Order (A Romantic Suspense Royal Billionaire Novel)

by Blair Babylon

  She turned to the man’s wife, who was hovering while Dree treated him. She handed over some supplies and began to explain to Batsa what to tell the woman.

  Maxence leaned down and whispered, “Give his wife what he needs, but not any extra. We need to conserve supplies because we’re going to be out here for a while. There’re going to be a lot more people who need your help.”

  Dree’s jaw set, but she nodded and continued detailing wound care instructions to Batsa.

  As soon as Dree was done treating the man’s head wound, a woman carried a little girl up to Dree and said something in Nepali.

  Batsa translated, “My girl has a demon in her ear.”

  Dree examined the child and told Max, “She has an abscess inside her auditory canal. Can you hold her? I can numb the area as much as I can, but this little girl needs treatment. Batsa, I’m going to need you to translate to the mom how to give her a course of antibiotics.”

  Dree continued to treat people young and old, working efficiently and continuously to help them, moving from one to the next to the next without so much as a breath.

  Maxence sent Isaak and Alfonso out to the edge of town under the guidance of Father Booker to set up their camp for the night. He heard Alfonso chattering about what he was going to cook out of the supplies they had brought with them in the backpacks.

  After a few hours, Dree’s hands and speech were slowing. She strained to lift kids onto the kitchen table that served as an examination table.

  Maxence pulled Batsa aside. “Can we get her something to eat?”

  Batsa fluttered around and arranged for a late lunch for Dree and them, which was a savory lentil stew and thick naan-like flatbread.

  Dree sopped up the stew with the bread and shoved bites into her mouth between patients.

  When Father Booker returned to report that the campsite had been assembled, Maxence sent him and the two other guys off to scout possible locations for the planned micro-NICU buildings.

  He looked at the stone house they had commandeered, too, and considered the construction and space.

  Maybe they didn’t need to build new construction.

  The house had no utilities, though. Sunlight streamed in the windows. The lady of the house was boiling water from a village well on a charcoal stove.

  When the sun wilted behind the tall mountains at about three-thirty in the afternoon, shadows spread over the town, and Maxence declared an end to the clinic.

  He told Dree, “You’re down to treating minor cuts and scrapes with antibiotic ointment and Band-Aids. They can do this. It’s twilight now, but the sun will be going down in about an hour and a half. We need to get to the campsite before it gets dark.”

  Batsa led them to the tents and the other guys, where indeed, a pot of something that smelled delicious bubbled over a small campfire. Alfonso had procured more fresh bread from one of the women in the village.

  Maxence fashioned a cushion for Dree out of a sleeping bag and made her sit down by the fire and eat.

  She wolfed down the food. “This is so good.”

  Alfonso beamed at her praise, smiling at Dree and flirting with her with his bright green eyes. He was solicitous, asking her if she wanted more and making sure she had it.

  Maxence wanted to slug him, but the lentil stuff he’d made was good. It reminded Maxence of mesir wat, an East African lentil stew, and he missed the injera flatbreads that Auntie Ndaya and Auntie Disanka cooked. He would be back home in The Congo in six or eight weeks or so. He didn’t need to become morose. He’d managed to video chat with the aunties, Majambu Milandu, and Mpata Majambu while he’d been at the Our Lady of the Assumption rectory, which had been a rare treat due to his hectic schedule, the difference in time zones, and the frequent power outages in Kathmandu.

  Dree elbowed Maxence while she scooped the lentil stew with the naan and popped it into her mouth. Her luscious lips puckered as she chewed.

  A memory of her red lips tight around his cock intruded on whatever he was going to say or had been anticipating she would say because, oh God, those lips of hers.

  She elbowed him again.

  “What, yes?” Max asked.

  “So, this was just a small village that hadn’t seen a doctor in a while, right?” she asked him.

  “That’s true.”

  “And the villages where we’re going after this are larger than this one, right?”

  “At least some of them,” he allowed.

  “And they’ll have better access to medical care than this one, right?” she demanded.

  This was the direction he’d suspected the conversation would be heading. He’d suspected Dree had a soft heart. “A few of them.”

  “How few?”

  “Very few. Most of them will have a significant number of people with medical issues that, in other locations, would be seen by a doctor.”

  “In rural New Mexico where I come from, there are a lot of poor people. A lot of people live in shacks their granddaddies built that only recently got running water and utilities. I didn’t have internet until I lived in the dorms for college. In some of the far parts of the state and out on the reservation, things are a lot more dire. Many people out there still don’t have any utilities. But if somebody had that little girl with the ear abscess or the little boy with strep throat, I like to think that all of them would have ridden their horse or an ATV or a freakin’ tractor over to a neighbor’s who does have a truck to take them into town to see a doctor.”

  Maxence sighed. “As you can see in this village, no one’s neighbor has a truck.”

  “I guess what I’m asking is, why don’t they? Or why didn’t their parents ride on one of the supply trucks to a larger place to get help or find some more of their people who do have a truck? There is a small store in the town. The trucks have to come here.”

