Page 54 of Duke, Actually

“I do know that. Wealth has its compensations.” He had turned serious, almost somber. It was interesting that he used the wordcompensations, as if being wealthy was by default negative. His mood change fit with a growing sense she had of a darker undercurrent to Max’s affable, pleasure-seeking exterior. There was a wistfulness to him she sometimes saw flashes of, and that, together with his tendency to deflect attention from himself, made her feel like maybe Max was actually... sad. “Max, I wish you would—” No. She was being weird.

“You wish I would what?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me,” he insisted.

Well, hell. He’d inserted himself pretty firmly into her business earlier this evening—to good end, she had to admit. She had chatted with everyone at the party, even Vince and Berkeley. She had laughed and nodded and flattered and commiserated. It had all been a performance, and it had beenexhausting. But Max had been there to bolster her. Unlike at Christmas, he hadn’t had the aristocratic charm turned up to eleven. This time, he’d been more of a quiet, steady presence, laughing at her jokes, answering questions when asked, but otherwise keeping quiet. He had pitched everything—his own performance and the one he’d thrown herinto—perfectly. They were real, true friends, friends who helped each other—which meant she could speak truthfully. “I feel like you’re unhappy. Not right now but . . . elementally. I wish you would tell me why.”

He blinked rapidly, his breezy facade dropping. On the surface, he was all confidence and swagger, but he would, from time to time, say something that startled her with its guilelessness. It used to be his proclamations about how much he liked her. Or his New Year’s Eve declaration about wanting to get a job. Maybe she could trigger another such admission.

It worked. He took a long drink of his champagne and said, “I’m unhappy because my father is a vicious drunk. Or perhaps I should say that my father is vicious, period, since he’s drunk all the time. He terrorizes all of us, but no one seems to mind except me.”

The wordterrorizesgave her pause, but she didn’t want to interrupt him.

“I hate living on the estate. I have no purpose in life other than to consume resources while I wait for my father to die so I can become the Duke of Aquilla, which I very, very much do not want to do. Hell, I don’t even want to be a baron.” He laughed bitterly and raised his cup. “Poor Max, right?” He rolled his eyes, then closed them like he was sick of himself.

His little speech had made her want to cry. She patted the hand that wasn’t holding the glass. He whipped his head up and looked at her, startled by the contact. “Yes,” she said vehemently, “poor Max.” She started to retract her hand—she’d only meant to deliver a quick, sympathetic touch—but he rotated his hand under hers and held on, looking at her like she was his lifeline.

Maybe she was.

She knew Marie was Max’s best friend. But if he and Marie were anything like Dani and Leo, that relationship had taken second fiddle as the lovebirds embarked on their life together.

“Can I ask you some dumb questions?” she said.

“You can ask me anything,” he said with a strange vehemence and still not letting go of her hand.

“Could you walk away from it? Abdicate? Is that what you’d call it in your case? Pull a Harry-and-Meghan, basically?”

“I could, but that would mean passing all the shit to my brother.” He paused, pressed his lips together. “That is not something I will do.” He snorted. “Well, of course when I don’t produce an heir, he and his future children will be in line to inherit. But my father will be gone at that point, so I’m quite content to dump everything on him then. I just won’t... let him shoulder everything now.”

Ohhh. Something shifted in her mind as she thought about a few things he’d said over the months. “That’s why you didn’t go to boarding school and he did.”

He blew out a breath like he’d been busted doing something untoward. “In theory, I could have gone once Seb left at thirteen. But it turned out I’d made too good a case in the first place for why I should break with tradition and not go.” He wrinkled his nose, as if he were remembering something unpleasant.

“Your father wouldn’t let you go when your brother did.”

“It was all right. I only had two years left, and I actually liked my tutor. Well, ‘liked’ might be overstating it. But he was exceedingly qualified, and we rubbed along together well enough. I’d had to fight my father for him in the first place. Once Father had accepted that I wasn’t going away to school, he wanted meto continue on with my boyhood teacher. It was a real battle convincing my father not to send me.”

“How did you do it?”

“I feigned interest in learning about the dukedom.” His upper lip curled. “I gave magnificent speeches about family and legacy and destiny and said I didn’t want to be away for four years when I could be learning about the role I was born to inherit.”

“And did you learn about it?”

“I certainly did.” There was the lip curl again. “I learned I never wanted to be the Duke of Aquilla. But we don’t always get what we want, do we?”

“Why don’t you want to do it? What is ‘it,’ really?”

“‘It’ is using what we own—what our ancestors took—to make money. We had feudal land, land that tenants paid to work. Later we had—still have—mines all over Europe. Do the people who work in those mines share in the profits they generate?”

“No?”

“That is correct. So the job of the duke is to oversee the moneymaking, environment-destroying empire. Which my father does a half-assed job of because he’s usually drunk. But he has a steward who’s a decent person.”

“You’ve spent your whole life protecting your brother,” Dani said quietly.

“Well, no. I gave up when he decided to move home. But that was a mistake. Not that he needed protection anymore, but I shouldn’t have... abandoned him like I did. I understand now that even though he made different choices than I would have in his place, he had his reasons.”

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