Royal Pain (9 page)

Fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.

Max was a fucking duke? Technically, according to the
Times
, he was only a marquess—a fallen-away marquess, she remembered with a bittersweet smile—until his father left this world and he took on the title. Bronte recalled one of the acronyms she had committed to memory in the early years of her adolescent fascination with all things royal:
DMEVB
—duke, marquess, earl, viscount, baron.

She thought over all the stupid, offhand comments she had made to Max about how she loved when he went all royal on her. Or—oh God—all the times she had been flipping through
Hello!
, ranting about how idiotic all those women were who fawned over William and Harry. Oh dear God. Or how she wouldn’t want to be Kate in a million years. She had probably insulted some member of his immediate family. And now that she allowed herself to sink into the full depths of her shame, she realized she had interrupted him numerous times when he was probably on the verge of telling her that very fact.

She sank lower into her chair and began clicking on the copious photographs of Max that had appeared in the press over the years. At least her postbreakup stalking wouldn’t be relegated to a few grainy shots of a twelve-year-old boy and a blue-ribboned steer.

He was fucking everywhere.

She clicked on a photo of him—looking quite dashing, she hated to admit—at the Henley Royal Regatta. She pulled her chair closer to her desk and hunkered down. Formal shots at Ascot. Buckingham Palace. Sandringham. Hunting in Scotland. Tabloid shots on holiday in Spain. At a corporate event at the National Gallery. A formal family photo—Max’s father looked really nice, thought Bronte, and now he was sick and Max was on his way back to them… and away from her.

Bronte was overcome with a mix of sheer glee (look how gorgeous he is, and he loves me) and sheer horror (look how gorgeous he is, and I totally screwed up).

“Hello?” she barked rudely into the incessantly ringing telephone on her desk.

“Hi, Bronte, it’s Sarah James. Is this a bad time?”

Sarah James was the überglamorous, pretty young thing who had started the hottest new line of shoes since Louboutin. Her family was a reigning member of the Chicago old-school elite, and she was the sparkly little gadfly in their ointment. Despite all of that, or because of it, she was a savvy, no-nonsense businesswoman and she admired Bronte’s efficiency, not to mention her swearing.

“Hey, Sarah. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be such a churl. Just a little hiccup on the romance front. End of the affair and all that. Nothing that will prevent me from making every person in the free world adore every delectable creation that comes out of your atelier.” Bronte shut her Internet session down and focused on her potential client.

“Well, that’s why I’m calling really. I have been putting off making a final decision on the ad agency for the big launch because I think I want to move to New York and really be there full time to get this off the ground.”

“Classic. Chicago is going to be the death of me, I swear it. Good luck in New York without me. I totally understand your reasons for not choosing BCA.” It wasn’t that BCA didn’t have lots of national and international clients, but Sarah had made it very clear that she wanted to work hand in hand with whichever agency she finally chose. If she was moving to New York, Bronte simply assumed Sarah was going to hire a New York agency.

“No, Bron, listen. Would you want to go?”

“What?”

“Do you want to move back to New York? I don’t care how you swing it: if you ask your partners here if they want to open a New York office-of-one, or if you want to start your own agency, or if you want to go in-house with Sarah James—though I doubt that would be the best long-term solution for you—”

“Sarah, this has been twenty-four hours from Mars… I don’t even know where to begin…”

“Your British ship has sailed, I take it?”

“Mm-hmm.”
More like the fucking royal yacht
Britannia, Bronte thought as she absently twisted a long strand of her brown hair and swiveled her chair around to look out onto the summer treetops and across the park to the facade of the Newberry Library. “You know what, Sarah? I think a victory march back to New York City is very much in order. My landlord is going to kill me—I have only been in my apartment for six months—but fuck it. This city has always been a holding pattern for me. Let me talk to Brian and Cecily about how they want to do it. I do not want them to see me as poaching, so it is probably best if I stick with them and open a BCA office in New York. Let me go talk to Cecily and figure out what’s the best way to move forward. Want to meet for lunch at Le Colonial at noon? I will need a glass of wine by then for sure.”

