“Well gosh, Max, I can see how you didn’t get around to it. What with all those days we had together.” He winced at the words. “I don’t understand. Was it a joke?”
“No. Christ. No.” His fingers grazed her arm, leaving fire in their wake, her body instantly remembering that he’d just stretched it tight like a string and it would like its promised orgasm, thank you very much.
Her body had not received the message that he was a lying bastard.
Nope. Not a bastard. A duke.
She pulled away from his touch. “Don’t.” She was hot with embarrassment. “You lied to me.”
“It wasn’t a lie . . . ”
“I thought you were a farmer.”
“I am a farmer.”
She exhaled, angry. “That’s your play? I’m a farmer? I asked you if you owned a suit!” God, it was mortifying. Of course he owned a suit. He’d turned up in Gucci, for fuck’s sake, and not off the rack—bespoke as hell and looking like he’d stepped off the pages of Vogue.
She’d invited him to this gala, filled with her work, where she’d laid herself bare for him, desperate for his approval, thinking he’d be impressed with her. And he was a duke. She laughed. “And then, when I saw you here, I thought you were—”
She stopped, not wanting to reveal more of herself to him.
He pounced. “What? What did you think I was?”
I thought you were mine. I thought you were my partner. Us against the world.
I thought you were my future.
And it turned out, he was a duke. The most glamorous guest at this party filled with glamorous people. And Lilah? She was back to where she always was.
Alone.
I thought you were home.
“Lilah,” he said softly, stepping closer. “Please. I wanted to tell you.”
Don’t touch me. Don’t make it harder.
“And how did that end? You reveal you’re secretly a duke and I throw myself into your arms and we live happily ever after . . . cosplaying in your collection of medieval suits of armor?”
He blinked. “Is that what you think we would do?”
“I don’t know what your kind do.”
“Lilah,” he started, cautiously, but she could tell he was holding back a smile, and she considered giving the British Museum a second punch in the face that evening. “I don’t own suits of armor, but I will get some if that’s what you’d like.”
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t make this a joke. You lied to me.” She turned on her heel and made for the door. Max was at her elbow instantly. “I should have known. Look at you. Of course you’re a duke. With your perfect face and your perfect voice and your . . . watch.”
“What? What about my watch?”
She cut him a look. “I thought it was a gift! But it wasn’t, was it? It’s just a normal twenty-thousand-dollar watch that you wear on regular days in a sheep pasture because you’re a duke.” She stopped at the coat check, empty now that everyone was inside, enjoying themselves. She spun to face him. “Is this some kind of bullshit game you play with all the girls who wander onto your estate? See if you can get them to bang the hot farmer?”
“What? No!”
She turned her back on him, digging a small white rectangle from her pocket, and passed it to the young woman behind the counter who stared at them, wide-eyed. “Thank you,” she said, but what she meant was Please, God, hurry.
“Lilah—listen to me.”
“No. You listen to me,” she said, anger coming hot and furious. “I’ve spent the last eighteen months of my life trying to put myself back together, trying to work up the courage to trust this world again—this world that turned its back on me. And you—” Tears came, hot and unbidden, and she willed them back. “No. Not you. Max made me believe that it was possible. That I could trust again. That I could believe in the value of my work and in my own value. And that I could open myself up again, and triumph, and maybe . . . just maybe . . . also get the guy.”
“You got the guy,” he said. “I’m here.”
“I didn’t even know your name.”
“Who cares about my fucking name?”
Weston.
Rupert Maximillian Arden. Fourteenth Duke of Weston, Earl Salterton.
That strange, foreign, mystery of a name—the name used with reverence by the staff in the estate house, the one they’d casually tossed around while they’d joked with the boys in the pub, while they’d walked to the folly tower on the edge of the estate, where she’d realized how fast she was falling in love.
And all the while he’d been the duke.
He wasn’t Max.
God, she hadn’t even asked him his last name.
Her face went hot with refreshed embarrassment. The laughter in the pub with the boys—the way they’d all guffawed and winked along with her when she’d talked about how she didn’t trust rich and powerful men. And all that time, the joke hadn’t been on the duke in the castle on the hill.
It had been on her.
Because Max was the duke in the castle on the hill.
“Obviously you care about your name a whole lot, Max, or you would have introduced yourself.”
He rocked back on his heels, and she turned back to the woman in the coat check. “Thank you,” she said, collecting her coat, clutching it to her chest. Armor.
She met his eyes then, those beautiful, whiskey-colored eyes she’d imagined looking into for the rest of her life. Now, somehow, in the face of another man.
Max was gone.
And of all the things she’d lost, this one might be the one that broke her.
Her chest tightened, tears threatening.
She would not cry. Not tonight. Not here.
Which meant she had to leave.
“Goodbye, Max.”
Chapter Thirteen
He’d been so close to telling her.
He’d had a plan. Back to her hotel room, and there he’d confess all of it. He’d tell her he was a duke, and why he’d kept it from her.
