by Megan Mulry
“And?” Bronte prompted.
“Well, Max had no idea who she was and gave her a quick once-over and then turned to me with a little check-that-out wink. And I thought, quite matter-of-factly, really, ‘Perhaps I shall murder Max tonight.’ And then I thought, ‘That’s odd, why would I want to murder Max?’ And I looked back, classic Bogie-Bacall double take, and saw it was Willa, and well… that’s when I knew we were—how did you ask it? Oh yes, more than friends.”
Willa was leaning against the frame of the wide entryway into the living room, listening to David tell their story. “Now do you see why he’s my idiot, Bron?”
“I do, Willa.”
They caught up on other mutual friends in New York, ate Willa’s delicious artichoke appetizers, and were just starting their second round of drinks when the buzzer sounded and Willa let Max into the apartment. David and Bronte had leapt up to greet him as well, David with hearty nuptial congratulations and Bronte with a silly-schoolgirl-crush feeling in her stomach. They’d only been apart for the day, for chrissake, but she could see he wanted to connect with her too.
Badly.
He was still shaking David’s hand and half-hugging him with his other when he locked eyes with Bronte and smiled the most delectable, melt-in-your-mouth smile.
“David. Willa. I am going to have to have a private word with my fiancée if you don’t mind.”
“Oooh, darling!” Willa trilled, locking her arm through David’s. “Remember when you used to have private words with me, David? So romantic! Of course, off you go, you two. No hanky-panky, please.”
Bronte was flushed and happy as she followed Max down the dimly lit hall and into the first room on the left, a tiny guest room with a small desk. Max shut the door quietly then turned and took Bronte’s face in his hands and kissed her so deeply, so passionately, that she almost tilted right back onto the bed that took up most of the room.
“Mmmm…” she mumbled between hot kisses. “I had the most wonderful epiphany on the way here…” She spoke with her eyes still closed, kissing him wherever she could, neck, cheek, lips.
“Mmmm… and what was your epiphany?” he whispered between kisses.
“That you get me.”
He brought his hands down to her neck, then made a trail down her back, then along her hips and around her backside, all the while continuing to overwhelm her with those searing kisses.
“Do I ever!” he agreed. “I get you every chance I can!” He gave her a bawdy squeeze on her ass to make his point, then stopped suddenly, sniffed, and looked into her eyes. “Have you been drinking?”
“Of course I’ve been drinking!” Bronte laughed. “I’m with David and Willa and it’s after five o’clock… what else would I be doing?”
“But, Bron, what if you’re pregnant?”
She felt the tenderness leave as an icy, rebellious thread began to weave through her. “I beg your pardon?”
He whispered, almost reverently, “What if there’s a baby?”
“Max…” She let herself sit down on the edge of the bed after all.
“Bron, if there’s even a possibility, don’t you think it’s worth…” His voice trailed off as he saw through his incipient joy that Bronte may not hold out the same hope.
“Max… I don’t know what to say… and that’s saying something. I mean, is it really right to have a child—to make the most monumental decision of our lives—based on my having forgotten my pill pack? I mean, what—”
“Bronte, this is no longer just a matter of you forgetting your pill pack. We were always belts-and-suspenders when it came to birth control. I mean, who else in their right mind uses condoms and the pill like we did? When we… I mean, last week, when I stopped using the condoms, it was because we were together… are together… I mean, a family… not because I wanted to—”
“Look, how about this?” Bronte interrupted. She felt like she was drowning, the conversation spiraling away from her, into confusing and desperate emotional territory. “Let’s use condoms from here on out. I’ll go off the pill for the rest of this month. If I missed three pills, which in effect I have, or would have even if Carol FedExed me my pack, I am supposed to use alternative birth control anyway, but that’s assuming… well, we’ll just see what happens in the next few weeks. I’ll probably get my period in a few days anyway, but—”
“So you won’t drink until we know, then?”
There was something totally vulnerable and tender about the way Max asked, but something very deep in Bronte bristled nonetheless. He was treading carefully, but perilously, on the knife-edge of compassion and control.
If she feared the erasure of her psyche when it came to matrimony, she could only begin to imagine the total loss of self that accompanied motherhood. Especially when one was mothering the twentieth Duke of Northrop. How could he not see that?
“Max…”
“Please, Bron.” If she was pregnant, and it was a boy, the ramifications were more than Max could begin to contemplate or convey. He’d spent his entire life downplaying the importance of the title, making a concerted effort to have a clear, humble view of what it really meant. His father had been a wonderful role model in that respect, always joking with Max not to take himself too seriously but to always take his responsibilities seriously. Bronte might well be carrying the twentieth Duke of Northrop. That fact fell quite plainly under the Serious Responsibility column. How could she not see that?
“All right, I won’t drink until we know.”
But she wasn’t happy about it, and that Max could see. He gave her a tender kiss, tracing the inside of her upper lip with his tongue as he withdrew. He had to fight off the brief impression that her response had bordered on perfunctory.
“I love you, Bron.”
“I know. I love you too, Max.” She moved slowly past him and opened the door out to the hallway, the sounds of the other guests’ careless laughter wafting down the corridor. Fuck.
