Page 108 of Duke, Actually

“Keeled over at the dinner table. Heart attack. There’s going tobe 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 saidwas, past tense. Maxwascoming 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 inMax’slibrary.

No, they were sitting intheirlibrary. 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.”

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