“Do you think Sebastien will come out?”
He thought back to Seb’s statement about not wanting to hide anymore. “I think he will.”
“How is that going to go over?”
“I don’t know.” He cast his mind back to his confrontation with his mother, which, remarkably, had been only an hour ago. “But I do know that things are changing around here.”
“What does that mean?”
“Have you ever thought about how in English, the word abandon has two vastly different meanings? To abandon someone is to leave them, but to do something with abandon is to really throw yourself into it?”
“Are they really all that different? If you’re doing something with abandon, it means you don’t care about the consequences. You’re leaving behind the consequences, in a way.”
“Hmm.” It was odd. If Max thought objectively about everything that was swirling around in his mind—the fact that he’d had sex with Dani, first and foremost, but also Seb and Torkel, Seb’s potential coming out, the idea of changing how he related to his parents, it should have made him uncomfortable. Hell, it should have made him panic.
But somehow, lying next to Dani, he was calm. As settled as he’d ever felt in his life. It was that same feeling of embodiment from earlier, but this time he also felt like his spirit, for lack of a better word, was involved. Everything felt profoundly right, so right he wasn’t worried about any of the upheaval that was to come. He welcomed it, in a way, if it would allow for more of this settled feeling.
“Do you really not have a condom?” Dani sounded incredulous.
“I really do not have a condom.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t expect to be having sex here.” He would have thought that was obvious.
“You didn’t expect to be having sex at a wedding? Aren’t weddings a major place where people hook up? Weren’t you trying to break your dry spell?”
He didn’t know what to say to that. He distinctly remembered going through his travel toiletries case to come here and dispassionately thinking, Toothbrush, check; toothpaste, check; deodorant, check; condoms, don’t need those.
“What about Lavinia?”
“What about her?”
“You were laughing with her when you came into the reception. You were late because of her. I had to start the toasts.”
Oh. He hadn’t made the mental leap from “hooking up at a wedding” to Lavinia the way Dani apparently had. “All right. You got me,” he said, trying for humor. “Lavinia and I were doing it in the coatroom. That’s why I was late.”
It didn’t work. She didn’t even smile.
Was she jealous? Was he a monster for wanting her to be? “I was laughing with Lavinia because, to my great surprise, she suggested a little subterfuge to get both sets of parents off our backs. We decided to be seen looking cozy, to make people fill in the blanks.” He wagged his eyebrows, trying again to amuse Dani. “Apparently it worked.”
She still didn’t laugh. “So Lavinia does have a sense of fun?”
“Pardon me?”
“You said you weren’t going to marry her because she didn’t have a sense of fun. She seems to have one after all.”
“I suppose she does.” He had indeed misjudged Lavinia based on that first meeting.
Dani raised her eyebrows as if she was coming to some conclusion that was supposed to be obvious.
Again, he had to wonder if she was jealous. Was that even possible? And again, why did that give him a little thrill?
He thought back to that night at the cottage, when she’d quizzed him about Lavinia, making jokes about them hyphenating their names. He’d snapped at her and felt bad about it immediately. Now, like then, he wished he could rewind. He was not the sort of person who played games, so he set out to explain, to ease her mind if it needed easing.
“I’m not going to marry Lavinia,” he said carefully, trying to sound as though he meant it, because he did, but trying not to be so vehement that he sounded angry. “I was never going to marry Lavinia.” He found himself in uncharted territory, wanting to reassure a woman that he only wanted her. But leave it to him to find the only woman in the world for whom such a declaration would be a death knell. Even though she apparently didn’t want him to want Lavinia? He was confused. He didn’t like being confused.
“I should go,” Dani said suddenly.
Ah. He had not said the right thing. He should have continued to laugh off her questions about Lavinia.
“It’s late,” she said, “and we have to leave early.”
“All right,” Max said, and it was all he could do not to grab her hand, to say, Stay. But he knew enough not to do that.
When she left, he lay back down. That feeling of being perfectly balanced in his own body and mind was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
When Dani saw Max the next morning, the weirdness that had characterized the end of their time together last night had, thankfully, evaporated. He winked at her as she strode across the foyer to join him where he was standing with Marie and Leo. “Sorry I’m late,” she said, trying to inject into her words a breeziness she did not feel.
“Overslept?” Max inquired mildly, but with a twinkle in his eye that told her everything was fine between them.
She sent him a private eye roll, but she was hugely relieved, so she couldn’t help sending mixed messages by pairing the eye roll with a smile. She was embarrassed by how she’d overreacted to his having a laugh with Lavinia. But it was okay. Max understood her. He had seen her fears and witnessed her less flattering moments, and it hadn’t changed anything between them.
Well, it had changed the fact that her ever-simmering attraction to him could now be acted on. That wasn’t “normal,” but it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be acted on now, but a person couldn’t have everything.
“Last night was rather exhausting, wasn’t it?” Marie said.
Max cleared his throat obnoxiously.
“I was trying to find my dog to say goodbye,” Dani said, shooting Max a look. Max Minimus was staying at the palace while Dani and Max toured Austria. “Gabby came to get him earlier this morning and spirited him off. This place is so big, it took me a while to find them.”
A few hours later, they checked into their hotel rooms in Innsbruck. Marie and Leo had a honeymoon suite on the top floor and Dani and Max had adjoining rooms the next floor down.
She wondered how things were going to go. Were they going to have sex again? She hoped so, and they’d joked about needing more condoms, but that was before things had gotten a little awkward. As Dani and Max opened the doors to their rooms, he winked at her, and, okay, yes, they were going to have sex again. She dropped her suitcase inside her door and without turning on any lights went straight to the adjoining door and yanked it open.
He had done the same with his door but was slightly ahead of her so he was already waiting for her.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi,” he echoed, as he had done last night. Max never used the word hi in real life. He was too posh for that. He always said the full hello.