Royal Pain (19 page)

She glanced away from the window and back at Max; her stomach lurched—love? terror? He was gesturing wildly with his hands as he was describing how his younger brother, Devon, used to run up behind the horse that Max was riding and jump up on its bare back, the two of them whooping and screeching and looking like nothing so much as the itinerant Romany gypsies that still came to Dunlear to trade horses.

Max proceeded to do a wonderful impersonation of his mother—or what Bronte assumed was a wonderful impersonation, because she had never encountered the original—his voice raised to a feminine octave, strained and clipped with lofty disdain.

“Please refrain from your carnival antics when we have company, children,” he crowed. When Max and Devon were twelve and ten, he explained, they were ill equipped to deal with the subtle nuances of their mother’s idea of what constituted “company.” More or less throwing his mother under the proverbial bus, he continued apace.

“How were we supposed to know the difference between Reggie, the Duke of Wellington, and Reggie, the nice man who trained the horses between indiscretions with the local physician’s assistant? Our father never seemed to differentiate, and we were simply young and eager to show off our grand skills!”

Cathy was wiping at the tears of mirth that had formed at the corners of her eyes as her laughter subsided. “Max, you really shouldn’t mock your mother, even though you are quite good at it; it’s very cruel,” she said, but she smiled good-naturedly, and Bronte was glad. “Parents everywhere suffer, you know, trying to appear supremely consistent and reliable; meanwhile, their children lie in wait, gleefully anticipating their missteps: ‘You said—’ or ‘You promised—’ It is an endless, and necessarily losing, battle”—she turned meaningfully to Bronte—“to live up to your own child’s infinite trust.”

Bronte looked down into her now-empty iced tea glass, rattled the remaining ice for a second, then returned the glass carefully to the lovely round serving tray. “Point taken, Mom. Where is Dad’s manuscript?”

“Come along, Max. I am sure Bronte will want you to see her childhood room, where she dreamed of her escape from this painfully mundane existence.”

Her mother’s complete absence of malice would never cease to amaze her. Coming from anyone else, that comment would have struck Bronte as petty or spiteful, whereas Cathy Talbott was simply stating a fact: Bronte
had
spent hours, years really, planning her escape from this mundane existence.

***

Max and Bronte were on their way back into the city after a festive dinner at the little Lebanese restaurant in Hoboken. Cathy and Max had split a bottle of white wine as Bronte meditated on the completely unfamiliar (yet comforting) joy of watching two of her favorite people genuinely enjoying one another’s company. Mr. Texas had always found Cathy a bit grating.

“Whenever we go to visit her house, I feel like I am about to break something,” he’d remarked defensively after one particularly chafing visit.

Bronte smiled sardonically to herself at the now-glaring irony, seeing that
she
was the one who ended up broken and she would have been wise to heed her mother’s barely concealed skepticism of Mr. Texas, the good old boy.

“What are you not really smiling about?” Max’s arm was loosely resting across Bronte’s back, his middle finger grazing her upper arm.

“Just remembering other maternal visits with other men.”

“Good, as long as that bitter grin is never the result of one of my visits. Your mother is an angel, by the way.”

“Well, if she likes you, of course, that is certainly the case. If you happen to, shall we say, question her authority, she’s somewhat demonic in her affect.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I think
you
would have to grow horns and a spiked tail and carry a red pitchfork for her to even begin to contemplate your less-than-perfectness.”

“It’s nice to know I have someone firmly in my camp.”

“What do you mean by ‘someone in your camp’?”

“I mean, the way you’ve been talking about our life together, you make it sound like an uphill climb… in the snow… both ways.”

“As my mother made perfectly clear over dinner, I tend to be difficult.”

“Now, that’s an interesting point.” His hand was wandering again. “I think you have this view of yourself as one tough customer, as the saying goes, but in reality I think you are really all warm and soft and gooey inside.” His hand was moving up under her shirt, then trailing one mischievous finger along the waistband of her white jeans. Her entire abdomen rippled in response.

“Well,” she sighed, “I think you’re the first person to think so. Unless you mean soft as in soft in the head.”

“Very funny, you self-deprecating wench.” He pulled his trailing finger from her waist, brought both of his hands up to her cheeks, and turned her to face him.

