Page 55 of Duke, Actually

“Have you ever tried to . . . talk to your father?”

“You mean an intervention?” She nodded. “We tried once. Well, mostly Seb tried, because he’s the best of us, but he rallied my mother and me. It did...” He made a face. “Not go well. While I understand the power of addiction and would extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone else in its grip, I can’t... let go of some of the things he’s done. The damage has been too great. I can’t fix him, and I don’t want to try.”

That seemed both reasonable and remarkably self-aware. “Understood. Can you move, at least, if Sebastien doesn’t need your protection anymore? You might have years before you inherit.”

“The plan was always to move to the palace with Marie.”

Right. It was still hard to wrap her mind around how close Max had come to marrying Leo’s fiancée.

“I wouldn’t have escaped my eventual fate, of course, but when I inherited, I’d’ve been able to run things from afar, and...”

“And what?”

“I don’t know. There was never anything romantic between us, but Marie and I were good partners. I felt like she would’ve been able to help me make the job of duke less bad. That sounds vague, I know, but she was...”

“A helpmeet?” Dani teased, wanting to lighten his burden, even if only momentarily, but it actually seemed like the correct word.

He chuckled. “Precisely.”

“You could still move. Wait out your fate somewhere else.” She had the sudden, silly notion to suggest that he move to New York. He liked New York, and they could have so much fun. But she didn’t say that because it was ridiculous.

“Right, but for that I would need money—my father will cut me off if I move off the estate for anything less than marrying into a family he deems suitable. And for that, I need a job.”

“And the mine project isn’t paying.”

“It could be. Seb offered to put me on the payroll...”

“But taking money from the family company isn’t that different from taking money from the family?”

He shrugged. “I thought about it. Iamworking. But I... need to not entangle myself with my father any more than I already am.”

She thought back to the wordterrorizes, and to Max saying he no longer wanted to try to help his father. “Max, did he... did he hurt you?”

“He hit Sebastien once.”

Max had no idea why he was doing this—“This” being sitting in a sauna holding Dani’s hand and telling her stuff he’d never toldanyone, not even Marie.

“That doesn’t really answer the question,” Dani said with her signature mixture of kindness and hard-assed-ness, which he supposed answered the question of why he was doing this.

He was aware that he was being evasive. It was hard, even now, even having bared so much of himself, to fully drop the impulse to deflect that had been his default mode for so long.

“Sebastien was having a tea party, which was something he liked doing,” he began slowly. “He was a solitary, dreamy child with an unfettered imagination. The problem was, he was having it in the library. He was sitting there with all his stuffed animals, babbling about who knows what, when my father walked in with a minor Austrian aristocrat who was visiting. I was too young tobe attuned to matters of state, but I had the sense he was someone Father wanted to impress.” Max didn’t remember the man’s name, but he did remember Father had insisted that Max and Seb wear their formal eveningwear at dinners during the visit, which both boys hated. “I wasn’t there at the start of it,” he said, thinking back to that day. “But my father upended the table Seb was using. I came running when I heard the ruckus, and when I got there, Father was in the midst of throwing Seb’s favorite stuffed bear into the fire and telling him that only women had tea parties and that he was an embarrassment to the family and to Eldovia.” Dani winced. “Yes, apparently a tender eight-year-old not adhering to proper gender conditioning is a threat to king and country. Seb had a black eye the next day.” He could still see it, the grotesque midnight-blue blossom against his brother’s pale skin. He could stillfeelit, too, the shame blooming in his gut when his father’s guest gasped. And the anger when Mother started trying to smooth things over, when she looked at him likehewas supposed to help in her twisted endeavor. “I waited for something to happen, for there to be a reckoning of some sort—for my mother to object or for my father to apologize.”

“But nothing happened?” Dani asked quietly.

“Nothing happened,” he confirmed. He remembered waiting again, later that night in the nursery, thinking that even if Father wasn’t going to apologize, surely Mother would appear with some retroactive explanation, some words to soothe and placate. She didn’t come. And when not a word was said the next day, Max had come to understand that he and Seb were on their own. They couldn’t rely on their parents, and since their parents were the duke and duchess, ultimately they couldn’t rely on any of thehousehold staff, either. “I decided then that I would use what power I had to draw my father’s fire, so to speak.”

“So he hit you instead?”

“Not really. A few times.”

She squeezed his hand again, and suddenly he felt as though he might cry. He had always thought the times he and his father had come to physical blows were less painful memories than their other, verbal confrontations, which made a certain sort of sense. A punch was a punch. It hurt, but it ended things. Whereas a sneering examination of what Father thought Max should have learned in the schoolroom but had not yet mastered could go on and on and on. That kind of torture, Max had always thought, was more insidious than a quick slap.

Max’s sympathy and concern had been reserved for Sebastien, because Seb had always been so guileless, so much more vulnerable. Max had been older and stronger. But he thought suddenly of Leo’s sister, Gabby. Of someone laying hands on her in a fit of violence. He would kill anyone who did that. She was a child.

But he had been, too. Achild. He had been a child who had deserved better.

His eyes were burning. “Fuck.” He lifted his free hand to swipe away a rogue tear, swallowed the rock in his throat, and went back to her question. “I didn’t get hit that much. I developed a well-pitched campaign of distraction. If I made bigger mistakes—more consequential ones—than Seb, what did a tea party matter?” He shrugged. “Eventually, I got taller and bigger than him.”

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