A Princess for Christmas

by Jenny Holiday

  Oh, hang on. She grabbed the phone.

  Dani: On second thought, there might actually be a scenario in which I want to get together with you today.

  Max: I wait with bated breath.

  Dani: Any chance you want to be my plus-one to my departmental holiday party, at which my soon-to-be-ex-husband Vince will be in attendance, as will his new girlfriend, who is a former student of both of ours and who is twenty years younger than he is?

  Dani: Is your soon-to-be-ex-husband the main character in a Philip Roth novel?

  She laughed out loud.

  Dani: He might as well be.

  Max: The answer is yes, but I have questions.

  Dani: Of course you do.

  Max: Question the first: Is this like one of those elaborately complex rom-coms where we’re pretending to be in love to make your ex jealous?

  Dani: Let’s leave it vague. If pressed I’ll call you a friend. But if you wanted to very obviously find me the pinnacle of wit, that would be fine.

  Max: It will be a stretch, but I’ll try. Question the second: Am I myself or am I pretending to be, say, a visiting scholar of feminist literature who is therefore extra suspectable to your pinnacle?

  Dani: You’re yourself.

  Max: Ah. So what I hear you saying is that in this one very specific scenario, you actually find it convenient that I’m an almost-duke.

  God damn him.

  Dani: God damn you.

  Max: I might even go do far as to say that you’re using me for my almost-dukeness.

  Dani: She’s twenty years old. He told me she was his Lolita. That she saw the real him and that in order to take his writing to the next level he needed someone who could be a “helpmeet.” When I said we were each other’s helpmeets, he said there can only be one helpmeet and one help-ee in any relationship.

  Max: What time am I picking you up?

  Dani: Five. I’ll meet you there—it’s a building on campus but not mine. I need to look up the address. I’ll text it to you.

  Max: Dress code? Formal? Business casual?

  Dani: Duke-ish casual.

  Max: Got it. Prepare to be the pinnacle.

  Dani smiled, dove onto the bed, and prepared to be love-bombed by the other Max, who genuinely thought she was the pinnacle. As he did every morning, he acted like waking up next to her was the greatest joy of his life, going from dead asleep to vibrating with happiness as he hurled himself onto her lap. “Good morning, my love,” she cooed, burying her nose in his fur as she hugged him.

  Maybe today wasn’t going to be quite as crappy as she’d feared.

  Max was supposed to meet Dani at the faculty club on her campus, but since he arrived half an hour early, he had his driver drop him at the English building.

  This was going to be fun. He hadn’t been lying—he did like Daniela Martinez, not least because she didn’t seem to like him. That wasn’t something that happened. It wasn’t that everyone liked him. He wasn’t that conceited. But he rarely encountered someone who didn’t at least pretend to. Sparring with Dani last summer when she’d come to Eldovia to visit Leo had been a breath of fresh air in a remarkably stressful time.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said when he ran into—literally—a student standing outside her office.

  A boy wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt with a picture of a ram on it looked him up and down. “No prob, man.”

  There was also a girl in line, ahead of the boy, and she said, “Are you looking for Professor Martinez?”

  “I am.”

  She snapped her gum at him, but not in a way that seemed hostile. “Get in line.”

  He did. He hadn’t wanted to be late, and not knowing how long it would take to get to the Bronx from his Midtown hotel, he’d budgeted too much time for the journey.

  After a minute or so, another boy came out of Dani’s office, and the girl went in. Ram Boy shuffled down the wall so he was closer to Dani’s open door.

  “Are you enjoying Professor Martinez’s class?” Max inquired.

  “I guess,” the boy said flatly.

  The girl emerged, having only been in there a minute, and Ram Boy went in. Max edged closer to the open door so he could eavesdrop.

  “Hey, Professor M, I need you to do me a huge favor.” I need you to do me a huge favor. Something about the way he phrased that, like a command, rubbed Max the wrong way.

  “And what would that be?” That was Dani’s “I am not impressed” voice. Max smiled. He was acquainted with that voice.

  The boy proceeded to make a weak case involving a diving meet, a book forgotten on the team bus, and a thesis all worked out but just not quite down on paper yet. Dani proceeded to systematically dismantle him, but subtly enough that the kid wasn’t understanding the full extent of the burns he was sustaining.

  It was hot.

  Dani was hot.

  Interestingly, that was a fact Max could note with detachment, which was another new experience. All the years he’d spent assuming he was going to marry Marie had also been spent, he would freely admit, slutting around. He and Marie had agreed that their marriage would be in name only and that discreet “extracurricular” activities would be allowed, necessary even. Still, he’d viewed the last several years as his last gasp of singledom and therefore of freedom and had conducted himself accordingly.

  So when the world offered itself to him, he took. And when you were an obscenely wealthy baron, you had a lot of offers.

