Royal Pain (33 page)

Denial was exhausting.

She went home with more healthy food and prepared another meal fit for Alice Waters. And sulked.

She served up her late-afternoon entree with a heavy dose of Al Green and Lyle Lovett, damn them. Their sexy duet had her scrambling for the phone for what seemed like the hundredth time to call Max again. She had passed through the multiple stages of immature frustration and annoyance at his lack of a response and fallen face-first into full-blown panic.

Bronte dialed and got his voice mail again.

“Okay. Point taken. I’m starting to freak out. Please. Please call me back. You win. I was wrong. Mea culpa. Punish me. Seriously. I like the sound of that. You. Me. Some sort of little leather paddle thing that I’ve never heard of, of course, but maybe you have, and you’ll teach me a lesson in obedience. Please call me back. I’m worried. I love you.”

After the call ended, Bronte stared at the stupid device that kept her permanently entwined in the lives of millions of people and still left her utterly alone.

She went back into the kitchen to clean up, then decided it was time to
really
clean. Every surface, every corner, every shelf, on top of the refrigerator, under the refrigerator. She was almost finished when Mavis Staples started singing in that rich, deep, compelling, sexy voice of hers. The haunting lyrics of the song cut Bronte to the quick. She couldn’t do it alone any longer. Moreover, she didn’t
want
to.

Bronte let her back slide down the kitchen wall, then she sank to the floor in a self-pitying pile. She sat with her forearms on her knees and let her head hang there for a long time. She was finished crying. This was ridiculous. She got up and threw the kitchen towel she’d been using into the sink, leaving the counters strewn with the spice jars, soup cans, boxes of pasta and cereal, and bottles of oil that she had removed from the kitchen cabinets. She had somehow, there on the floor with Mavis, come to realize that her job and her life and her very self were all pretty useless if she wasn’t with Max.

She had been a coward. She looked at the clock on the wall above the sink and saw it wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. If she tossed a few things into a bag and got in a taxi right away, she could be at JFK in time to catch the ten thirty flight to London.

She started making calls while she packed.

She called a messenger service to have her dad’s manuscript picked up and delivered to the publishing company the next morning.

She called her mother and thanked her again for the great talk earlier. Bronte let her know she had made the decision to send Lionel’s book to the editor and that she was on her way to London to surprise Max. Her mother was happy about both decisions and wished her a bon voyage. (No point in upsetting her mother with the very real possibility that Max would want nothing to do with her now that she had more or less implied she might not want his firstborn child… his heir. Genius.)

She called Carol and Cecily and told them she was probably taking a leave of absence, or not, but that she was going to be missing in action for a few days until she ironed things out with Max, then she’d be back in touch.

She called Sarah James and let her know that Carol would be handling her account for a couple of weeks, but she could reach Bronte on her cell phone. Sarah pressed for details, but Bronte feinted with an urgent need to make other calls to tie up a few loose ends before she left for JFK, and quickly said her good-byes.

She left a message on James Mowbray’s New York office voice mail, letting him know the same. All of her smaller accounts would be happily taken care of by Cecily and Carol for the short term, and she recorded a new outgoing message on her office phone explaining the situation. After that, she would just have to figure it out.

Bronte sat on her luggage to squeeze it shut, zipped it with difficulty, then took one last look around her little, orderly world. She felt like she needed to take it all in before letting it all go.

She took the elevator to the lobby of her building and handed her father’s brown-paper-package-tied-up-with-string to her doorman. She let him know the messenger would pick it up first thing in the morning, then asked if he would please collect her mail and put it into her apartment until she returned.

She walked out to the sidewalk, the summer sun setting to her left, Lexington Avenue stretching away into infinity across the park to the north. Bronte made a frown at the sea of occupied taxis that passed by, then gave a little sigh of relief as one rolled to a slow stop in front of her building to let out a passenger.

She was in such a rush to get into the taxi that she practically pulled the door off the car. The guy inside was passed out, probably drunk, his head in shadow.

“Wake up! I need this taxi!”

She bent her head down to look into the far side of the cab and felt the tears of joy start streaming down her cheeks. She dove at Max, rubbing her hands against the three-day growth on his cheeks, grabbing at his glorious, disheveled hair, kissing his neck, his ear, his eyelids, and then, as he started to wake from his groggy, sleep-deprived, cramped, passed-out, back-of-the-taxi slumber, his happy waiting lips.

“I’m so sorry, Bron,” he tried to get out between kisses.

“Me too. I was so… foolish.” She kissed him again, loving the feel of his jaw, his muscled arms through the thin fabric of his shirt. Her hands were practically clawing at him.

“Hey! Are you going to pay me or what?” the impatient driver barked. “Lady, do you need a taxi?”

“No!” Bronte cried as she made an awkward attempt to extract herself from the cab, then leaned into the front window to look at him. “No, I don’t need a cab after all!” She took a hundred-dollar bill out of her wallet as Max walked around to the trunk of the car to get his bag. “Here! Here’s a tip since you have just made me the happiest woman on the planet!”

“Thanks.” The taxi driver took the money with skeptical gratitude, then shook his head as he heard the trunk slam and pulled back into the slow stream of traffic.

