Page 23 of Duke, Actually

“Indeed. The houses of Accola and Aquilla had bad blood going back centuries. It hadn’t been active bad blood, mind you, since the nineteenth.”

It was such a strange thing, to be able to trace one’s family so far. Dani, with her immigrant parents, knew the grandparents on each side, and her dad’s mom talked a lot about her own mother, but that was as far back as she had any meaningful knowledge.

“There was a cessation of hostilities in 1898,” Max went on. “After that, the animosity was limited to fighting each other in Parliament and snubbing each other at parties. But then Marie’s father and mine ended up at the same French boarding school and struck up a clandestine friendship. Our family supplies some of the trace minerals used in the watches the royal family’s company makes.”

“So aren’t the houses ‘united’ at that point? Why insist on marrying off their children?”

“I’m not defending it by any means, but I think they liked the idea of grandchildren in common. There’s nothing to seal a newfound truce like a baby. Anyway, you’re post-love, aren’t you?”

Post-menwas what Dani had been saying, but she supposed it amounted to the same thing.

“And you’re a scholar of the nineteenth century,” Max went on. “You of all people should understand that the idea of marrying for love—and the idea of romantic love itself—is a modern construct. In many ways, the aristocracy hasn’t modernized. Political marriages are still common in our circles.”

“But Marie bucked the trend.”

“She did indeed.” He looked so wistful all of a sudden that Dani half wondered if the Depraved Dukewascarrying a torch for Marie. His insistence that he was happy for her and that theirs had never been a love match had seemed genuine, but she was also getting the sense that something deeper was going on with him.

But she didn’t know how to ask that. “So you grew up in a castle in this place called Riems.” She started to make a mental note to google it but checked herself. She had already googled Max. She wasn’t going to google hiscastle, too. A person had to have standards.

“No, no. It is rather a large old house, though.”

“You still live there?” As much as she loved her parents, she had no desire to live with them. But she supposed the size of the “rather large old house” might be a mitigating factor.

“I live alone in a cottage on the grounds. It used to be occupied by my grandmother, but it had been sitting empty since she died, so I moved in when I returned from university.”

“How many bedrooms does this cottage have?”

“I’ll have you know that it has only one. Though I suppose there is also the library. But it’s small. It is rather a privileged life, though, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

She could picture him in a cottage. As worldly as Max was, with his designer suits and his razor-sharp wit, she could also seehim pottering around a library, drinking tea. “But what do youdoall day?”

“As little as possible.”

Was she imagining it, or did his snappy retort seem a little performative? “You should actually do the research into that Eldovian woman you told me about. That was a fascinating story, and that’s without even knowing how it ends.”

He made a dismissive gesture. “To what end, though? I’m done with school.”

“You could write a book.”

“Oh good god, no. That’s your department.”

She wasn’t sure what her point was. So what if Max drifted around his posh cottage purposeless and waited upon? Just that sometimes he seemed to turn wistful—sad, almost. But then it would be gone before she could really examine it. “When do you go home?” she asked. “Any more New York bashes?”

“Tomorrow, and no. Just the one.”

“I know my commonness is probably showing, but I’m still amazed that you would come all the way here for a party.”

“Well, to be honest, it wasn’t the party so much as it was a certain person at the party I needed to meet.” He smirked. “A certain female person.”

Ah. “Is that your way of saying you came to New York for a hookup?”

“Lavinia von Bachenheim is an intelligent and accomplished young lady, and I would never refer to any of my interactions with her—or anyone—with as vulgar a term as ‘hookup.’” He sniffed, but in a way that telegraphed that he was teasing. “But no, Lavinia and I did not hook up. We merely chatted.”

“I thought it was Lucrecia?”

“Lavinia is Lucrecia’s younger sister. The party was at Lucrecia’s apartment, but Lavinia is at Yale.”

“Well, don’t you have good taste?” she shot back—and whoa, why so snappish? What did she care what—or who—Max did while he was in town?

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