“Sounds great… are you humming?”

“Yes, hard to believe given my lovelorn state, but I really think we are going to take Manhattan, Sarah. See you at lunch.”

Brian Coleman and Cecily Bartholomew were the dynamic pair that started BCA in the late nineties and turned it into one of the hottest, hippest advertising agencies in the Midwest. They left Quaker Oats and McDonald’s accounts at the big firms to branch out with their own special brand of intimate customer attention and creative, unique, glamorous ads. Brian was the visual genius and Cecily was the brass-tacks negotiator.

Their business partnership spread seamlessly to their personal partnership in a way that Bronte could only wonder at. They had gotten married a year after they met at Ogilvy. All that time together seemed admirable, if inconceivable, to Bronte’s jaundiced eye.

On the other hand, spending every minute of her life with the future Duke of Northrop at Dunlear Castle seemed perfectly conceivable. She shook herself and knocked on Cecily’s door.

Bronte sat across from her boss, looking over the immaculate etched-glass tabletop balanced on polished chrome struts and the lone Apple wireless keyboard and mouse that made up the entire contents of her work surface. Bronte had a complete déjà vu moment from that day in Carol Dieppe’s office in New York almost a year ago.

“Hey, kiddo, what’s up?” Bronte loved how Cecily called her
kiddo
, somehow infusing it with filial respect rather than patronizing dismissal.

“So here’s the deal, Cecily. You know I’ve been working on Sarah James for months now, and I think I’ve snagged her.”

“Fabulous. That has been your baby all the way. You sought her out; you pursued the account. Congratulations. So why do I get the feeling this might not have a happy ending?”

“Well, you’re kind to compliment me on my perseverance, but you of all people know she wouldn’t have even taken my call, much less listened to my pitch, if it didn’t come on BCA letterhead, with your strength behind me.”

“Mm-hmm.” Cecily started to swivel slowly back and forth in her chair, kind of like a leisurely shark, Bronte thought, then shook her head again to dismiss the predatory image.

“So… fuck…” Bronte grabbed her long hair into a tail and shoved it behind her back. “Sarah wants to move to New York; she wants to move
me
to New York and have me focus all my attention on the launch. She offered me anything I want… in-house, BCA New York office, my own office… oh and by the way, Max flew back to England yesterday.”

Cecily’s chair stopped moving and she rested her forearms on her desk, meticulously setting aside the keyboard and mouse, as if they represented a world of clutter in her otherwise pristine existence.

“You don’t seem like the backstabbing, poaching kind, Bron, and I can see you are trying to do the right thing here. But what is really going on?”

Bronte covered her face with her hands, then rubbed her eyes. She didn’t even feel like crying. She was so far beyond tears at the moment. She was just exhausted all of a sudden. Utterly and completely depleted.

“I want to go home. I want to get back to New York.”

“Oh, Bron. I need to talk to Brian, but I am 99 percent certain that he and I will be in complete agreement on this. I would love for you to open the BCA office in New York, and if you can get that talented bitch Carol Dieppe to jump ship and join you, we will pay you a hefty bonus. Go for a walk. Go shop. Go have a fancy lunch. Get out of the office for a couple of hours and then meet me back here at four.”

“Cecily, you are the fucking bomb. Why don’t we all move to New York?”

“Thanks for the invite, friend, but if I wanted to live in that rat-infested stink hole, I would. In the meantime, I will take my townhouse on Astor Place over your bedsit in the West Village any time. Now get the hell out of here.”

Bronte went back to her desk, grabbed her bag, and headed out of the building. A good dose of retail therapy on Oak Street was just the thing. She checked her cell phone to see if she had missed any calls while she was in with Cecily and saw there was a call from her mother. Ugh, she would return that later.

She made up her mind to call Max’s cell phone, just to make sure he had arrived in one piece, she told herself rationally. She pressed the preset and listened to the line click and crackle as it connected to a foreign trunk line. The long beep of the European ring made her heart skip a beat. Once, twice. Then a polite recorded British voice informed her with clipped formality that the call could not be connected; please try again later.

