Royal Pain (13 page)

She was wearing a stiff-collared white shirt from Anne Fontaine that should have screamed Victorian schoolmarm, but had always made her feel rather naughty. Her short, navy, Marc Jacobs skirt had been another treat, she now realized, in the ongoing, self-prescribed treatments of retail therapy in which she had indulged since moving to New York.

After that, David Bowie and Freddie Mercury were screaming about giving love a chance. Bronte was going to see to it personally that Sarah was burned at the stake for the crime of playing DJ for young lovers.

“Aach, Max. Please don’t do that.”

He pulled away his hand abruptly and Bronte opened her eyes to look at him.

“What are you doing in New York?”

“Business. We have some investments here and my cousin wants me to sit in on some meetings. Strictly silent partner stuff. What about you?”

“I live here.”

“Since when?”

“Since about two weeks after you left me.” The words fell flat. “I mean, since two weeks after you left. I mean… well… you know what I mean.”

“But… why didn’t you tell me?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know… I just couldn’t see the point. You deserve so much more than I…” She stumbled over her words, then sighed. “I’m sorry, Max. I am so sorry. About your father. About everything.”

“It’s all right, Bron. I’m not here to badger you. It was all too much too soon for us, I guess.” He didn’t believe that for a minute, but if it was going to calm her down enough to get her back into his arms, he’d say whatever she needed to hear. “Maybe it is good we had the year apart. I had to spend endless months with the solicitors and the land agents and the stewards and my mother and sisters and brother and cousins and, well, perhaps we both needed that. But that’s all behind us now.”

She looked out the window and tried to hear his words, but the heat of his body was so close it was hard to concentrate. And he kept switching tenses. Was he saying it was all in the past? Herself included? Or was he saying his obligations were behind him? She felt so muddled.

He spoke slowly and gently, looking at his hands in his lap. “I suppose I could have called or pursued you, or whatever after all that settled, but it seemed like you and I were some sort of embalmed memory… that you had gotten your wish and I really was just the Transitional Man. So, after a few months had passed, I sort of figured the ball was in your court, you knew how I felt… how I feel… and that you were finished with me.”

Bronte thought she might throw up.

She very carefully placed her champagne glass down on the coffee table next to Max’s, then roughly wiped away the single tear that was trailing down her left cheek. She hated herself.

“Good God, Max. You make me sound like a beast. You know it wasn’t like that. I was a wreck when you left, but I had just gotten over being a wreck when I met you and I just couldn’t go there again. I called David and Willa the day you got back to England—as I had mentioned in my message, that’s how I got your numbers—and I left you a message at your home, your
castle
, I mean, with that bitch of a housekeeper, and your message back just sounded so… far away. So cordial. So finished. I listened to that message over and over, searching for clues… should I call him? Does he still want me after I let him down? How could he?”

Max felt the heat of renewed possibility burn in his chest as Bronte continued.

“Of course, if I was a mature woman, I would have picked up the phone and we would have struck up a perfectly friendly conversation, but I’m not mature. Especially where you’re concerned… I’m like twelve. And then David and Willa made it pretty fucking clear you were one big royal deal back in jolly old England. I won’t even go into the whole duke situation. I mean, give me a fucking break. How could you not tell me that? What would you want with some—”

“What the hell did David and Willa tell you?” he interrupted. “I asked them about you at my father’s funeral and they were rather tight-lipped about everything. Said you had called for my numbers, almost as a courtesy. I assumed you had asked them to fend me off. What a fucking mess.” Max’s shoulders slumped forward and he ran one hand through his hair in an achingly familiar gesture. It was all Bronte could do
not
to rub her hands along his weary back.

“I want to put my hands in your hair so badly my fingers are cramping,” Bronte whispered haltingly.

Max turned to look at her, mystified. “Then why
aren’t
you? What do you need from me, Bron, to make it all right for you? Do you want a ring? Do you want a proposal? As far as I’m concerned, you already left me standing at the altar.”

