Page 86 of Duty and Desire

“I still prefer Nick when we’re alone.”

He frowned. “That feels so wrong.” He pointed to the dwindling lines of people below us. “I think you can leave now. You’ve been here long enough.” He straightened. “You’ve done your duty to them.”

Except I hadn’t, it seemed. My father’s expectations of my duty still clung to me, and I couldn’t shake them.

“I need air,” I said under my breath. Sunlight. Birdsong. The sight of flowers growing in the earth, not cut and arranged, their petals standing out against the green.

Signs of life.

“Then let’s go outside.”

Franz led the way down the winding narrow staircase, and suddenly I heard my father’s voice.

This is not your playroom, Nikolaus.

We walked from the hall, past the few remaining mourners, through the wide oak doors, and along the stone-flagged corridors. Everyone we passed bowed their heads, and I nodded in acknowledgment.

“I’ve grown up with this deference all my life and it still feels strange,” I confessed as we strolled. My brother Rudolf had once torn a strip off a servant who hadn’t bowed to him, and while my father had nodded in approval, I’d been horrified.

An early indication that while we were of the same blood, I was not like them.

Thoughts of Rudolf reminded me that there was another tragedy connected with their deaths: Rudolf’s widow, Gabriele, had miscarried. The child my brother had longed for.

Gabriele and I had spoken on the phone, and when she broke down in tears, telling me she couldn’t face the funeral, I told her she didn’t have to. She was under enough of a strain.

I’d be there for both of us.

At last we were outside in the sunshine. Franz walked ahead of me, and I found it amusing he already knew my destination, a corner of the gardens where a bench sat facing the defunct fountain that hadn’t worked since I was fifteen or so. I sat, breathing in the perfume of late spring flowers, watching the birds floating on air currents, gazing at the purple-colored mountains in the distance.

I smiled. “When I was little, my tutor gave me a story written in the nineteen-thirties. It seemed an odd thing to give a child, but it became one of my favorite books. It was calledLost Horizon.”

“I think I saw the movie once. They made it into a musical too. Was that the one about Shangri-La? A peaceful valley in the mountains of Tibet, where people aged slower? A kind of utopia?”

I nodded, then pointed to the far-off mountains. “I used to believe that if I could cross them, I’d find another kind of Shangri-La, one where I’d be free to be myself.”

Franz sighed. “That explains Bora-Bora, then.” When he paused, I knew the signs.

“Whatever it is you want to say, but you’re afraid you’re about to overstep the mark, stop thinking about it and just say it.” Franz was the closest thing to a friend I had right then.

Since you blasted Claudia.

I didn’t want to remember that. My face still tingled and my cheeks burned when I recalled the way I’d spoken to her.

Franz didn’t speak right away. Then he sighed. “I can’t help feeling you’re being railroaded. That you should be able to stand up and say, no, I’mnotgoing to marry her.”

I arched my eyebrows.

“But you mentioned the British royal family, and that got me thinking. They’re just figureheads, aren’t they? And whentheypush back, it doesn’t tend to end well for them.”

My lips twitched. “So I’m a figurehead? Thank you for pointing that out.” He winced, and I hastened to reassure him. “It’s okay, I get it.”

Not that I could deny it. My father had left the country pretty well sewn-up.

His phone buzzed, and I glanced at it in irritation. “It’s probably Miss Risch, asking where I am.”

He peered at the screen. “And you’d be wrong. It’s an email for me.” He glanced at me. “From Claudia.”

My heartbeat quickened. “But she’s emailing you, not me.” There’d been no word from her since I’d exploded at her.

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