  What you didn’t have a lot of was refusals. But Dani, having made her disinterest in him clear from the moment she’d arrived on Eldovian soil, was a rare woman. Wickedly smart, deliciously witty, insanely beautiful, and not interested. There were no hard-to-get long games being played. Leo had told Max a bit about her ugly divorce, and Dani herself had used the phrase post-men more than once.

  She was a goddamn delight.

  To Max’s surprise, even though the boy was wilting under Dani’s questioning about the thesis he supposedly had all worked out—it didn’t seem he had actually read the book, which sounded like it was meant to be The Great Gatsby—she suddenly granted him a forty-eight-hour extension and abruptly dismissed him. “Happy holidays,” she said so flatly she might as well have been saying, “Good riddance.”

  It was such an unexpected turnabout that Max, who had been lounging against the wall, stood up straight, startled.

  “Are there any more students out there?” she asked the boy.

  “Students . . . no,” the boy said, making brief eye contact with Max as he breezed by in possession of an extension he did not deserve.

  When Max stuck his head into Dani’s office, it was to find her peeling off a blue blazer to reveal a formfitting pinup-girl dress that looked like it belonged on Bettie Page instead of a literature professor.

  “Oh!” She jumped.

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean to startle you.” He smirked. “I’m merely here to ask for an extension.”

  She rolled her eyes in lieu of greeting him, sat at her desk, and pulled a small mirror out of a drawer. “You’re early,” she said to her reflection.

  “My thesis is all ready to go.” He sat on the guest chair and, as she started applying a deep burgundy lipstick, revised his previous assertion that he could appreciate Dani’s hotness from a purely intellectual perspective. “Want to hear it?”

  “I guarantee you I already have.”

  “None of the characters in The Great Gatsby have any inner life to speak of, making what is admittedly a masterfully written book into a mere melodrama.”

  She glanced at him with one lip painted. The contrast between the dark red of the finished lip and the pale pink of the natural one certainly was something. “An interesting line of thought.”

  He thought she was going to say more, but when she merely returned to her lips, he asked, “Why did you give that kid an extension? He was bullshitting you. And does he know you at all?”

  One eyebrow rose, though she was still looking
at her reflection instead of at him. “Do you know me at all?”

  “I’m thinking the way to get an extension from Professor Martinez is to level with her. Own the fact that you screwed up—with time management or laziness, or what have you—present a plan for fixing your screwup and state your terms.”

  Ah, that cracked her. She put the mirror down and really looked at him for the first time. Almost looked like she might smile. “Did you hear the student before him?”

  “No.”

  “She asked for a twenty-four-hour extension because she works two part-time jobs and she fell asleep at her computer last night.”

  “Did you grant it?”

  “I did. I told her to go home and take a nap and to take another week with the paper.”

  The fact that he had been right about how to handle Professor Martinez when you were a wayward student was strangely, sharply satisfying. “Why?”

  “Because she shows up to class prepared and has never asked for anything. Because I see her working at the Starbucks in the lobby all the time, and if that’s only one job of two, that’s a little sobering.”

  “So why does Diver Boy get an extension, too? I wouldn’t have pegged you as such a pushover.”

  “I have a hundred essays to grade in the next two weeks, so it doesn’t really matter to me when they come in. And frankly, it’s not worth the bad reviews on my student evaluations.”

  Hmm. It was hard to imagine Dani getting “bad reviews.” And her unexpectedly blasé response to the boy’s request created a disturbance in the mental picture Max was painting of her.

  “You ready?” she asked as she stood, and his appreciation of her dress—and her lips, and her everything—grew even less intellectual.

  “You want to give me any background about the ex-husband—did you say his name was Vince?—or the new girlfriend?” he asked while he tried not to be too overt about his escalating appreciation.

  “Neither of them have any inner life to speak of, so nah.” She did flash him a little smile then. It was pleasingly conspiratorial. “I’m sure you—” Her speech came to an abrupt halt and her body froze except for her eyes, which traveled rapidly up and down his body.

  He looked down at himself. “What? Not duke-ish casual?” The New York trip was a short one, so he only had the one suit with him. He’d almost worn it without a tie, but in the end he hadn’t been able to make himself do it. If a man was wearing a suit, he should wear a suit—all its pieces, not some haphazard, choose-your-own-adventure version of it.

  “It was a pun on business casual,” she said.

  “I got that. Is this not business casual? You Americans with your dress codes. You put words together that either don’t mean anything or contradict each other and call it a ‘dress code.’ I could have worn my frock coat complete with ceremonial sword.”

  She cracked a grin, a full unreserved one, and he was unbecomingly excited to have been its source.

  “You look fine. Let’s go.”

  All eyes were on Dani as she entered the English Department holiday party, but for once it wasn’t because of her status as jilted ex-wife of the inexplicably popular Professor Vincent Ricci, who had left her for a perfectly average twenty-year-old named Berkeley.