“That’s a load of crap and you know it, Max. We
never
talked about the future—”

“Only because it was one of your stupid stipulations—”

“We never talked about kids, where we would live, how we would live, what the fuck? I mean, seriously! Just like that,
poof
, we get married and all that shit just miraculously works itself out? And I would be a duchess? A duchess who says the word
shit
.”

“Pretty much. Yes.”

“Even now you’re acting like I’ve rejected you and you’ve never really even asked me to do anything specific except pack a bag and hop on a private plane with you a year ago. What are you really after, Max? You want the whole deal? Or do you want to have some more great sex—it was great, wasn’t it?” Her voice cracked and he nodded. “Because if that wasn’t great, then I am really
really
in deep shit. Because I thought it was the greatest—”

Max’s patience snapped. He grabbed Bronte’s head in his hands, pressing his palms against her cheeks, strong fingers pushing against her scalp, and gave her a good shake.

“Listen to me right now, Bronte Talbott. You know exactly what I want. I want you. I don’t give a crap about any of that other
shit
, that’s all your
shit
.”

“Being a royal duke is your shit, not my shit—”

“I am not a royal duke!”

“You are royal. And you are a duke, aren’t you?”

He gripped her harder. “Yes, but no!” He shook his head, flustered. “Bronte! Stop! I haven’t been with anyone since I was with you. I can’t even look at another woman without thinking of you. I came to New York on business and was going to fly to Chicago for a couple of days and try to accidentally-on-purpose bump into you. I am desperate for you. Even sitting here right now, it is torture not to rip that sexy-as-all-hell school mistress getup you’ve got on right off your smoking hot body. Let’s go get married right now. Let’s get in a cab and go to City Hall and get married. I want to be with you all the time. I want to hear you say fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck every time you are looking for your cell phone in that absurdly large bag of yours. I want to watch your face when I make you come—”

“Stop! Just stop it!” She shook her head out of his hold, pushing his forearms away with her own. “I haven’t seen you, or even talked to you for that matter, in nearly a year, and just like that I’m supposed to drop everything? You are related to the
queen
for chrissake. That is not nothing—”

“Who’s your great uncle’s daughter?” Max blurted.

“What?”

Slowly, he repeated, “Who is your great uncle’s daughter?”

Bronte looked out the window, knowing where this was leading. “I don’t know. Brockhurst somebody, maybe.”

“Well, that’s how I am related to the queen. It’s so tangential… it matters, of course it matters.” He swept his arms toward the cityscape outside the window. “Out there, it matters. But in here? With us? Come on. I loved that you loved me for me in Chicago. It was just us. The two of us. Alone. No great uncles or even siblings or anything… remember?”

She bit at her bottom lip. She wanted to dive into his arms, of course she did. But Chicago with Max had been a complete vacuum. If her passion for the Texan couldn’t survive the comparatively mild demands of daily life, how would her relationship with Max endure the scrutiny of… she couldn’t even get herself to say it out loud. Royalty. Tabloids. Absurd. Speaking of which… “And what about your blond—”

“Bronte,” he interrupted with a small smile. “I just proposed to you.” He let his index finger run the length of her jaw and watched as her body gave her away, the muscles rippling at his touch. He felt a wave of joy surge through him. In that moment, he knew she was his, not that he was going to say that to her. Until she arrived at that conclusion of her own volition, hurrying her along would only prove counterproductive.

He got up slowly and pulled one of his shirt cuffs so it was even with the other at the edge of his suit coat.

“I will be in New York for a few more days. I’d love to see you. You can reach me at this number if you want to see me.” He placed a small calling card on the coffee table next to her champagne glass. “No ultimatum. No threat. Just the truth.” He leaned down, his lips very close to her neck but not quite kissing her, and whispered, “I love you, Bronte.”

By the time Bronte had recovered her senses, all she caught sight of was his retreating back as he turned out of Sarah’s office. After Sarah showed Max out, she closed the front door to the shop and slid the lock home. She came up the stairs, peeked into her office at Bronte, and clicked her iPod remote to cue a woeful postbreakup ballad.

“Very funny,” said Bronte through the tears that were now streaming unabated down her face. Fat, messy, sniveling, splotchy tears this time.

