Royal Pain
Authors: Megan Mulry
Copyright © 2012 by Megan Mulry
Cover and internal design © 2012 by Sourcebooks, Inc.
Cover design by Jennifer K. Beal Davis
Cover photo © Richard Izui Photography
Hat by Jenny Pfanenstiel
Stylist: Brynne Rinderknecht
Cover Model: Crystal McCahill
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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mulry, Megan.
A royal pain / Megan Mulry.
p. cm.
(trade paper : alk. paper) 1. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3613.U4556R69 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012020534
HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce]: I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.
PICKERING: At what, for example?
HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly]: Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east wind.
—George Bernard Shaw,
Pygmalion
A year ago, if you had told Bronte Talbott she was going to quit her job and leave her life in New York for any reason, much less a romantic one, her answer would have been a quick and confident, “Bullshit.” Bronte wasn’t looking for anyone to sweep her off her feet. She didn’t have any absurd ideas about her very own happily ever after. She had worked too hard and loved her job in advertising too much to throw it away for some guy. But that night at David and Willa Osborne’s going-away party had been the beginning of a transformation that left Bronte almost unrecognizable to her former self.
She had walked through the packed front hall of David and Willa’s apartment in Tribeca and seen Mr. Texas across the proverbial crowded room. Really crowded. Really smoky. Really loud. And he had looked up from his conversation as if her late arrival had triggered some unanticipated but welcome reaction, and he had given her a small, inviting smile that sliced through all the noise and peripheral distractions.
Slam.
She had met him a couple times before. Over the past few years, he had become a sort of bit player in their circle of friends. He lived and worked in Chicago, but he would fly into town for what he liked to call “the big weekends.” He and David had hit it off after they’d worked on a financial deal together and discovered a shared love of the Austin music scene and alcohol.
At first, Bronte had written him off as a little too loud, a little too confident. He was from Midland, Texas, for chrissake. But in that moment of crosscurrent intimacy amid the melee, she had a little recognition of her own desire to ally herself with someone who might be a little too loud or a little too confident. For once, she wanted to be the one who didn’t have to carry the conversation. Or the luggage, for that matter.
The rational, Gloria Steinem part of her railed (
My
mother
marched
on
Washington
for
this?
), but there it was. The shameful truth: a latent desire to be arm candy. To be taken care of.
“Hey,” he said.
He’d left the conversation of which he had been, as usual, the center of attention and was standing next to her at the makeshift bar. Half-empty bottles of Belvedere Vodka and Johnnie Walker Blue and Myers’s Rum were scattered across the black-granite countertop of David and Willa’s narrow, modern kitchen.
“Hey,” Bronte answered back as she poured herself a glass of red wine.
The two of them were temporarily alone in the relatively quiet space.
“So,” he asked, “you think you’ll go visit Willa and David in London after they move back?”
“I hope so. I’ve only been there once, but I loved it.” She took a sip of wine and waited for him to carry on the conversation.
“What’d you think of the show?” he asked.
“What show?”
“The concert at Madison Square Garden!” He smiled. “I thought everyone here had been there.”
“Oh, I didn’t go.”
Another friend, who was bombed, stumbled into the kitchen and pulled a soda out of the refrigerator, then weaved between the two of them.
“Hey, Bron,” he slurred.
Bronte smiled as she watched the poor guy bump into the doorjamb on his way out, then she looked up to see Mr. Texas staring at her with something akin to interest or mischief.
“What could have possibly kept you away?” he drawled.
She looked into her wineglass, then back up into his eyes. “It was a flip of the coin, but I ended up choosing the Rothko show at MoMA over the concert. My cousin is moving to L.A. and it was our last chance to hang out before she moves.”
“I don’t think I would’ve missed that concert for anything, much less some grim museum exhibit. I’ve been to that Rothko Chapel in Houston, darlin’, and I thought it was pretty lame.”
Bronte laughed. She wasn’t sure she had ever heard anyone dismiss Rothko. Or call her
darlin’
. If he had still been alive to meet him, her intellectual father would have absolutely despised this man.
“What kind of art do you like? The dogs playing poker?”
He smiled. “Yeah, I love that bull dog. The dangling cigarette. He’s definitely got a full house.”
“I know you are being purposely unintellectual,” she said.
