She shook her head and started backing away. “I thought you were my friend.” Her voice had cracked on that last sentence.
“I am your friend.” Oh, god. He hoped that was still true. “I—”
She held up her hands, gesturing for him to stop talking, and she kept backing away. She backed herself all the way to the adjoining door. “If you’re my friend, you will stop talking right now. If you’re my friend, you will leave me alone for a while.”
He nodded. What choice did he have?
“I’m going to go now.”
“Will you let me know when you’re ready to talk?” he asked quietly, his mind whirring as he tried to think how, when she was ready, he could repair the damage he had done.
What he didn’t realize until after spending the morning “leaving her alone,” as she had asked, was that not only had she backed out of his room, she had backed her way out of the hotel, out of the continent, and out of his life.
Dani called Leo on the way to the airport. She hated to interrupt his honeymoon, but it couldn’t be avoided. “Can you do me a favor and get a message to Mr. Benz?”
“What? Where are you? Are you okay?”
No. She was not okay. Her whole world had been upended, and she had lost her best friend. But she couldn’t say that to Leo, who was supposed to be her best friend.
She never should have allowed Max to displace him. The only way she could think to explain it was the lobster-in-a-pot analogy. Max was always there, and he was so warm. He’d kept her so safe and cozy that she didn’t notice the temperature rising to lethal levels until it was too late.
She considered lying, making up some reason she needed to talk to Mr. Benz, but Leo would find out soon enough. “I’m going home. I’m on my way to the airport. I’m taking a puddle jumper to Zurich and a taxi from there to the palace to pick up Max, then back to Zurich for a flight home. Could you ask Mr. Benz to round up Max? I should be there in about four hours.” She didn’t have a lot of time to spare, given the flights she’d hastily booked, and she wanted to make sure her dog wasn’t being taken on a mountain jaunt or something when she arrived to collect him.
“Hang on.” There was some murmuring, and Dani tried not to lose her cool. She would have preferred to make her exit with only Leo knowing about it, but there was no way that was happening. And it wasn’t like Max himself wouldn’t tell Marie. For all she knew, he already had. He had respected her desire for privacy this morning, but had it lasted? Eventually he would have knocked on the adjoining door and found her gone.
Leo came back on the line. “Marie says she’ll ask Mr. Benz to have someone drive Max to Zurich to meet you.”
She waited for more, but miraculously, that was it. “Thank you.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I really don’t.” Though she knew she wasn’t going to get away with that forever. “Not yet. I need some time alone. Call me when you get back?” He hesitated. “Leo. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.” It was, she was pretty sure, a lie. But no need to ruin his honeymoon.
“All right. But you call me if you need me, okay?”
“Yes.”
Less than an hour later, Dani was on a plane. As it taxied along the runway, which was surrounded by mountains silhouetted against a setting sun, she realized that her worst fear, the one she had told herself was utterly irrational, the one that had stopped her from sleeping with any of the Tinder guys, had come true.
She’d had sex with someone and gotten her heart broken in the process.
The worst part was she had slept with Max because he wasn’t one of the Tinder dudes, because he was supposed to be safe.
No, the worst part, the part that made a pit of shame open up in her stomach when she thought about it, was that she had wanted to say yes. She had wanted to say, Yes, I will upend my entire life and stay here with you.
She had fallen in love with Max. That was the terrible truth.
But at least she had her list. And it had saved her in the end, hadn’t it? The list was supposed to keep her from making a mistake, from gradually subsuming her life into that of a man—a man who didn’t love her. And Max didn’t love her. Not like that. No lying, he had said. Relentless honesty. Max would never tell her something that wasn’t true.
And he hadn’t. He hadn’t said, “Marry me because I love you. Move in with me because I love you.” No, it had just been another business arrangement with a friend, like he’d had with Marie.
But it wasn’t his fault. He had never misrepresented himself to her. He had told her, time and again, that he wasn’t capable of love.
It wasn’t his fault she’d fallen in love with him. So really, she had only herself to blame.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Two weeks went by without a word from Dani, and Max was as gutted as ever.
He’d thought about calling, had written and deleted a thousand texts. But what would he say? She had specifically asked him to leave her alone, had said she would let him know when he was ready to talk.
After Vince left, I realized that he never listened to me.
That was what she’d said about Vince. The topic had come up several times. Max would let himself die of heartbreak before he’d be like Vince fucking Ricci. Clearly, he had already misstepped by cornering Dani with an unwelcome proposal. He wasn’t about to do it again.
But Max didn’t know what to do with radio silence from Dani. It was turning him into a captive animal pacing a too-small cage. He had told her about his fears and his secret ambitions. He had told her about the pain he had never thought to try to put into words. He had looked at her and allowed a blade made of ruthlessness and tenderness in equal measures to pierce him.
And now she was gone, and he was still bleeding.
What had he been thinking? He hadn’t been, clearly. He’d just been so swept off his feet.
His phone rang, and as it did every time, he jumped. Every call, every text notification, had him falling over himself to see if it was her. And if not her, he hoped for his brother.
It was Marie, and he didn’t answer it. She was due back, so it made sense that she was calling, but he didn’t want to talk to her. She would have some version of tough love to lay on him, which ordinarily would have been fine—ordinally he might even have signed himself up for it—but Max really didn’t want to start up some kind of childish “Don’t tell Leo I said this, because he might tell Dani” chain.
He wanted his brother.
The phone rang again, startling a small smile out of him. Finally. He fumbled to answer it. “Are you back?” Max was still in the hotel in Innsbruck. Every day he woke up and told himself today was the day he’d go home. And every afternoon before checkout, he called the front desk and extended his reservation. Going home to Riems felt like too much. That last disastrous dinner aside, he and Dani had had such a wonderful time there. He didn’t know how to go up to the attic and find her not there.
“I’m on the way home,” Seb said. “We just landed in Zurich.”
“Is Torkel driving you?” His own situation aside, Max wanted to meet Torkel outside the context of the palace.