“Oh, Bron, it can’t be that bad. He’s hot as hell but there are other fish in the sea. You could have a new hot date every weekend.”

Bronte didn’t have the courage to blow her cool-girl cover and tell her friend that she hadn’t even kissed anyone since she’d been with Max.

“Sarah, I think he just proposed to me… I mean, I don’t think he did. He did. And I just sat here like a gaping fish that has flopped ashore, gasping for air. What kind of idiot doesn’t accept a marriage proposal from the Duke of Northrop?”

Sarah’s jaw dropped.

Then she screamed.

“Are you telling me that your Max is Sir Maxwell Fitzwilliam-Heyworth? The Duke of Northrop? Oh, Bronte!” Sarah actually squealed with glee. “This is simply too delicious! I’ve heard his younger brother is quite the tasty morsel. Do you think you could introduce me someti—”

“Earth to Sarah! Grow up! On the one hand, you are a successful businesswoman who quit school at seventeen to design shoes and eight years later here we sit in your shop on Madison Fucking Avenue. On the other hand, you have the emotional intelligence of an eight-year-old.”

“That’s right. And that’s why I surround myself with brilliant, mature women like you to help raise my
E
-
I
-
Q
.”

“I am not a mature woman, by the way. Sophia Loren is a mature woman! I am only five years older than you. Back off on the mature angle, thank you very much.”

“At least you’re not crying like a big bawling baby anymore.”

Sarah’s accompanying smile did have a wonderfully calming effect on Bronte’s frayed nerves. Having spent her entire short life bucking every expectation that had been made of her, Sarah was not really the emotional eight-year-old that Bronte accused her of being. In fact, Bronte’s utter lack of trust in the male of the species held her place far more securely in the emotional immaturity hall of fame.

Sarah refilled their glasses of champagne and passed Bronte’s flute back to her.

“Let me gather up all my crap and we can go get a drink-drink at that sexy new bar around the corner. Okay?” Sarah leaned away from her desk and began sorting through the papers she wanted to take home with her that night.

Bronte let her mind wander as her tears abated. She had recently read an obituary about a novelist who wrote primarily about what would now be referred to as her dysfunctional family. Back in the seventies, an interviewer had asked about her inspiration, and she had remarked—rather blithely, Bronte thought—about her father’s rages that would sometimes last for three days at a clip. Bronte had to turn the page of the paper before the red heat of anger, shame, and embarrassment washed over her, right there on the Lexington Avenue subway.

Her own father’s rage had seemed like a constant hum in the background of her life. Percolating. Occasionally shutting off and on like the central air-conditioning in her apartment, but only in order to maintain the same constant temperature of antagonism, resentment, and fury.

Lionel Talbott had died of an aneurysm during Bronte’s freshman year at Cal, when, after a year and a half away, Bronte had finally come home for Christmas. She had gone through all the motions of grief, but ultimately Bronte had been relieved he was gone; there had just been too much about him that she despised for her to pretend otherwise. She had headed back to Berkeley nine days after the funeral and resumed her classes without even telling her roommate what had happened.

Her mother, on the other hand, had been devastated.

Bronte was an only child, and she and her mother had always been painfully close—an intimacy that was partially fostered by the need to bolster one another against the constant negativity that Lionel’s grim presence rained down upon them.

He had never beaten them or anything.
He was an academic, after all
, Bronte thought snidely. He was far too intelligent to bother with physical abuse; it would be like asking a surgeon to use a blunt instrument. He was just mean.

Bronte’s mother was one of the top English teachers in the New Jersey public school system, but her father had never ceased to remind her that she was only a “schoolteacher,” not a “professor” like he was. The fact that he had not professed jack-shit for nearly ten years before his death didn’t seem to bear close inspection, at least to his way of thinking.

After the Princeton showdown and Bronte’s subsequent departure for California, however, Cathy and Lionel Talbott had mended much of their broken relationship. Bronte didn’t like to look too closely at the fact that her absence may have accounted for her parents’ renewed happiness.