“Life is grand; why struggle with all those suicidal abstract expressionists?”
From anyone else, she might have been offended, but he had this uncanny way of making her academic interest seem, if not foolish, at least needlessly difficult.
“Yeah.” She looked at him over the rim of her wineglass and wondered if he was drunk. He had a hint of mobility around his mouth, and his eyes were unsteady. But he seemed sober enough to keep his attention firmly on Bronte’s lips.
“So, you want to go for a walk?”
She laughed again. “It’s almost two in the morning. Where would we go for a walk?”
“I don’t know. I was just thinkin’ I could walk you home. You know, how one does.”
He was ramping up the Texan drawl and she had to admit it was pretty damn sexy. She hadn’t been attracted to anyone for ages. It felt good to have the warmth of his gaze on her. She’d been so focused on scratching her way to a level or two above entry level in the advertising business that her eye had simply been elsewhere. She was adept at compartmentalization. If she was focused on work, she was focused on work; she wasn’t 90 percent focused on work and 10 percent focused on seducing someone.
Bronte had looked at these post-college years as the pay-your-dues chapter. She was willing to do just about anything to earn the respect of her boss and her colleagues, to prove that she wasn’t some airhead who was working for a few years until she found a husband or hop-scotched to another industry. Whatever it took, she was going to be a kick-ass advertising account executive. She wasn’t going to wait around for anyone to whisk her off her feet.
But.
This man was proving to be pretty awesome in the whisk department. Broad, blond, confident, jovial. He reminded her of Kipling’s Kim, little friend of all the world. But big.
“Have you ever read
Kim
by Rudyard Kipling?”
“Is that like
The
Jungle
Book
? I’ve watched that cartoon with my nieces.” His smile was inclusive and naughty.
Every guy who entered the kitchen to grab a beer saluted him with a mix of respect and camaraderie. A string of “Dude!” and “Hey, dude!” and “What a show, dude!” punctuated by high fives and emphatic nods constantly stalled their incipient conversation.
“Why are they congratulating you on the concert?” Bronte asked in one of the lulls.
He laughed. And it was as if a great bass guitar had strummed through her. “They’re not congratulating me! We were just all agreeing how great it was. Shared pleasure and all that.”
He slowed his voice there at the end, and even though she knew it was some trick of seduction that he probably practiced (or no longer needed to practice because it came so easily), she still gave herself over to the warm flow of desire that it created.
“I like the sound of that,” Bronte said softly.
Shared
pleasure
and
all
that
, she repeated to herself in her mind. She would like to know more about “all that.”
He reached out his hand and took Bronte’s near-empty wineglass out of her grasp. A sort of chauvinist gesture that she resented but also liked, hating herself a little.
“What if I want another glass of wine? What if I want the last sip in that glass?”
But he knew, and she knew he knew, that she would much rather abandon the dregs or the possibility of a future glass in favor of walking out of this party with this charismatic, larger-than-life, anti-Rothko hunk holding her hand.
He was pulling her in that direction when Willa and David entered the small kitchen, pretty much sauced and holding their arms around one another’s waists. Bronte let her hand fall away from his.
“There you are!” Willa nearly sang.
She gave Bronte an emotional hug.
“Willa, I saw you for lunch today! You act as if I haven’t seen you in years!”
“I know, but I’m going to
miss
you.” Then, still holding one of Bronte’s hands, Willa turned to the blond hero in close proximity. “And you! You have got to meet Bronte Talbott. She is fabulous.” Willa’s voice was a lilting mix of upper-crust British and drunk.
Mr. Texas smiled over Willa’s shoulder and winked at Bronte in a conspiratorial way, then said, “Thank you for the introduction, Willa. Bron and I were just gettin’ acquainted. Please convince her that I would be a suitable escort to walk her home.”
“Oh, Bronte! You must! He’s simply so American, isn’t he?” Willa grabbed his bicep as if he were a prizefighter. “All that might and muscle.”
David rolled his eyes and pulled his wife’s hand away from his friend’s upper arm. “Really, darling, you must stop mauling our guests. Plus, I thought you wanted Bronte to meet Max.”
“Well, I did. Who wouldn’t want to meet the most eligible bachelor in all of England after all?” Willa gave Bronte a meaningful, if drunk, eye widening. “But if he doesn’t have the decency to arrive on time, he’s going to miss the catch of the day.”
