“You’re leaving out one major factor,” Margaret says with a smirk after I’ve finished laying it all out.
“What’s that?”
“If you take this title, you can have a shot at the prince.”
I groan. “Oh no! I’m not going down that road again.”
“What road?” Lady Maier cuts in. “What am I missing here?”
“Aurelia and Prince Friedrich were seeing each other for a little while.”
“Emphasis on little. And Margaret, what makes you think he actually wants me? We only did what we did because we knew it would be a short-term kind of thing.”
Lady Maier is sitting on the edge of the sofa now, bent with her arms on her knees. “Wait a minute. That actually happened?”
I blink at her. “I’m sorry, what?”
“He asked for your phone number, like, ages ago.And then you made allusions to him only once, and then I never heard anything else. I just assumed nothing ever came of it.”
Margaret scoffs. “Rebecca, you are the biggest gossip in the peerage. How did you just let something like that go?”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” I cut in. “Because it’s over now.”
Lady Maier is almost trembling. My employer is normally so cool and composed. I’ve never seen her like this before. “Girl, not for him it isn’t.”
Margaret holds up a hand. “How do you know that?”
“I’ve known Fritz since we were kids. My father was Lord Chamberlain for years when I was growing up. I can read that man like a book. I saw him at the charity football thing a few weeks ago and knew something was up. But he was being very cryptic and asking questions about my marriage with Dietrich and marriage in general. Then he asked if it was possible to have a happy marriage if he was in love with someone else.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s me.” I gnaw the corner of my lip. I can’t let these two hopeless romantics get to my head. I almost fell back under his spell last weekend, and it would be all too easy to let my heart start rationalizing my feelings for him once again.
“Coupled with the way he was looking at you at Lady Graf’s funeral,” Margaret says, refilling the wine glass that I’ve been emptying at an alarming rate.
I gulp down more wine to try and quell thetraitorous fluttering taking up residence in my chest. “You’re both wrong. I overheard him on his phone during that party.”
“Even if he said the very words ‘I’m not in love with Aurelia Sumner’ I’d still argue that he’s continuing to harbor some huge feelings for you,” Margaret says.
“No, but whoever he was talking to, he kept calling dear and dearest. And he said I love you to her.” It hurt more than I care to admit hearing him say those things so soon after things ended with us, but as I keep reminding myself, that’s never what we were about. Even if he did drop the bigL wordright before we did the nasty on the floor of the altar of a church and then promptly broke up afterwards. But that wasn’t a real profession of love, right?
Lady Maier is chuckling as she pours more red for herself.
“What?” This feeling that everyone else knows something I don’t is getting really old.
“Sweetheart.” She comes to sit on the edge of the sofa next to me and takes my hand. “Dearest is what the family calls Anneliese. He was talking to his sister.”
All other thoughts in my head come to a screeching halt. Everything else is quiet in the face of one potential truth.Friedrich might still have feelings for me.And I can’t bring myself to say it out loud, but I still have some strong ones for him, too.
“I don’t know, y’all. That’s a lot to risk on a big if.Ifhe still has feelings for me.Ifhe wants to give a realrelationship a try. If he doesn’t, then I’ve just changed my whole life and there’s no going back.”
Lady Maier is still holding my hand. Her voice is soft and assuring, exactly how I wished my own mother would have spoken to me after dad left, when all that business with the church went down, when I was grappling with plans for my future.
“Don’t change your life for him, Aurelia. Do it for you. Think of all the good you can do as the new Countess Graf. You can continue your aunt’s charity work. Maybe even begin some of your own. You will have a voice in government simply because of the weight your title brings. Imagine the perspective you can bring to the table. You will be a rockstar to young girls across the country, a strong female role model for them to look up to.”
“Yes, all those things,” Margaret chimes in. “And if things don’t work out with the prince, you’ve still got this amazing new life you never even imagined.”
I turn back to my employer. “Yeah, but I really like the life I’ve got going right now. I love being a nanny, and I love your children.”
“Aurelia, what made you want to become a nanny?”