  “The supply trucks that make rounds to many of these smaller towns might only stop once a month, and they might not reach someplace larger for a week after that. The drivers wouldn’t let them on, anyway. They’d become a bus. The people in these villages have no options.”

  Her voice cracked. “I can’t imagine watching my child suffer like that.”

  Images of chubby cheeks, joyous gummy baby smiles, and hands like tiny starfish clutching his clothes rose in Maxence’s mind. “Me, either.”

  “It’s not fair,” Dree said. “They should have a way to get into town. Someone should have helped those kids and those adults. That guy’s broken leg isn’t going to be okay. He needs surgery.”

  “You fashioned an excellent splint and cast for him. He’ll be much better off.”

  “I know, and it’ll probably be able to bear his weight, eventually. He won’t be a hundred percent, though.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “People need to do more.”

  “Right, they should. We should. They don’t even have the most basic necessities. Alfonso, you boiled the drinking water, right?”

  Alfonso glanced at him just as the campfire popped. Sparks soared into the air. “Of course, I did. When I was making the fire, I boiled the water first. Why, do we not need to boil the drinking water here?”

  “Yes, we should boil the drinking water here.”

  “We have on all the other trips like this one. I just assumed—”

  “When in doubt, it’s safest.”

  Alfonso leaned back on his arms, shaking his head. “This is not my first rodeo, as you say.”

  Dree cracked up at him. “Yep, not your first rodeo.”

  Alfonso smiled at Dree. “I would not let the intestinal parasites get to you, Andrea Catherine.”

  “Oh, well, thank you. I’m glad you’re running interference between me and the intestinal parasites. Thank you for your concern about my colon.”

  Alfonso continued, “Access to clean water is very much a problem for the communities on charity missions like the ones Deacon Father Maxence takes us on.”

  Maxence noted Alfonso’s
subtle emphasis on his religious title and stuffed bread and lentils into his face before he could say something stupid.

  From across the campfire, Father Booker watched him and ate steadily.

  Maxence lowered his head and concentrated on his food.

  Dree turned back to him. “So, why are we only doing micro-NICUs here? Why aren’t we airlifting in supplies and medical personnel and doing some sort of a village make-over right now?”

  Maxence swallowed. “That’s the age-old question, isn’t it? Why are some people poor, what can be done for the poor, and with the riches of certain geographical areas, social strata, and the Church, why aren’t we doing more to help the poor?”

  “Right!” Dree exclaimed, bobbling her plate but recovering before it spilled.

  Alfonso reached toward her leg in case he could help.

  Max wanted to slap his hand away but did not move.

  Dree said, “I may have mentioned that I went to Catholic school all my life—”

  Maxence smiled at her. “It’s come up.”

  “—so, the sisters and teachers told us that on the Day of Judgment, God will ask each person what they did to help the poor and needy. It’s that whole Matthew twenty-five thing, ‘whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.’”

  Father Booker stretched his legs. “See, Deacon Maxence? American Catholic schools aren’t entirely in disarray.”

  “Oh, jeez, the sisters hit us with that at least every year,” Dree told him. “When Sister Ann taught catechism class in junior high and high school, it was once a month. There was always a chapter on social justice in the textbook, and she hit them hard.”

  Max just bet that Sister Annunciata did hit the social justice chapters hard, and he smiled as he ate.

  Father Booker said from across the campfire, “Yes, as Christians and other people of beliefs, we have a personal responsibility to help the poor.”

  Maxence heard the challenge in Father Booker’s voice and met his insistent stare over the fire. That was the Church’s official stance on the matter, that helping the poor is a personal mandate for Christians.

  “But that can’t be all,” Dree said. “One person can’t do anything big. I mean, individual people like me, anyway. I’m just a farm girl who managed to go to nursing school. People like Bill Gates and other billionaires could do more, I guess.”

  “Ah, billionaires,” Father Booker said as if he found something distasteful.

  Three of the six people sitting around that campfire had at least a theoretical claim to that social class.

  Alfonso and Isaak shifted where they sat and stared at their food.

  Maxence lifted his head. “And yet, most billionaires’ net worth pales when compared to governments who could tax them and help far more people. Even here in Nepal, some people are extraordinarily wealthy. The Shah family, who were the Nepali royal family before they were all killed in the massacre—”

  “What!” Dree half-stood. “Like when Tsar Nicholas the Second and his family were executed a hundred years ago in Russia?”

  “Except that it was in 2001.”

  “Seriously?” She glanced behind herself as if regicides might be lurking in the dark hills.

  “It was in the middle of a civil war that lasted for ten years. The entire immediate family of the king was mass-murdered in exceedingly odd circumstances. Ten people, including the king, the queen, all their children and their spouses, and most of the king’s siblings and their spouses were all murdered, except for one of his brothers. That brother decided not to attend the supper that night. His wife and son were minorly wounded, just winged. So he became king. They blamed it on the crown prince ‘accidentally’ killing everyone and himself with an automatic weapon.”

  “That’s unbelievable,” Dree said, her voice squeaking.