She tried halfheartedly to look away, but he held her gaze and the air seemed to suddenly quiet around them. “I like when you call me ‘wench,’” she whispered. “It makes me feel like I am the tavern maid and you’re the local gentry.”

“Look at me, Bronte. See me loving you right now. There is nothing else. I don’t think there’s anything you could do to drive me away—not that I want you to try, mind you—but whatever’s gnawing—”

She simply closed the distance of a few inches between them and captured his mouth in a kiss of depth and passion.

After that, neither of them knew what happened.

When the driver rapped his knuckles twice, sharply, on the Plexiglas divider, Bronte felt as if she were coming up from an early diving expedition, with a monstrous diving bell being unscrewed with wrenches to let the decompression begin, ears popping. Her eyes were dark with longing as Max slowly took his hands out of her tangled hair, where he had apparently been gripping her in a mindless thrall.

“Holy fuck,” Bronte muttered.

“My thoughts exactly.”

Max slowly got out of the Lincoln Town Car on the street side, walked around the front of the car in a daze, then leaned into the front passenger-side window. He’d never broken his old habit of paying London cab drivers from the sidewalk.

Bronte leaned down toward the floor of the backseat and retrieved the burgundy canvas tote bag her mother had given her to carry the nine composition books that contained her father’s novel. She quashed a momentary impulse to accidentally-on-purpose forget the bag in the dark well under the front seat.

Max had opened the door to let her out and was gazing down at her bent back. “Don’t even think about it, Bronte.”

“Whatever do you mean, Your Grace?” She got out of the car and tossed the tote bag casually over one shoulder, carrying it with two fingers like her long overdue dry cleaning.

“You know damn well what I mean. If you are going to dismiss your father’s writing out of hand, at least let me take a look at it. And no leaving it in the back of an anonymous dial-a-car.”

“Oh, very well.” She smiled and said good night to her doorman as they passed through the lobby of her building and headed up to her apartment. As soon as the elevator doors began to close, Max pressed the full length of his body up against Bronte, pushing her forcibly back against the elevator wall.

“Now where were we?” Max’s voice was a low growl.

“Here is good.” Bronte brought her lips up to his and lost herself again in the depth of their kiss. There was no preamble, no reconnect; it was like plugging into a full-on electrical socket. The elevator doors opened at the ninth floor and Bronte’s eighty-four-year-old neighbor was standing there waiting to get on. Bronte and Max awkwardly disentangled themselves from one another then made their way past the wide-eyed, but hardly surprised, Mrs. Johannssen. Max held Bronte’s hand as they walked down the short hall and into Bronte’s apartment.

“I like how you like to hold hands,” she said.

“I am certainly glad to hear it, Bron.”

“No, I mean, I like the heat and the whatever that was in the car—what was that by the way? I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so bowled over by a kiss… something in that Lebanese wine?” She put the tote bag with her father’s notebooks down on the kitchen counter and turned to see Max right behind her, then her hips were wedged against the counter with the weight of his torso pushed against her.

“I don’t know what that was in the car either, but I think we need to do a little research.” He lifted her up onto the counter and set about investigating.

Within a few minutes, she was arching into him, overcome by the power of her climax. Her head fell forward into the crook of his neck and she was unable to stop her quiet tears. It wasn’t even sobbing… it was more of a cleansing release. The crisp smell of the starch in his shirt, the hint of bay rum that he must have put on when he went back to his apartment to change before dinner, the strength of his arms supporting her now-limp body: the solace these things offered terrified her beyond measure.

He began to stroke her long hair methodically, gently. “Are they tears of joy or abject terror?”

Bronte pulled away from the safety of that crook with great reluctance. “Fifty-fifty I think.”

She tried to laugh, but it came out as something approximating a seal bark, which, accompanied by the tears and runny nose, must have presented quite the sexy picture. “My emotions just feel shockingly huge sometimes.”

“Maybe we should lay off the hot sex for a while? Let things calm down a bit.”

“Yeah right, like that’s going to happen. You just made me come with a hot breath and a quick wave of your hand over my jeans, and you think we’d be able to lay off the hot sex?”