He’d pretty much told her she had totally let him down; she wondered if maybe she should let him be. On the other hand, even her supposedly hard heart could not bear the memory of his sweet innocent expectation that she would, of course, head back to England with him to help him during his difficult time. If only for a week or so.

Oh God, what had she done?

What had he done? How could he not tell her he was a duke—or going to be—for fuck’s sake?

She scrolled down through her phone list until she came to David and Willa’s home number in London. She hesitated with her thumb hovering over the talk button, then bit the bullet and pressed it.

Again, the long beep tone of the British phone system heightened her anticipation, and then the phone was answered with an abrupt, “Huh-
loh
?”

“Willa, is that you? It’s Bronte Talbott calling from Chicago. I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

“Hey Bron, perfect timing. David and I are just sitting down for an after-work cocktail and planning an outing for next weekend. I think we might head down to Dunlear to welcome back Max Heyworth. David said he vaguely remembered a late-night phone call at a pub a month or two ago and mentioned that you two had crossed paths in Chicago. Did you hit it off?” Willa laughed carelessly, the ice in her drink tinkling happily in the background as she took a sip.

“Uh, you could say that.”

“He was the one I wanted to set you up with in New York, remember?”

“Yes. I remember.”
You
could
have
mentioned
he
was
a
fucking
duke
, Bronte wanted to add, but refrained. She kept trying to convince herself that it really didn’t matter if he was royalty or not. It really didn’t. (But it did.)

“Well, he belongs in England, that one, so you’ll have to come here if you want him in your clutches, but be prepared to queue up behind every chit in the peerage, if you know what I mean, eh?”

Oh. God. This was truly misery. “Yeah, about Max. His father is really ill so he had to fly back a few days early. I think he’s there now, but I only have his US cell phone number and it’s not working and I’d really like to make sure he got home but I don’t even have a phone number for him in England because we got in a fight right before he left and I thought it would be all so cut-and-dried and it isn’t at all but now I think I’ve fucked it all to hell and he won’t want to hear from me anyway but he wasn’t totally up-front with me either”—she gasped for breath—“but I have to at least let him know that I am not the stone-cold ice princess he left standing in the middle of our living room yesterday afternoon.”

“Fuck’s sake, Bron. Bad as all that, huh? You should be careful with your heart when it comes to those royal types—they’re used to getting what they want and, well, David’s getting mad at me with his eyes now so I am passing the phone over to him.” Bronte could picture Willa widening her eyes and mouthing “
What
?” at her exasperated husband.

“Hey, Bron, David here. Where do you want to begin?”

Bronte settled herself onto a shady bench in the park, the morning sun dappling in and out through the trees over her head. “As absurd as it sounds,” she began, “I honestly didn’t know about any of that duke crap until this morning. I am so up shit’s creek, David. He actually asked me to come back to England with him while he sorted out all this dismal shit with his family—his father had a heart attack yesterday… would that sort of thing be in the news there? Never mind. What I mean is, in a nutshell, I think we both thought it was going to be this two-month-long, no-strings-attached fling while he defended his dissertation and we set about the happy task of mending my broken heart one kiss at a time. But, David, the damnedest fucking thing is I think he fell in love with me and I fucked it all to pieces.”

“Listen, Bron, I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you have a bit of a bad habit of thinking men are in love with you when, you know, they just might want a good shag… again, no offense—” Bronte heard Willa grabbing the phone out of David’s hand and then a loud slap.

Bronte felt like she too had been slapped.

“Please pretend my caveman husband did
not
just say that to you,” Willa pleaded. “What he was trying to say in his pathetic, illiterate fashion was, you might want to be patient on this one and see where the chips fall. If there is truly something real and lasting with you and Max, good shagging aside, it will all rise to the top once he sees his way clear of his father’s illness. If it’s meant to be and all that. Just sit tight, Bron. Who knows? Maybe his dad will be just fine and Max can go back to being a relatively anonymous marquess for another twenty years.”