  Or it wasn’t only because of that. To be fair, it probably started because of that. Vince and Berkeley coming out as a couple a hot minute after Berkeley formally dropped out of school had been the biggest news to hit the department since the dean’s office reclaimed the faculty lounge and gave it to the economists for an econometrics lab. Poor discarded Dani, replaced by a younger, tauter model.

  But it only took a second, once everyone got a load of Max, for the narrative to shift.

  Because Max, in his duke-ish casual, looked a lot more than “fine.” He was a sight to behold, especially in contrast to the men in this crowd, who were “dressed up” in their Dockers and “no-iron” shirts that actually needed ironing. Max’s tallness and slimness was accentuated by the tailored blue suit he was wearing like it was a second skin. Like it was casual. With his icy blue eyes, his dirty blond hair slicked back into a pompadour, and his angular face, he looked like that Swedish actor from that vampire show, all sharp angles and cool cobalt. And the best part was it wasn’t all empty good looks. With his rapid-fire wit, he could eat these people for breakfast if he wanted to.

  She hoped he wanted to.

  He must have noticed everyone’s attention—it was hard not to; this crowd was not subtle—because he laid his palm on her lower back. In any other circumstance, she would have shaken him off. He didn’t press or push, though, just stood serenely while everyone gaped at them. After a few beats of that, he said, “Shall we go to the bar?”

  Dani caught the eye of Sinead, who she supposed was her best friend in the department. The only youngish woman professors without tenure, Sinead and Dani had leaned on each other a lot in the early years, forming a kind of battlefield bond that had never gone away even as they’d found their stride and gotten busy with research and relationships.

  Sinead raised her eyebrows in a way that was meant to communicate Holy shit, girl.

  Dani raised hers back and hitched her head slightly to send a return message: Meet us at the bar.

  Max’s hand stayed resting lightly on Dani’s back as they made their way through the crowded room. She said a few hellos to colleagues as they passed, but she didn’t stop. Better to let them wonder.

  “Hel-lo,” Sinead said as she sidled up to the bar. “Don’t you look smashing?”

  “You, too.” She really did. In fact, she was wearing a blue suit, just like Max, except hers was tailored to hug her curves, and she wore an open-necked white silk shirt under it.

  Dani kept introductions brief. “Max, Sinead. Sinead, Max.”

  They ordered drinks, and as they waited for them, Sinead flicked Max’s blue, black, and red checked tie. “Burberry?”

  Max raised an eyebrow. He probably wasn’t used to people touching his clothes. Or commenting on labels. Both were probably exceedingly low-classy. “Indeed.” He reached over and flicked the cross-body briefcase Sinead wore. “Vuitton?”

  Dani rolled her eyes. These two dandies were perfect for each other.

  “Knockoff,” Sinead said cheerfully. “I’ll be paying off my student loans until I die.”

  “Ah, yes, the puzzling American tradition of bankrupting young people before they even begin their careers.”

  “Hang on.” Sinead pointed at Max. “You’re the duke.”

  “Baron, actually,” Max said.

  Sinead had been leaning against the bar, but suddenly her posture changed. “Incoming.”

  Dani looked over her shoulder, took stock, and whispered to Max. “The guy on his way over here is the chair of the department and also of my tenure committee. We care about his inner life. His inner life needs to grant me tenure.” Max made a vague noise of acknowledgment.

  “And, bonus!” Sinead whispered. “He seems to have collected Vince and Berkeley, too.”

  “Berkeley?” Max barked an incredulous laugh. “Is that Lolita the Helpmeet’s name?”

  “It is indeed,” Dani said, choking back her own laugh—his mirth was contagious. “But ugh, all three of them at once? I’m not ready for this.”

  “Sure you are,” Max said as the bartender set their drinks on the bar. He put a fifty-dollar bill in the tip jar and handed the women their drinks. Before picking up his own he rolled his shoulders back and straightened his spine like he was preparing for battle. “This”—he winked at Dani—“is going to be fun.”

  About the Author

  JENNY HOLIDAY is a USA Today bestselling and RITA-nominated author whose work has been featured in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Washington Post, and National Public Radio. She grew up in Minnesota and started writing at age nine when her fourth-grade teacher gave her a notebook to fill with stories. When she’s not working on her next book, she likes to hang out with her family, w
atch other people sing karaoke, and throw theme parties. A member of the House of Slytherin, Jenny lives in London, Ontario, Canada.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Jenny Holiday

  Mermaid Inn

  Paradise Cove

  Once Upon a Bride (novella)

  One and Only

  It Takes Two

  Merrily Ever After (novella)

  Three Little Words

  Undue Influence

  Famous

  Infamous

  Saving the CEO

  Sleeping with Her Enemy

  The Engagement Game

  May the Best Man Win

  The Fixer

  The Gossip

  The Pacifist

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  a princess for christmas. Copyright © 2020 by Jenny Holiday. Excerpt from duke, actually copyright © 2021 by Jenny Holiday. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Cover illustration by Gizem Kazancıgil

  first edition

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.