Bronte wiped her dwindling tears away with the back of one hand, then reached across the sink and tore off a piece of paper towel to dry her nose. “I think it’s just going to take some getting used to. I’m not really, you know, in touch with my feelings, like you are. I kind of, well, as you of all people know, I have spent much of my adult life ensuring that those feelings remain pretty well off limits. And the fact that you can simply glance at me—I mean literally, there was one point tonight when you looked across the table at the restaurant and I felt a wave of, well, lust I suppose, but it’s not even horny really, it’s just this visceral need to be physically connected to you and, yes, that scares the living crap out of me.”

“I wish I could say I was disappointed but I am, in fact, downright delighted.”

“You are a beast.”

“No. I am merely glad to see that we are both suffering from the exact same condition. Let’s get a good night’s sleep and address all of these messy feelings in the morning, shall we?”

She wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his body, then gripped. He carried her over to the bedroom and the two of them collapsed in a heap.
Good
night’s sleep
, Bronte thought ruefully.
As
if
.

Late Saturday morning, which was, in fact, early Saturday afternoon, offered a bright new day: perfect for solving the world’s problems in general and Bronte’s commitment phobias in particular. The city street sounds were making their way through the open window into Bronte’s bedroom: the muted screech brakes on Park Avenue, a distant horn beeping several blocks away, a short burst of siren. Bronte rolled over onto her pillow and tried to fall back to sleep.

“Enough sleep for you, miss.”

“Aaaargh. You tax me all night long then pester me awake all morning. When do I get a break?”

“Never. Today is the first day of the rest of your life and we are going out to celebrate. First, I want to eat delicious food—hot coffee, crusty bread, fluffy eggs. Let’s go to Pastis then walk around for a few hours.”

“Are you nuts? The West Village on a Saturday is like Disneyland for chrissake. Let’s go over to Brooklyn and walk around in Prospect Park. There’s a show at the Brooklyn Museum I want to see and we could hang out there for the afternoon.”

Max bowed formally. “As you wish, my lady. Now get your lazy bum into the shower and let’s make a day of it.”

They took the subway out to Brooklyn and had pints of beer and fish and chips on Atlantic Avenue, then walked around the tree-lined streets of Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill, talking over their plans for the next few weeks.

“I have to be in London to resume some negotiations by next Thursday, but would prefer to arrive a day or two earlier to collect myself and go over all the paperwork beforehand. Is there any way you could follow a few days later and we could spend the weekend at Dunlear, then head back into London for a few days? Surely Sarah James needs a little boutique on Bond Street, eh? And Mowbray must need a hands-on visit from their new North American advertising executive.”

Bronte was marveling, and not for the first time that day, how entirely possible everything seemed when Max stated it as a quick trip here and a quick visit there, lickety-split… London… the weekend… Dunlear…

“You are not really even listening to me, are you?” he asked.

“I am… it’s just that, ugh, I sound like a broken record, but it all
is
happening too fast, Max. I want us to be together, obviously, but let’s keep a little perspective in terms of the timeline.”

“How long does a little perspective require these days, exactly?” Max waited silently then proceeded apace. “Days? Months? I am not even going to acknowledge the idea of a little perspective on an annual basis.”

He turned to look at her as they were walking down a quiet side street, making their way back into the city.

“Max…”

“Bron?”

“Well, a yearlong engagement is not unusual, so you don’t need to make it sound as though I am some sort of heartless bitch because I need a little time to get used to the idea.”

Max dragged his fingers through his hair slowly, contemplating how best to move forward. “Bronte… I am not splitting hairs or being rhetorical. I am legitimately asking: what is the idea,
exactly
, that you need the time to get your mind around?”

Her silence was not the answer he was looking for, but she could not get the words out. She was afraid she would sound like a squeaking little bird if she continued.

“Max,” she started, then cleared her throat, buying some time and trying to sound in command of her very out-of-control emotions. “You’re… I mean, I am…”

“Go on.”

“Okay, fine. I’m all for it,” she rushed out in a stream. “Let me talk to Carol and Cecily about taking a few days off the week after next. I mean, it’s awkward, though; you must see that.”