  “Oh, yes,” Maxence said. “It’s absolutely unbelievable. No one believes that’s how it happened. Anyway, the king’s brother who ‘decided not to go’ was king for a while before he was forced to abdicate.”

  In the warm light of the fire, Dree pointed to the sky and far, dark mountains. “But—but—didn’t he have something to do with it?”

  Maxence shrugged. “Like I said, no one believed that the crown prince killed his parents, himself, and everyone else who might have had a claim to the throne except for that one brother of the king, and somehow only lightly wounded his family.”

  “Right,” Dree said, staring at the fire and shaking her head as she processed that.

  “Palace coups still happen. The massacre sent a chill through every royal family in the world. When there are billions of dollars and actual power at stake, people will do shocking and terrible things. Anyway, the king’s surviving brother and his family, the Shahs, retain an excessive amount of wealth, considering the poverty of many Nepalis. And then when the civil war finally died down, the earthquake happened.”

  “Earthquake?” she squeaked.

  “In 2015. Practically leveled some regions and damaged buildings everywhere.”

  “Jeez, this poor little country!” Surprise had turned to empathy in her voice.

  A lot of the people Maxence knew or was related to would not have been so affected by Nepal’s plight. Dree and himself were more kindred spirits than different. “Indeed, those are some of the reasons we’re here. Nepal has just had blow after blow. The government should do more to help these people. The world should do more to help these people. The moral test for any society and civilization is how it treats its most vulnerable citizens.”

  Father Booker looked up from his food at Maxence and studied him, holding his bread pinched in his fingers but not eating, because Max had just thrown a theological bomb into the conversation.

  Maxence continued, “Because of Matthew, Chapter Twenty-Five, right?”

  One of Father Booker’s silver eyebrows twitched, and he went back to eating.

  They spent the rest of the evening talking about less controversial things—things that wouldn’t get anyone laicized or excommunicated—until the fire burned down to coals and darkness crept over the stony ground, encroaching on their little camp.

  The plan was to get up the next morning early and survey the areas that Isaak and Alfonso had scouted that afternoon before pressing on to the next village.

  Where Dree would undoubtedly work herself to exhaustion again.

  Maxence would need to watch over her.

  Isaak was standing, stretching his fists into the air and groaning, which sounded uncannily like the way he snored.

  Maxence was not looking forward to these nights when he was bunking with the two of them. Maybe he should ask Father Booker and Batsa if they had room in their tent for one more. Batsa was skinny. There was probably more room in that one.

  Well, he’d evaluate after tonight. Maybe those two would snore less sleeping on the earth instead of the saggy beds at the inn.

  He stood and stretched, his long legs a bit cramped from sitting cross-legged near the fire. The tops of his feet were warm. He grabbed his flashlight off the ground beside his foot and switched it on. Father Booker, Batsa, and Isaak did the same, and the beams strobed in the darkness of the country night.

  Isaak and Booker kicked dirt over the coals. Enough dried vegetation covered the ground that they couldn’t leave the coals unattended.

  The mountains chopped black voids out of the horizon around them, but stars crept out of the darkness above as the fire burned down.

  When the fire was mostly out, Alfonso poured water over the last traces of red glow to extinguish it. Steam hissed into the air, clouding their flashlight beams.

  Stars salted the sky.

  Dree said, “Oh.” A sigh lifted her voice like when Maxence trailed his mouth over her shoulder to her throat, though he stood several feet away from her in the dark.

  An errant flashlight beam crossed her face.

  She was staring at the sky, enraptured. “The stars were always bright out on
the ranch, but this is amazing.”

  Maxence and the other guys clicked off their flashlights to see the stars better.

  The pinpricks of light grew brighter as his eyes adjusted until the galaxy blazed around them, innumerable trembling motes flooding the heavens.

  Yet, even as Maxence gazed across God’s creation, the stars and the deep and the world without end in a moment of pure wonder and awe, awareness of Dree’s nearness drew his attention.

  The pale silver light of the stars touched her nose and her cheek. A faint blue reflection from her eyes sparkled in the night.

  “It’s so beautiful,” she said.

  “Yes,” Maxence agreed.

  “It’s—like Heaven. You can see how people back before there were artificial lights must have looked up and seen this,” her hand waved in the darkness, “this world of crystals and diamonds in the sky and conceived of Heaven.”

  He wanted to see the heavens and the world through her eyes.

  Max waited, but she didn’t say any more, and neither did the other guys.

  Eventually, they flipped on the flashlights again. The light scoured the stones and earth, blinding him, and he squinted.

  The other guys spoke, and Dree’s soft voice lilted in the night.

  Maxence trailed Isaac and Alfonso as they walked back to the tiny, tiny tent standing on pebbly ground.

  Just before Max crouched to duck into the pup tent, he looked back to where Dree was crawling into her tent, the flashlight beam filling the fabric prism and reflecting back onto her supple form.

  His longing for her was not entirely physical, and Maxence didn’t know how to think about that.

  Chapter Six

  Choices

  Dree

  Later that night, Dree awoke to the sound of a table saw ripping through rough wood, the screaming rustle of slithering nylon, and angry masculine grunts.