All right, then. She was sad—gutted, really—but it was a relief to have thought things through.
The question was: What happened next? She was still angry at Max for thinking she would upend her life to indulge his whims. But was she going to throw out their entire relationship because he had made an error of judgment? No, she was going to tell him he’d hurt her feelings, apologize for running away, and make things right with her friend. She would keep her true feelings to herself. She would live through her own personal romantic tragedy. She had done it before, and she could do it again. The heartbreak would fade—eventually—and she’d still have Max.
Assuming she got off her ass and called him.
Her phone rang before she could pick it up. She harbored a momentary hope that it would be him, but she knew even before the call display showed Leo’s name that it wouldn’t. She had told him not to contact her, and Max listened.
Well, Leo would do. She needed to apologize to him, too. She hadn’t been very reasonable last night.
“Leo. I’m—”
“Max’s father died this evening.”
She gasped. Max Minimus started whining, as if he knew somehow. “What happened?”
“Keeled over at the dinner table. Heart attack. There’s going to be an autopsy, but the leading theory is that all the drinking did a number on his cardiovascular system.” Leo paused. “Though I’m not convinced it wasn’t shock. But I’m not supposed to say that, as apparently Sebastien is racked with guilt.”
“Sebastien? Why?”
“This all went down at a dinner in which Sebastien came out to his parents and Max told them he was moving off the estate.”
“Moving? Where was he going?”
“New York.”
“What?”
“He got a job with the design firm that’s working on the mine project. He was going to get a place in New York.”
“Why?”
“Hmm. I wonder.”
Maybe Dani wasn’t the only one who hadn’t told the entire truth that morning in Innsbruck?
“He was going to take a red-eye that landed in New York on the eleventh. He was strangely adamant about the timing. I think it had something to do with a movie you watched with him once? He said there was a line in it about telling the truth on Christmas?”
At Christmas you tell the truth.
Oh god. Did she dare hope that his truth was the same as hers?
Did it matter? If it was truth-telling season?
All right. New plan: She was going to tell him everything. She was going to tell him she’d fallen in love with him. If he didn’t return her feelings, they’d deal with it together. But she let herself hope that maybe this wasn’t going to be a tragedy after all.
“You said was, past tense. Max was coming here, but now he’s not?”
“Well, that was before his father keeled over. He can’t leave now. He’s the duke.”
Max was actually the duke.
She got up, yanked open her closet to grab her suitcase, and said, “I’ll be on a plane tomorrow.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“I’ve got to call Dani,” Max said to Sebastien close to midnight at the end of a whirlwind day, his first full day as the duke. “First thing tomorrow.” It was a pity his apartment-in-New-York plan had been derailed by Father’s death. And that his perfectly timed trip couldn’t be made. But Dani still had to know how he felt, so a phone call would have to do. “In fact, I should do it now.” He wasn’t sure what was stopping him. Well, he did know: abject fear.
“Mmm,” Sebastien said noncommittally, looking at his phone, which wasn’t like him—Seb always gave him his full attention. They were sitting in Father’s library, but Seb’s mind was elsewhere.
No, they were sitting in Max’s library.
No, they were sitting in their library. As Max had told Laurent, the estate’s steward, he was committed to a new way of doing things. And even if he didn’t know exactly what that was yet, he knew that it involved collaboration with his brother.
“I’m thinking we should hire a new head of security for the estate,” Max said loudly, which still didn’t get Seb’s attention. “Perhaps Torkel. How much do you think we’d have to pay him to lure him away from the palace? It would be a bit of a comedown, I suppose, in professional terms, to go from being the head of security for the king to being the head of security for a mere duke. I may have to think of some other perks I can offer him.”
By the time Max was done that little speech, Seb had tuned back in and was shaking his head with an exasperated smile. “You’ve got to call Dani,” he said. “I heard you. I think you should go to New York now.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You were planning to go there tomorrow, yes?”
“Yes, but that was before Father died. That’s when I thought I was going to be moving there.”
“You can still get an apartment there. If you leave now, you can still make it in time for your ridiculously romantic December 11 gesture.”
“But there’s so much to do here.”
“It can wait. Laurent said as much.”
“Mother is—”
“Mother is what? She’s shut up in her rooms, and I doubt we’ll see her for days.”
It was true. Max had accepted, the night of Marie’s wedding, that Mother was never going to be who he wanted her to be. But somehow, he still hadn’t expected her to sink into abject and total sorrow at Father’s passing the way she had. He’d thought her more cunning than that. But she seemed genuinely felled by grief and had been barricaded in the ducal apartment, refusing visitors.
“I can deal with her if she needs dealing with.” Seb grinned and typed something into his phone.
Honestly. “If I’m getting in the way of you texting your boyf—”
“Max.” Seb set down his phone. “What have we learned in the last year?”
“What do you mean?”
Seb rolled his eyes. “We’ve learned that love is more important than duty, you numbskull.”
Could Max really do this? Could he just get up and fly to New York and leave the mountain of bureaucracy that needed his attention? Decide to scale it later? “Do you really think I can—”
“Excuse me, Your Grace.”
It took Max a moment to realize that he was the Your Grace in question. He turned to the door to find Mr. Benz? “What are you doing here?” Although perhaps this was something that happened when one was a duke—the king’s equerry showed up unannounced.
“I understand you will be traveling to New York,” Mr. Benz said.
Sebastien smirked and set down his phone.
“What did you do?” Max said to his brother.
“I’ve taken the liberty of booking you a flight,” Mr. Benz went on, “but we need to leave now.”
Max shook his head at his grinning brother. “All right. Let me pack a few things.”
“No time,” Mr. Benz said brusquely, handing him a leather envelope. “Here are the necessary documents. You can get anything else you need in New York. I have a car waiting.”