever want to do is come between you and your girlfriend.”
“Daniela is not my girlfriend,” he said reflexively.
She looked at him for a long time. “But you wish she was, yes?”
He was all geared up to deny. Deflect. I am not the girlfriend type.
But it wasn’t true. It used to be. It used to be so true, it had felt like an immutable part of him.
If the past week, with all its talking and cavorting, felt like a movie montage, he knew what kind of movie it was. A romance. Or, worse, one of those dreadful Hallmark movies Americans seemed to love where they just made up a fake European country so they could have a fairy tale free from the inconvenient constraints of reality.
Given his aversion to self-deception, Max had to face the truth. He might not be the girlfriend type, but he was, it seemed the Daniela Martinez type.
He had a full-on crush on Dani. He eyed Lavinia. How had he ever thought she was naive?
She flashed him another of her sad smiles. “It’s complicated for people like us, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he agreed.
The smile turned warmer. “But Daniela is rather wonderful, isn’t she?”
What could he do but agree again? “She is.”
“Max,” Lavinia said, “I have an idea. For how we could help each other.”
Dani was sitting at her desk in the attic when Max arrived back at the cottage. “Knock, knock,” he said from the bottom of the stairs.
“Come on up.”
She turned in her chair as he appeared through the trapdoor, illuminated from below by light from the kitchen. He paused, and they looked at each other for a long moment. He was so dear to her, this man who saw her like no one else ever had.
“I’m sorry,” they said in unison, and it had the effect of breaking the aura of heaviness surrounding them.
“Why on earth are you sorry?” He crossed to the bed and flopped on it backward, his head at the bottom and his stockinged feet up by the headboard, like he was too tired to lay down the right way, forget walking the extra ten steps to the sitting area.
She got up and joined him, but she sat with her back to the headboard. “Because your parents are horrible.” She winced. “I’m sorry.” She winced again. “I already said that. I’m sorry your parents are horrible, but I’m also sorry I said they were horrible.”
“They are horrible.” He shrugged like that was the normal way of things, which she supposed it was. “It’s just that their horribleness is usually aimed at me, not at innocent bystanders,” he said to the ceiling. “And believe it or not, it’s usually much worse. That was them tempering themselves because they had an audience.”
“I guess they didn’t want to make a bad impression on the people they hope will be future in-laws.”
“Mmm.”
She’d expected a more dramatic reaction, for him to shudder and fall back on his usual refrain about how he was never going to marry. “Lavinia doesn’t seem so bad?” she ventured, though she had no idea why.
He looked up sharply—he had still been staring at the ceiling. “Not bad as in I should marry her or not bad as in she’s a decent human being?”
“I don’t know,” she said, though in her mind she was strongly going for option B. “She seems too young for you.”
“She’s only four years younger than I am.”
“Right.”
“You’re four years older than I am,” he said.
“Well, I’m not going to marry you.”
“I know that. I merely meant that four years is not that big a gap when you click with someone.”
When you click with someone. Did that mean he thought they clicked? That was flattering. And true. Obviously. She wouldn’t be here in his attic in the freaking Eldovian Alps otherwise, stretched out on a bed with him. Platonically stretched out, but still. Or, wait, did that mean he thought he and Lavinia clicked?
“What if you did marry Lavinia von Bachenheim?” She had an illogical impulse to keep questioning him on the topic, like being unable to stop probing a toothache with her tongue.
“I’m not going to marry Lavinia von Bachenheim. She has no sense of fun.”
“Yeah, but if you did? And what if she wanted to hyphenate her name? Would she be Lavinia von Bachenheim-von Hansburg? Or Lavinia von Bachenheim-Hansburg? Or maybe, since you’re such a progressive dude, you could combine your names and be Max and Lavinia von von Bachenheim-Hansburg. Or—”
“I’m not going to marry Lavinia,” he snapped.
She blinked, not at all accustomed to such a harsh tone from Max. “Sheesh. Okay.”
He rolled onto his side and propped his head on one hand. “I’m sorry. I’m being a beast.”
“Is Sebastien single? I know you said you won’t walk away and leave him to shoulder the burden of being heir, but maybe if he was happily coupled, it wouldn’t be such a burden.” She knew she was grasping at straws, but now that she’d seen what kind of pressure Max was under, she wished there was a way for him to get out from under his duty.
Max chuckled. “Sebastien is apparently not single, but Sebastian, it turns out, is also not straight.”
“Really?” She was surprised Max hadn’t told her. Also a little hurt. She’d thought they told each other everything.
“Yeah. He told me he was gay the day you arrived. I would have told you,” he said, addressing her unarticulated wound, “but I wasn’t sure if it was my place. He didn’t specifically ask me not to, but I thought I should keep his confidence. I was the first person he told—other than the mystery man he is apparently seeing.”
“Wow! Of course I won’t tell anyone. You can trust me.”
“I know. I do.” He was giving her a strangely intense look. She’d been getting more of those lately, but this one was on steroids. His brow was furrowed, and if she didn’t know better, she would have said he was angry over the fact that he trusted her. But then his face relaxed. “As it relates to Sebastien, I must now double down on my original stance that I can’t leave him to shoulder the burden of being heir. Can you imagine? My god, my parents would probably make him marry a woman, and he’d probably go along with it to keep the peace.”
“What if your brother walked away, too?” she asked. “Is there a dreadful, social-climbing cousin in line like in Jane Austen novels?”
He chuckled. “There is a cousin. He’s seven. I can’t quite see my way through to dumping this all on a seven-year-old.” He sat up and spun himself so he was right way round on the bed, next to her. “Listen. I appreciate that you’re trying to solve my problems, but they’re fundamentally unsolvable. We need to talk about what we do now.”