He’d tell her that he loved her, and that he didn’t want a life in half measures. That he wanted all of it. That he wanted her in his world—no more farmhouse idyll, but real life. That he wanted to be in her world, however it came. Real life. Not just the gala. London, New York, Los Angeles—whatever she wanted.
He’d tell her the truth. That he couldn’t imagine the future without her, wherever and whenever and however it came.
And then he would make love to her as Weston and as Max, and give her everything he had.
He’d been so close.
But Max should have known better. Because nothing with Lilah had ever gone to plan, since he found her on the ground, taking pictures of his sheep.
Christ, he’d fucked up. Again.
He watched her leave, pushing through a crowd of people that had congregated by the entrance to the museum, wanting more than anything to follow her. Maybe if he followed her, she would—
“I almost couldn’t believe it was you, you know.”
Max turned toward the words, finding his ex-wife watching him in that way she always had, calm and understanding, like she was perpetually one step ahead of him. And maybe she always had been.
She smiled, warm and full of fondness. “Surely not, I said to myself. Rupert? In London? By choice?”
“I come to London,” he grumbled.
“Under duress,” she said with a little laugh. “But you’re not here under duress, are you?”
“No.” He’d go anywhere if it meant being with Lilah.
“You’re here for Lilah Rose.” Her gaze tracked over his shoulder, to the place behind him where Lilah had disappeared. “Have you taken up an interest in photography?”
“Hers,” he said.
Georgiana nodded. “I can understand why. She’s set the standard for a generation of portrait photographers.”
A pause as they stood in silence, as they had a thousand times before, at school, beyond. Finally, Max exha
led. “I really bollocksed it, Georgie.”
“Why, because you thrashed Jeffrey Greenwood? I’ve no idea what he did, but anyone with sense can see he deserved it.”
“And more,” Max replied. “But it has nothing to do with Greenwood. It has to do with the fact that she didn’t know I was Weston.”
“Wait. What?” When he didn’t look at her, Georgiana said in her firmest voice, “Rupert.”
He did look then. “You needn’t talk to me as though I’m a child. How are your children by the way? And Hyde?”
“They are all fine, thank you, but I’ve no interest whatsoever in discussing them right now,” she said, the words coming in a perfect aristocratic clip. “How long have you known her?”
“Two weeks.”
“And you didn’t tell her.”
“No.”
“That you’re the duke.”
“Christ, Georgiana. No. I didn’t.”
“Right,” she said, turning and pointing back at the Great Court, to the massive pictures. “Look.”
Max did as he was told. There he was, on the folly tower at Salterton, acres of land spread out behind him. Hay he’d baled. Sheep he’d lambed.
All of it captured by Lilah. And now, none of it important without her.
“In all the years we were together—” Georgiana said, “You never looked at me like that.”
No one cares who is behind the camera.
He cared. Christ, he’d never cared so much.
“You’re in love with her.”
He looked to his ex-wife. “Yes.”
She sighed, the sound full of pity. “Roo.”
“I didn’t want her to . . . ” He trailed off, the explanation getting lost in—was that opera playing in the room beyond?
Georgiana finished for him. “You didn’t want her to love you for the title, and you not be able to deliver.”
He didn’t reply. He didn’t have to.
“Congratulations. She doesn’t love you for your title.” Her gaze softened. “And I know you never believed it . . . but I didn’t love you for it either. It wasn’t the title that ended us. It wasn’t the sheep, and it wasn’t parties in London.”
Max looked to the woman he’d married an age ago, believing that they could love each other enough to give up the lives they’d always wanted. “We never wanted the same things.”
She smiled, sad and kind. “No, Roo. We were young and silly and we didn’t know what we wanted.”
He knew what he wanted now though.
“I want her,” he said, to himself as much as to Georgiana.
“I’m very happy to hear it. It’s rather wonderful when it all falls into place.” She smiled the smile of a woman who’d learned that lesson well. “And does she want you?”
“She wants Max.”
“Lucky thing, that,” Georgiana said. “As you’ve always been more Max than Weston.”
He looked to her. “I love her.”
She smiled. “Then I suggest you go tell her. And please thank her for her gorgeous photographs. From me. And when it’s sorted, come round to dinner sometime.”
He was already gone, headed to the door at a clip no gentleman would ever use in public, but Max had already broken several of the cardinal rules of gentlemen that evening, so there was no reason for him to stop now.
He pushed through the crowd at the door, a plan already forming. She was at a hotel five minutes’ walk from the museum. He’d go to every one of them he could find in that radius, all night long until he found her.
He didn’t have to go far.
Max burst onto the red carpet, ready to sprint to the street, to discover that something had happened outside—a commotion of some sort, if the police and photographers were any indication. Whatever had occurred was over now, but the gates leading onto Great Russell Street were closed, penning in anyone who wanted to leave.
Which worked out very well for Max, because there, standing at the center of the red carpet, somehow all alone in a pool of light, waiting for the gates to open, was Lilah.
Relief thrummed through him on a wave of adrenaline as he bounded down the steps, calling her name, loving the way she turned, instantly, as though she couldn’t help herself.
Good. He couldn’t help himself either.