“Actually, I really don’t. In fact, I’m doing my best not to be reminded of standing in your basement flat a year ago and asking you to come with me to my father’s deathbed”—he held a hand up quickly to prevent her protest—“and I don’t want you to think I am bringing that up as some sort of emotional blackmail. Honestly. I just don’t get it.” He stopped short and put his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to look at him. “Look at me, Bron. It’s me. Again. What’s up? Why delay at all? I know you don’t want a big splash of a wedding, so it’s not like you need the year to pick out china and reserve the best hotel ballroom. I know you don’t want to get married in a church and I am going to have to fight like hell to make that happen. My mother’s going to go berserk; we might need to invite the family vicar as a courtesy, but I think even you in your atheistic zeal can accommodate that. So that only leads me to believe one of two things: one, you are petrified of marrying
anyone
and hope to put it off as long as possible—in which case I will push even harder to make this the shortest engagement in the history of the Heyworth family—or two, you are having doubts about marrying me in particular, in which case we need to thoroughly revisit—”

“You know it’s not that,” she blurted, “so just stop with the organizational flow chart. It’s not a labor negotiation for chrissake. It’s just me. Not wanting to be the idiot… I… I live in fear of loving you so much that I am no longer good at anything else.”

He kissed her tenderly after she finished speaking, trailing his thumb along the line of her jaw. “You have no clue how much I love the sound of that. I know it is despicably caveman of me to relish the idea of you adoring me night and day, to the exclusion of everything else, children underfoot, smiling at me across the dinner table and all that. I know it’s horribly egomaniacal, but it’s so madly sexy.”

“Oh good God. You are a madman. Children? Let’s try to get through Marriage 101 first, okay?”

“Just letting my imagination get the best of me.”

“Max, you are so good. So strong and dear.” He started to make a self-deprecating smirk and she cut him off. “I’m not flattering you. I mean, you are all those things so naturally. I can’t help but envision a slow water torture of my own encroaching invisibility. It’s your world I will be entering, your family, your country.” She looked to the sky through the swaying leaves above them, then back into his eyes. “It’s not just procrastination or delay for its own sake. It’s a matter of finding my place in that world that so thoroughly belongs to you. I don’t want to sound like some late-for-the-party feminist, but I have always dreaded my erasure… my loss of identity… it sounds like such a cliché but I feel it so sharply.”

“Bronte. I understand what you are saying, but—”

“It’s not about understanding me or supporting me, or carrying me through a rough patch. It’s about me… ugh… it’s about me staying strong and good… not only for me, but for us.”

“All right then. I see where we are headed.” Max’s voice had a military quality that was bizarrely satisfying. He wasn’t being bossy; he was being fabulously pragmatic. “You are coming to London next week. My treat, by the way. I know we haven’t dealt with the whole financial side of things and I suspect that that’s part of what you’re spinning on about in some sort of roundabout way, so let me just lay that piece out on the table, so to speak. Buying last-minute transatlantic airline tickets is certainly not in your budget, and since I am practically forcing you to do so, I think it’s only fair that I underwrite that particular expedition.”

She
had
been worrying about the money, but she had had no idea how to broach the subject without sounding like she was adding that to the already increasing pile of what he considered her baseless worries. “Money had crossed my mind.”

“The vulgar truth about my family’s money, Bron, if you must know—which, obviously, you must—is that the Heyworths have been making the stuff hand over fist for the past six hundred years. I would not say it in such a cavalier way except I seem to be pressed for time where you are concerned. Sign a prenup if you want, if you’re worried people will think you are marrying me for the dosh, or don’t sign one if you don’t want to. I don’t care either way. My solicitor, and my mother, come to think of it, will be delighted if you sign, but do what you want. Either way, I will fully expect to pay for everything from here on out, and for you to bank everything you make in your own name.”

“You see, like even that.
Wham. Bam.
Problem solved.”

“Would you rather I stood here wringing my hands and gnashing my teeth in anticipation of all the hardships that await us? Ridiculous.”

“I know you’re right. And I think I would like to sign a prenup. Or fuck, I don’t give a shit. I’d like to sign something that says I don’t want any of your money if we split up, which seems patently absurd since I have no intention of ever parting from you.”

“Well, now that’s more like it.” Max leaned in and kissed her on the tip of her nose, a punctuation mark of sorts.

They resumed walking up the street and were headed toward the subway.

She slowed and took a deep breath. “Let me talk to Cecily and Carol later today and maybe I could fly over with you on Tuesday. Then I could work at Mowbray in London on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week. If it’s an all-expenses-paid lovers’ tryst, I don’t see how anyone at BCA is going to care one way or the other.”

