“Which isn’t, in itself, a bad thing,” he added, “but we had a wedding to get through.” He smiled, a little half smile, and he looked more like his usual self, even if it was a sad half smile. “That’s done now.”
“So now it’s okay for me to see everything?” she whispered.
“You already saw almost everything. So what’s another inch? What’s the last little bit?” The sad smile turned almost unbearably fond, and even though it was him saying he was showing her everything, she felt almost painfully vulnerable, like she was made of new skin forming under a bandage that someone had ripped off too soon.
She knew what they were talking about. Even though they were speaking in strangely cryptic terms, she knew what “everything” meant. But she wanted explicit, verbal confirmation. “‘Everything’ being that you want to have sex. With me.”
He did not hesitate before saying, simply, “Yes.”
Yes. She wanted that, too. Hadn’t she always? Or at least for a long time? Hadn’t she wanted him to the exclusion of others—hence her Tinder problem?
“Yes,” he said again, taking his palm from her and laying it on his chest. He sounded . . . devastated.
Yes. The word rose through her consciousness every time he said it.
“I guess now that I’m not married, I’m eligible under your rules of engagement.”
There was a pause before he said, “That’s true.”
“And I’m certainly not trying to entrap you.” She tried to laugh but found she couldn’t get the sound around a lump rising in her throat. What was the matter with her? Max had propositioned her a bunch of times, early in their acquaintance. This wasn’t new. What was new was that she was going to say yes.
There was another pause. “Right.”
“And there will be no lying on either of our parts,” she said. “We both know what this is—and isn’t. So that leaves the rule about doing it on your turf. How do we handle that one? Is your room here sufficient? It’s like a hotel room, right?”
He blinked about a thousand times. “I don’t think that rule matters in this case.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve never had sex with someone I—”
“What?”
“With someone I . . . already trust. With a friend.” He scrunched up his face like he’d tasted something bad.
She smiled. He was so himself, and so dear to her. “And we’d still be friends, right? After?”
“Yes,” he said, so vehemently that it made his voice crack.
“So . . . when do we do this?”
The sour face was replaced by a more familiar grin. “No time like the present?”
And just like that, all the seriousness and intensity of the day, of the moment, was gone, shed like an old skin, and Max was back. She laughed. “We can’t bail on the wedding to go have sex.”
“I’m fairly certain we can do whatever we want, but all right.” He took a step back. “Meet me outside my room when this bloody evening is over. It’s in the northwest wing on the third floor. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes.” He took another step. She so very much didn’t want him to go. “Do you want to dance later?”
“No.”
“No?” she echoed laughingly.
“I can’t dance with you,” he scoffed.
“Why not?”
“I can’t touch you. God. I can’t even look at you.”
“But you’re going to do a lot more than—”
He held up a hand. “Later. That’s later. I’ll see you later.”
“Are you going to go back to ignoring me until then?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Chapter Nineteen
At least I have Lavinia, Max thought to himself as he twirled his unexpected ally around the ballroom. At least I have Lavinia was not a sentence he had ever imagined himself thinking.
As was typical for Eldovian weddings, the regular dancing was interspersed with formal waltzes and traditional folk dances. “If you dance the ländler with me later, our parents will die of happiness,” she said, breathless and pink-cheeked from the fast-paced waltz.
“Grand idea,” he said.
“But perhaps that is too much.” She frowned as she looked over his shoulder.
“No, no. This was a brilliant idea.”
That night in Riems, after the disastrous dinner, Lavinia had shocked Max by proposing they join forces at the wedding to keep their parents at bay. “What if we give them what they want?” she’d asked. “Or I should say, what if we appear to give them what they want? That way we can actually enjoy ourselves without feeling that we need to be constantly looking over our shoulders. And also, your father won’t . . .”
“Ruin Marie’s wedding by throwing a tantrum?” Max had supplied, marveling over how thoroughly he had misjudged Lavinia at that first meeting in New York.
He had happily signed on to her diabolical plan. She had been correct in that their ploy had effectively neutered their parents. As for her other argument, he couldn’t really say he was having fun without having to look over his shoulder. But that wasn’t a flaw in her plan so much as it was about the fact that Dani would not sit still. He’d meant what he said earlier. He didn’t want to be near her until this interminable evening was over. He couldn’t look at her. If he had to, he was at risk of throwing her over his shoulder caveman-style and carrying her out of here regardless of the fallout it would create.
He felt trapped in his own skin. As if he were on fire, and not in a good way.
But what could he do but focus on Lavinia and try to act normal? Even if he wasn’t sure what that meant anymore.
A few hours later, he had danced the ländler, eaten cake, and endured a long conversation about the king’s decision to make some changes to Morneau, the royal family’s watch company, when his mother appeared at his side.
“Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs.”
Other than a brief conversation in the receiving line after the ceremony, he’d succeeded in his mission to avoid his parents. But he couldn’t avoid this. “Max, darling, I’d like to take your father upstairs” was code for “Your father is drunker than usual and about to embarrass us.” Max and his mother had an unspoken agreement to put aside their differences and join forces to extract his father in these sorts of situations.
Max sighed. “Where is he?”
“He’s talking politics with Lucille Müller.”
Lucille Müller was the leader of the far-left opposition party in Parliament. She was not a good person for Father to be talking to, especially if he’d been keeping up his usual pace at the bar. Remarkably, Max hadn’t been counting this evening. He looked around for Sebastien, who apparently hadn’t been counting either, because he was nowhere to be seen. “All right. Let’s go.” He steeled himself.
In some ways, even with all the chaos and unkindness that characterized his family interactions, these rare moments when his mother asked for his help managing his father were the worst. They didn’t happen very often. Only when they were in public and there wasn’t household staff on hand.