“And what’s the other part?”

She wasn’t sure why she was talking about this with Max. Maybe because, as she’d just been thinking, he didn’t have any actual stake in her life or she in his. “I was probably a little too fresh off the breakup to enjoy anything. Too raw. That’s embarrassing to admit to someone who’s met Vince.” Now that she was out the other side, it was hard to explain what she’d seen in Vince. He was smart, she’d give him that, and she’d been flattered by his interest when she was hired into the department. But from her current vantage point, it seemed obvious that she’d let herself get too swept up in him. And not just him, but his interests, his career, his family—Leo and Gabby aside, of course. Hence the list. “I was working so hard because I had this project I’d put aside about a year previously because Vince thought we should do this other project together.”

“What was it?”

“Cubism in literature.”

“Ah, the Picasso obsession. I didn’t know cubism was a movement beyond visual art.”

“Yeah. Picasso and Gertrude Stein influenced each other. We were going to write a book about it. I was going to do the Stein, and he was going to do the Picasso. But then . . .” She shrugged. “He’s writing it by himself now.” With all her work feeding into it.

“Didn’t Picasso have a teenage mistress? It sounds as though Vince is taking the Picasso cosplay a little too far.”

Dani snorted, but it was so embarrassing. The breakup aside, knowing that you were the kind of person who would be with a man who would, in turn, date someone less than half his age was so gross.

Letting yourself be hurt by that kind of man was even grosser.

She looked at Max’s profile, illuminated by all the New York lights, of both the regular and Christmas varieties. Max was oddly easy to tell truths to, even uncomfortable ones. “That’s why I was working so hard last winter, to get back to my own stuff. To be fair, the Picasso-Stein project was a cool idea. But it wasn’t something I’d been inherently interested in. I let it derail me when what I needed to be doing was working toward tenure.”

She had, of course, created a list item to deal with any similar scenario in the future. It was #3: Work with him in such a way that his interests are advanced at the expense of my own. “I’m not sure how I let myself get so . . . seduced.” She meant it in the philosophical sense, but it was probably the wrong choice of word, because now the Depraved Duke would make a joke.

He did not. He merely made a dismissive gesture. “We all make errors of judgment when it comes to matters of the heart.”