Bronte almost tackle-hugged Max right there on the sidewalk, but they managed to get up to her apartment and into bed in record time. Max was almost delirious with exhaustion, and Bronte thrilled at the chance to strip him naked and get him all tucked up in her bed. He was a gorgeous dilapidated mess as his eyes slid shut and he told her he loved her for the hundredth time since he’d come awake in the taxi a few minutes before. He fell, almost instantly, into the rhythmic, even breathing of a deep sleep.

She lowered her head next to his on the cool, white pillowcase. Bronte put her face into his neck, breathing him in, stretching out against the length of his body, reaching across his chest with one arm, and draping one leg across his thigh.

She had always been mildly disturbed by that iconic Annie Leibovitz image of a naked John Lennon gripping a fully clothed and seemingly ambivalent Yoko Ono. It came to mind now. She used to wonder how he could be so shameless. He looked so desperate, one hand framing her face, the other clenched in a fierce tangle of her thick black hair. Why didn’t Yoko hug him back? She was practically ignoring him.

But in this moment, on this bed, with this man, Bronte felt a wave of recognition… and joy. John Lennon didn’t give a shit about what he looked like or what Yoko was doing, or who saw, because he simply loved her. It didn’t matter to Bronte whether she was an advertising executive or a duchess or naked—she simply loved Max. She wanted to hang on him like a toddler clings to his mother. She wanted to wrap her body around his like a shroud. She wanted him to wear her like a loose-fitting garment.

***

A few hours later, Max rolled over and awoke to see Bronte’s gleaming green eyes staring back at him a few inches away. He whispered, “We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to, if it’s all too much too fast. I don’t care as long—”

“You don’t have to talk. Let’s just rest for a while. We can get married today if you want to. Today. Tomorrow. Whenever.” She started steamrolling: “I almost called City Hall while you were asleep, but I figured it’ll be Monday morning soon enough, and of course they must perform weddings on Monday mornings. This is New York City, for goodness’ sake. And then I remembered Devon saying you might prefer to get married at the chapel at Dunlear, with the family vicar and all that—which is fine, by the way, if that’s what you want—but I’m not sure I can wait that long. I mean, I don’t want our first child forever wondering if he was responsible for some sort of loveless shotgun wedding! So I’ve got it all figured that this is how the story will go: I was in a doleful state of missing you after these past couple of weeks and then a near-panic when I hadn’t been able to reach you for
days
, and then the moment you arrived in New York, I couldn’t wait another minute, and we were careless, and I had my way with you, and then—”

Max’s smile stopped her in midsentence.

“What?” she said through her own smile.

“I love it when you think you can manage everything.”

“You love it? I thought it was merely
adorable
,” Bronte teased.

“I loved you then too, but I figured if I came right out and said so, you would think I was being insincere, in the first blush of lust and all that.”

“Well, I’ll have you know that I am happy to relinquish control… of everything. Whatever you want to do, wherever you want to do it, however many times you want to do it. My answer is yes.”

“Just like that?” Max echoed her skeptical reply from so long ago.

“Just like that.”

Without the encouragement and support of the following people, this book would not be in your hands: Allison Hunter, Anne Calhoun, Bettina Young, Brenda Phipps, Cat Clyne, Conway Van der Wolk, Deb Werksman, Dorothy MacDiarmid, Elizabeth Mellon, Emma Petersen, Fecia Mulry, Janet Webb, Jeffrey Huisinga, Katharine Ashe, Laura Munson, Linda Edwards, Lisa Dunick, Magdalen Braden, Mary Whittemore, Mate Bonilla, Mira Lyn Kelly, Miranda Neville, Nonie Madden, Peg Mulry, Rachel Edwards, Regan Fisher, Susie Benton, Tom Mulry, The Bridge Ladies, and everyone in the #1k1hr Twitter feed.

Megan Mulry writes sexy, modern, romantic fiction. She graduated from Northwestern University and then worked in publishing, including positions at
The New Yorker
and
Boston
magazine. After moving to London, Mulry worked in finance and attended London Business School. She has traveled extensively in Asia, India, Europe, and Africa and now lives with her husband and children in Florida. You can visit her website at
www.meganmulry.com
or find her procrastinating on Twitter.

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Nadia Knows Best

by Jill Mansell

The bigger the mistake, the more tempting it is…

When Nadia Kinsella meets Jay Tiernan, she’s tempted. Of course she is. Stranded together while a snowstorm rages outside… who would ever know?

But Nadia’s already been together with Laurie for years—they’re practically childhood sweethearts. Okay, so maybe she doesn’t get to see much of him these days, but she can’t betray him.

Besides, when you belong to a family like the Kinsellas—glamorous grandmother Miriam, feckless mother Leonie, stop-at-nothing sister Clare—well, someone has to exercise a bit of self-control, don’t they? I mean, you wouldn’t want to do something that you might later regret…

Praise for
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author Jill Mansell:

“Mansell crafts a lovely story.”
—USA Today

“A master storyteller who creates characters with unique personalities that captivate the reader’s imagination and heart.”
—Long and Short Reviews

For more Jill Mansell, visit:

www.sourcebooks.com