Max spent the rest of the dinner party pretending to listen to his friends’ cheerful chatter while he worried over Bronte. She had casually offered him her vodka when they returned to the living room, as if the thought had just crossed her mind to save David another trip to the kitchen to make one. She declined wine with dinner, easily explained because everyone already knew she had had more than her fair share the night before.
The other couple, Etienne and Helena, was charming and animated, but Max could tell that something about them was putting Bronte on edge. Her smile got a little too bright when Etienne was asking her about the time she had spent in Chicago. Max was trying to listen to Helena talk about a recent dustup at H & Q involving a young male intern and a married senior editor whose indiscretion was now the buzz of the office.
“…but now they’ve reached the dreadful crossroads: destroy her family and move ahead with their own new life together, or end the affair and move back to some semblance of the nuclear family.”
Helena was an engaging dinner partner, and on any other night, Max would have been happily drawn into her sparkling account of the star-crossed lovers. He was distracted but tried to participate.
“Would it forever be a semblance, do you think?”
“Hard to say. I mean, you don’t even need to know them to get the gist. You always hear the variations: the marriage breaks because it was falling apart to begin with—what I call the Petri Dish theory: the environment was right for infidelity, everybody parts ways, pulls it together, stays friends, that sort of thing. Then there’s the happy-enough marriage that is sabotaged by the idea of something better: the Greener Grass theory. That one usually leads to short-term hell for the abandoned party and serial relationship failure for the abandoner, since, as we all know, the grass is never—or hardly ever—greener. Finally, there’s the worst-case scenario, not even a theory, really; just a nightmare. One of you falls madly in love with someone else. This one has been my preoccupation recently.” She reached for her glass of wine. “Luckily, I writ
e about relationships, right?” She raised her glass to Max with a merry tilt. “I can never get enough.”
“I, on the other hand, enjoy the occasional dinner-party conversation about it, but probably have some sort of irrational superstition about overanalysis when it comes to my own romantic life,” Max replied. “For me, love is like that quote about laws and sausages: I really don’t want to think too much about how it’s made; I just want to enjoy it.”
“Touché… it’s primarily a women’s game, the discussion and dissection of it at least.”
They paused to finish their meals and Max looked up to see Bronte smiling weakly at Etienne, almost wistful, as she spoke. “It was such an odd coincidence. I mean, what are the chances that I would be standing on a street corner in the middle of London and they would walk by?”
“It is funny, because you are really his only failure,” Etienne proceeded with his sexy Gallic accent.
Max tried not to strain too obviously to pick up the thread of Bronte’s conversation. He saw her blink away her confusion… and maybe a touch of anxiety.
As if she could feel Max’s concern across the narrow table, Bronte turned and gave him a sad, fragile smile. Epiphanies notwithstanding, she had no interest in dredging up miserable memories. She was just beginning to celebrate that her feelings for Mr. Texas had well and truly expired; that did not mean she now wished to dissect those feelings in the midst of a delightful dinner party.
“Failure?” she asked with a little chuckle as she reached for her water glass.
“Oh, you know how he is,” Etienne said, “all Texan ease and laid-back camaraderie for all and sundry. And then you come along and let him know you never want to see him or hear from him again and he was just, well, disoriented.”
Even though he hadn’t been able to follow all the details, Max suddenly realized that Bronte must have crossed paths with her ex-boyfriend earlier in the day. He was overcome by a quick, fierce need to protect her from anything upsetting. He was almost out of his chair to suggest how jet-lagged he and Bronte were from their recent trip when she began speaking again. He held his place.
Her words were brittle. “I suppose you might say I am old-fashioned and even prudish in a way, Etienne. I find it nigh on impossible to have pleasant, bubbly conversation with former lovers. No spite really, just a clean slate and all that.” She looked across the table and took strength from Max’s gaze. “And now that I am happily and permanently off the market, it is not a situation I will ever have to reconsider.” She raised her glass toward Max and took a fortifying sip of cool water.
Etienne laughed warmly and replied, “If that were the case in France, no one would be speaking to anyone!”
Everyone at the table laughed with both humor and a touch of relief.
Bronte looked at Max with intense gratitude.
Plain. Simple. Gratitude.
In that moment, she knew that her petty gesture, waving her engagement ring in that woman’s face, was just that: a gesture. An empty gesture. The ring itself was nothing. She kept staring at Max across the table as the others started to pick up the threads of new conversations. The real weight and heft of their relationship was what passed between them at moments like this: his look of gentle confidence, her radiant trust.
She would take those looks over any jewels.
***
Later that night, Bronte was in bed reading one of the notebooks that her mother had given her, trying to understand how her father’s written voice could be so bitterly hilarious while his real voice had been just bitter. She laughed at one particularly vicious line, and Max poked his head out of the walk-in closet to see what she was reading.
“Not as bad as you thought it would be?”
“I may be a bitch, but I am more than happy to admit when I am wrong… and I was. Definitely wrong. This is fucking hilarious.”
Max finished getting undressed and made his way into bed, looking preoccupied as he crossed the rough, wide-plank floorboards. Carelessly naked. Bronte stared at him as he adjusted his pillows, turned on his bedside lamp, took his book off the bedside table, cracked the spine, and began reading.
