He softened. “It’s not your fault.” Lavinia might not be the woman for him, but she didn’t seem the conniving sort. He’d expected her to be more like her social-climbing sister, Lucrecia, but she’d done them a good turn back at dinner, expressing enthusiastic interest in Dani’s work. He didn’t know if it’d been a calculated good turn or if she’d been genuinely interested in talking to Dani about literature. Either way, she’d defused the situation. For a while.

“I must speak with you.” She hitched her head back toward the dining room. “They’re still in there. Can we go somewhere else?”

He stifled a sigh. He wanted to get back to Dani, not talk to Lavinia. But none of this was Lavinia’s fault. “Of course.” He led her to a small parlor he deemed sufficiently far from the dining room and closed the door. “They won’t miss you at dinner?”

“I pled a headache after you left.” She winced. “Which probably isn’t helping your cause. Now they’re going to think I had my tender feelings hurt.”

“My cause?”

She didn’t answer his question, just stared at him long enough to make him uncomfortable. “Would you like to sit?” he asked, for lack of knowing what to say.

Again, she ignored his question, but she did start talking. “My father told me you were . . . interested in me,” she went on. “I’m embarrassed that I barely gave you the time of day in New York. I was distracted, and I’ll be honest, given what I’d heard, you didn’t seem . . .”

“Like the kind of person you’d be interested in shackling yourself to for life?”

She smiled a sad little smile. “Something like that. But then when my father started pushing this visit, I googled you and found your master’s thesis. I read it.”

“You did?” He had not been impressed by Lavinia in New York, but he supposed he’d been distracted, too. He’d been thinking about Dani, wondering how she would react if he texted her.

“I did. I thought it was so interesting. And then I started thinking about how you used to be engaged to Marie, and I like Marie so much and think so highly of her. So I thought . . .” She sighed. “I thought it couldn’t hurt to meet you. It’s so difficult, you see, when one is . . .”

He didn’t know how she had intended to finish that sentence, but he supposed if you were the younger daughter of Harald and Larissa von Bachenheim and you had an intellectual bent, life could be difficult. “When one is expected to ‘marry well’?” Max finished.

“Yes,” she said vehemently. “You know.”

“I do indeed.”