Bronte blushed, unsure if it was from being referred to as a catch or if it was from the possessive Texan hand that had just retaken hers.
“He’s shit outta luck then!” The Texan drawl was back in full force, along with that firm hand. “Let me walk you home, darlin’. You must need to walk off all that Rothko, right?”
And she did need to walk it off. She needed to walk off a lifetime.
She felt like, up until that moment, her life had been a stressful balancing act of rebellion and conformity. Her appreciation of Rothko notwithstanding, Bronte craved people and ideas that served to disprove her father’s despicable worldview that humanity was divided into two groups: one was made up of about a hundred intelligent people, and then there were the rest of the idiots. Lionel Talbott had been a brilliant academic who’d loathed his daughter’s love of pop culture. In her early teens, her addiction to
Hello!
magazine had become almost feverish, especially in her father’s presence. He had studied in England and had tried to get her to focus on Shakespeare and Marlowe.
What had started out as a mere act of rebellion on her part soon grew into a lifelong fascination. She would acquaint herself with British history, all right. Starting with the torrid affairs of Henry VIII right up until the glamour of Lady Diana. She was especially fond of the brooding men who always had pressed linen handkerchiefs in their pockets and the stylish women who were born knowing how to wear a fascinator. Her father had despised Bronte’s royal infatuations and had ridiculed her inconsolable adolescent drama when Diana died. Of course, his disapproval only served to solidify her attachment to all things having to do with British royalty (and occasionally Danish and French when marriages demanded).
In a perverse turn of events, she ended up reading Shakespeare and Marlowe in secret, while she flaunted the latest Regency romance or left steamy bodice rippers on the living room coffee table merely to antagonize her father. Unfortunately, all of those teenaged skirmishes culminated not in a mature evolution of mutual understanding between father and daughter, but in a final battle of the wills when Bronte refused to go to Princeton. That had been her anti-intellectual coup de grâce.
Up until now.
How her father would have sneered at this poker-playing-bulldog loving, brawny, blond Texan. Not that she was attracted to him for those superficial, anti-Daddy reasons, she hedged. But it didn’t hurt. Mr. Texas was smart and well-educated and well-informed, and even after all that (the master’s degree in international relations and the MBA in corporate finance from the University of Texas), he actually chose to toss all those diplomas aside and simply enjoy a great bottle of St. Estèphe or the perfect Dover sole.
“Means to an end and all that,” he quipped when she pressed him for why he had gone to graduate school at all if he had no respect for higher education.
“Again with the ‘all that,’ huh?” Bronte said. “I sort of love how you are able to dismiss ‘all that,’ all that I have been brooding about for the past six years since graduating from college.”
They walked on in silence for a bit. A nice silence, thought Bronte. The cool March air made her feel keenly alert.
“So is it just for the money?” she asked as they walked farther north up Hudson Street. They had crossed Canal Street and were making their way into SoHo. The three-in-the-morning streets were quiet, almost private.
“No such thing as ‘just,’ Bron.”
He had started calling her Bron from the outset. Whether it was because that’s how her drunk friend had addressed her or because he always assumed a level of heightened intimacy with everyone, she didn’t care. She liked the sound of his warm, vibrating voice when he said her name.
She realized—without much perception, she later noted—that it didn’t matter much
what
he said because that deep thrumming voice was seductive no matter what came out of his mouth. He could have read the directions for setting up her modem and she probably would have sighed and batted her eyelashes like a starstruck teenager.
But along with all that thrumming, sexy, deep
Bron
-calling, he was also just walking a girl home and holding her hand. He never got grippy or pawing or pushy or any of that.
He just held her hand.
No such thing as “just,” she reminded herself.
“So if it’s not ‘just’ for the money, what do you intend to do with all your filthy lucre when you’ve made enough?”
“Enough? Never enough!” he laughed. “And I’m already doing it… go to my favorite concerts, stay in kick-ass hotel suites at the Four Seasons, fly to London for the weekend to hang out with friends and drink martinis at Dukes and eat squab at Mark’s, go skiing in Aspen, bonefishing in the Yucatán, hunting in Argentina, windsurfing on the Columbia Gorge. You know… live!”