Then he looked up when he felt the pressure of her gaze on him. “What?”
“This is good.”
“What is good?”
“This.” She gestured with a vague sweep. “The two of us reading in bed, home at a decent hour, curled up. I’m digging it.”
He reached over and put his hand on the side of her hip, letting his caress float over her.
“Me too.”
Whatever real or imagined isolation or belligerence she had experienced in that little guest room at the Osbornes’ flat earlier had passed. The feel of his hand against her bare skin made her shiver and scoot down deeper into the consuming cloud of white linen sheets and the airy eiderdown duvet.
“I don’t think I’ve ever slept on sheets as utterly delicious, by the way. How can they be so damned soft when they look like such a wrinkled mess?”
He put his book on the bedside table, face down, his other hand never leaving her side. He turned back to face her and stretched his legs out along the length of the bed, testing the sheets as if he had never thought about it, then let one leg climb up hers.
“Mmmm. Utterly delicious.”
“Max… you are…”
His mouth came down onto hers and the weight of his body pressed her solidly—safely—into the cocoon of the feather bed. All she could do was release a half moan, half sob of pure delight. He pulled away from the kiss and let his hand wander across her lower abdomen, right at her bikini line. He ran a single finger just beneath the elastic of her underwear and ripples of pleasure pulsed through her and out to her fingertips.
“I am not going to get overly philosophical, Bron, but I have to circle back at least one more time to the potential baby situation.”
“No fair.”
“What do you mean, ‘no fair’?”
“I mean,” Bronte sighed with a glazed-over smile, “you know I will give you anything when you hold me like this. Babies. Capitulations. Empty promises.”
“All good. But stay with me for a minute longer. I think there was a particular point that I was trying to make that… that I failed at making. When I was asking or worrying or what have you about the idea of you being pregnant, I wasn’t saying anything about your independence or your rights, or anything along those lines. I meant it more that the paradigm has shifted for us. We are a unit. And not in that atrocious way that makes your skin crawl. In the most delicious way.” He shifted his body closer to hers. “Whatever it is, we can figure it out, as a unit. Do you see what I mean? Do you agree?” He needed to hear her say it, to know that those real or imagined beasts of insecurity or independence that had threatened to sabotage her trust in their relationship were well and truly slain.
“I like that… a unit… easier to swallow somehow than all that cleaving and honoring.” She squirmed under him and went to kiss his neck, right where his tendons strained invitingly, but he held her back.
“I mean it, Bron. If you are pregnant and feel really strongly about, well, not being—I mean, I’m trying to be open-minded here, but to be honest, I’d be devastated. But we will figure it out. Together, okay? Please promise me.”
“Okay, okay, I promise!” she replied without any attempt to conceal her rising lust, straining to kiss his neck again.
“You are an impossible harlot,” he said in a low growl.
She savored the taste of his skin on her lips.
“Mmmm. I am. And also,”—she taunted him with her tongue running slowly along her upper lip—“I can’t think about, much less talk about, unwan—I mean unexpected, imaginary babies… it’s just too implausible.”
He finally gave up, or gave in. He wasn’t sure which.
Chapter 17
The following night, when Bronte looked out over the large drawing room at Dunlear Castle and saw the cast of characters, she wondered if she
were in a dream, or a Noël Coward play. The castle was closed to the public for the weekend and the main rooms were once again open to the family.
Despite the vast grandeur of the space—soaring ceilings with extensive, intricate plaster moldings; miles of rich brocade curtains; Venetian glass chandeliers; acres of Aubusson carpets; priceless French fauteuils and bergères; massive, carved-stone fireplaces at either end—the ease with which these people slipped into the oversized sofas with a cocktail and a ready smile made it all seem, well, utterly normal. They had convened at the far end of the room and Bronte was enjoying the overview as she came in a little later than the others. The train out from London had been pleasant enough, but she’d collapsed for a brief nap and was just now making her way back to the land of the living.
Max had invited Willa and David to join them, and those two were talking animatedly with the duchess, who had made a surprise appearance after all. Apparently, the idea of her entire extended family under one roof, enjoying themselves and talking about her behind her back, was more than she could bear. She looked as frosty as ever, her spine like a steel rod as she pretended to be amused by Willa’s inside tidbit of gossip from the latest royal fiasco. But there seemed to be something less predatory about Sylvia this evening. Her eldest, Claire, was sitting nearby, laughing at Willa’s rendition of the idiotic chauffeur who had tattled to the press about his canoodling—unmarried to each other—passengers and his subsequent dismay at losing his position. Even the duchess cracked a small smile at that.
Claire had turned out to be a very pleasant surprise. Bronte had anticipated a carbon copy of the supercilious, arrogant mother-in-law-to-be. Instead, Claire was more like a very pale version of Devon, a very rigid, focused version, to be sure, but hardly the conniver that Max had painted. She was eager to gather as much information about Bronte as she could, asking myriad back-to-back questions, just as Devon had. Before retiring Friday night, Claire suggested they take an early walk together the following day.