“Let’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, shall we?”

“Oh, I love that idea. It’s not too windy and the sun is starting to set. It sounds downright romantic.”

Bronte flipped her hair over one shoulder and smiled up at Max. Her heart skipped a light riff, and she was pretty sure the terror was abating and the warm peace of true affection was taking the lead.

***

Who was Bronte trying to fool? This was the fucking best. She and Max had spent an hour in the brand-new first-class lounge at Virgin Atlantic’s Newark terminal, then boarded the plane and hunkered down for the overnight flight to London. The cabin lights were set at a perfectly calibrated wattage… soothing but with plenty of task lighting for the other passengers who wanted to get some work done or read during the flight.

Bronte and Max were holding hands under the shared blanket that lay across them. The residual smell of their delicious dinner mingled with coffee grounds and the vague overtones of one of the flight attendant’s light perfume.

Max’s hand felt like a treasure in hers. He was starting to doze, but his head was turned toward her, and when he would open his glazed eyes, half-awake, she thought he gave new meaning to the word
dreamy
. His smile was half-cocked and his wolf-gray eyes sparkled like a little boy up to something, or that same boy falling asleep in the back of a car on the way home from a long, fulfilling day.

She squeezed his hand lightly as her own exhaustion crept up on her, even as she tried to fight it off, loving the intimacy of watching him fall asleep in the dark halo around them. She took her other hand out from under the blanket and reached over to touch his hair, softly repositioning it behind his ear, then sleep overtook them both.

She was startled awake three hours later by turbulence, while Max continued to sleep peacefully. She tried to get back to sleep, but her heart was beating so quickly it seemed ludicrous to lie there in that position, pretending to doze. She worked herself up into a sitting position as quietly as she could and looked around the cabin to see if anyone else was awake.

There were two businessmen a couple of rows back who were working on their computers, and another woman who was reading, but other than the steady burr of the engines, all sign of human existence was drowned out. She looked down at Max asleep as she fought back the panic that was still bubbling from whatever menacing dream she had been having when she was jerked awake. She took a few deep breaths, closed her eyes, and then started to come back to herself.

For as long as she could remember, she had never woken up with a clear head. She usually needed at least an hour to feel like her eyes were no longer covered with a gauzy film. Carol always joked about her rearranging early-morning client meetings to accommodate her non–morning person persona.

She had tried everything to combat it—early to bed/early to rise, no caffeine/tons of caffeine, yoga/no exercise—and it was always the same. She basically had no idea where her psyche went or what went on there during those deep nocturnal wanderings, but wherever it was, it was very, very far away and it took a while to come back from.

She made her way up to the first-class bar area and asked for tomato juice. The adorable Australian steward smiled and handed her the drink, then she got herself situated on a comfortable seat and started to read the romance novel she had picked up at the airport.

She clearly needed something to take her mind off the upcoming meeting with Max’s entire family, and as much as she was now reconciled to reading her father’s novel, she wasn’t about to dive right into it. Unfortunately, the historical romance novel she had haphazardly chosen at Newark was all about evil stepmothers, duplicitous stepsisters, and hard-to-handle rakes, so she couldn’t help her mind wandering to her own version of the evil mother-in-law-to-be, along with her multigenerational coven.

Little Miss Menace, Lydia, had returned to London as per her original schedule, so she had had four days to pave the way for a prickly welcome on the part of Max’s mother, and Max’s older sister, Claire, Lydia’s mother. Bronte was starting to think of those three Heyworth women as the witches from
Macbeth
: agents of chaos.

Devon, on the other hand, was clearly in her camp. Max had passed the phone to her a couple of times over the past few days as he was talking to his brother. Devon’s enthusiasm was contagious and he was patently relieved to know his brother had not been living in some imaginary world populated by The Perfect Woman Who Got Away.

“I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to know you are actually a real person, Bronte. Max has been diabolically ill-tempered ever since he got back from Chicago.”

“Oh, Devon, I can’t wait to meet you in person. I am a real person, but I am definitely a
nervous
real person these days.”

“Nothing to worry about. If Max has been telling you gruesome tales about how our mother wanted to bake us into pies and sell us at fairs… well, that part
is
true, but the other parts about being tied to the rack in the dungeon at Dunlear… well, come to think of it, that part is sort of true too—”