He wanted to turn whenever she called his name. Always.
He came to a stop in front of her, hating the way she’d crossed her arms over her chest, closing herself to him. Protecting herself from him. God. He’d done this to her—all the times he’d wanted to protect her, and now he’d hurt her.
“I love you,” he began. “Whatever else there is, whatever else you believe, whatever else you think of what I’ve done, know that. I love you. This was not a joke. And it was not a game. And it was not a lie. I might have ruined it, but that is the truth. And that will be true forever. I love you.”
She met his eyes then, and he sucked in a breath.
It wasn’t enough.
“How can I believe that? I unraveled for you. I told you everything. I held nothing back. I gave you . . . ” She paused, and the ache in Max’s chest became pain. “I gave you every bit of me. All of it. And you lied to me. From the start.”
“I never lied to you,” Max insisted, fear and panic thrumming through him as she cut him a look of utter disbelief. She was slipping through his grasp. “I didn’t. Christ, Lilah . . . I told you more of my truth than I’ve ever told anyone. You . . . you unraveled me. The moment you looked up at me in that pasture . . . I was blown open. I didn’t tell you my name. But I told you so much more.”
The disbelief was gone now, replaced by something else. Something like doubt. He could work with doubt. It wasn’t ideal, but he could work with it. He stepped closer to her. She didn’t back away. He could work with that too. “Lilah, if you give me the chance, I’ll tell you everything. Whatever you want to know. Every dark secret, every embarrassing moment, every emotion.” He paused. “Right now, I’m fucking terrified, love. I’m terrified I’ve lost you.”
“God, Max. You make it sound so easy.”
“It’s always felt easy with us.”
Her lips curved in a little smile, and a sliver of hope flared.
“Lilah, love.” He was desperate to touch her. He took a lock of her gorgeous hair in hand, the only touch he’d let himself have. “Let me prove it.”
There was a low rumble of murmurs somewhere off to the left, but Max didn’t look. He was too busy looking at her.
Lilah did look.
“Max,” she said, quietly, shooting a nervous glance at the lines of cameras set up on either side of the red carpet. “We’re in full view of every tabloid photographer in London. This isn’t exactly the place for—”
“I don’t care,” he said. “I’ve spent the last decade avoiding them. But I don’t care about any of that now. Let them take their pictures. None of it matters. Not if I don’t have you. And I can’t have you if I don’t tell you the truth, which I should have told you from the start.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
“My father died when I was sixteen.”
Her gaze softened. “I’m sorry.”
Of course she would say that. Of course that would be her first thought. God, if he lost this woman, he didn’t know what he’d do.
“Before that, I was a lot of things. I was born Earl Salterton. I was Arden to schoolmates and Rupert to my family. Lottie called me Roo. Georgiana as well.”
Her lips curved in a ghost of a smile. There and gone, so fast that he almost missed it. But he didn’t miss it. He loved it. “I know. Awful. I hated it, truly. But you know what I hated most? I hated that when my father died, every friend I had . . . every one . . . immediately started calling me Weston. Without hesitation. One moment I was Rupert or Arden, and then the phone rang at Eton and the news traveled from one room to the next, and instantly I was Weston. My father, not even cold in his grave. As though they’d all been calling me that in their head for years
, anyway, just biding their time until they could tell the world that they were friends with a duke.”
Her brows knit together as he continued.
“And it happened like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Without anyone even thinking to check on me, or to tell me they were sorry that my father had died, I was just someone else. The door closed on the past. Opened on some new future. Time to learn how to live in it.” He stilled, thinking on it. Hating that he still remembered the ache of it. Dwelled on it. He scoffed. “But what a whinge, right? I was a duke, and it came with money and power and privilege beyond reason, and everything I could ever ask for. And here I am, complaining that people noticed.”
“You were sixteen. And even if you weren’t . . . it was your life.” She reached up to touch him, her fingers sliding over his cheek, and he closed his eyes, the pleasure of her touch nearly unbearable.
She wouldn’t touch him if he’d lost her, would she?
“One minute you were there, and the next you were gone.” At her words, his gaze flew to hers, finding tears in her beautiful eyes.
Christ, he loved her.
“Max,” she whispered, searching his face.
“No.” He took her hand in his and kissed her fingertips. “Let me finish. I was born into this world. Power and privilege and money, with duty to the title absolutely drilled into me from birth. And I was terrible at this part of it.” He waved a hand at the museum, large and looming behind her. “I hated being here, in London. I hated parties and people and . . . ”
“Paparazzi?”
He nodded. “Them too. And I thought that if you wanted all this, I was doomed to disappoint you.” He hesitated, searching for the explanation. “So I stayed Max, telling myself I’d let you go at the end of our time together. Telling myself I’d be able to watch you return to your world and not wildly, desperately, want to be a part of it so I could be near you. Telling myself I could be in love with you and still let you go.”
“You should have asked me,” she said, her brow furrowing.
“I know.”
“You almost broke both our hearts.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
She nodded, her eyes searching his. Laying him bare. “No more of that.”
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