Order (A Romantic Suspense Royal Billionaire Novel)

by Blair Babylon

  “More like a prisoner to freedom. I’ve wanted to be a priest from the first time I read about the second sons of monarchs becoming priests. King Henry the Eighth planned to join the Church and take a run at the papacy until his older brother died, and thus he became the King of England. The sacerdotium was my entire ambition. I never wanted to rule anything.”

  “Was that just because your brother would have to die for you to be the prince, or did you really not want it?” she asked.

  “You did psych rotations, didn’t you?” Max asked her.

  She nodded again, briskly. “Psych rotations are standard in nursing school, but when you’re a nurse, you see a lot of people who are fooling themselves about what is making them sick. I can detect anybody’s bullshit at five hundred yards. I am a living, walking, breathing bullshit detector.”

  Maxence suspected this did not bode well for him.

  She asked, “So, did you really not want it?”

  He burrowed down into his mind, deeply examining what he wanted and what he thought he wanted, until he said, “I didn’t want it, even if Pierre had abdicated his position instead of dying. Lots of royals have abdicated. He might have. He had several personal situations where he might have done it or have been forced to, and I’d already made plans to abdicate and leave if that had happened. Ever since I could remember, though, I wanted out. The priesthood was a way out that no one could question, and thus I wanted to join the priesthood.”

  Dree said, “There are other ways out. You could have just renounced it a long time ago.”

  “My uncle Rainier told me, flat out, that he would not accept my renunciation unless or until Pierre had produced two legitimate sons from a Catholic, dynastic marriage. There’s that whole problem with the treaties of France. If there isn’t a sovereign prince, Monaco will cease to exist.”

  “Yeah, I remember that about Monagasquay.”

  “What the hell is Monagasquay?” Quentin Sault demanded.

  They ignored him.

  Dree said, “You could have just signed up with the Catholic Church and found someone to give you Holy Orders. Not a lot of men want to be priests these days. They pass out Holy Orders like candy if you ask nicely.”

  Maxence shook his head. “Pope Celestine the Sixth told me he would never allow me to be ordained, even if my uncle or my brother consented. And if I were, he would declare it invalid.”

  She squinted at the ceiling, thinking. “Isn’t he the Pope Emeritus now, and that’s how we got Pope Vincent de Paul?”

  Max smiled. “Yes.”

  “But you’re a deacon now. You already took the first level of Holy Orders.”

  He nodded. “His Eminence Pope Vincent de Paul allowed me to take those.”

  “If you’ve had the sacrament of Holy Orders, you can’t get married. If you can’t get married, you can’t have legitimate kids. That’s a problem for those treaties with France you were talking about, right?”

  Maxence sighed and dropped his head forward into his hands. “My vows were made to be broken. There are liturgical methods for laicization for deacons and priests who want to quit, even for cardinals, but everyone knew I was a special case. Pope Vincent de Paul wrote the vows in such a way so that he can call me on the phone and laicize me in five minutes. That’s why Father Booker was poking at me that my sacrament probably wasn’t valid, and he’s probably right.”

  Dree nodded slowly, obviously thinking hard. “So, you can just walk away from being a deacon. That’s why you’ve been holding onto it so tightly.”

  His skin chilled like all his clothes had been ripped off in the Himalayas in December, leaving him exposed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “But you haven’t been allowed to walk away from Monaco and the royal family.”

  “It’s not like that. I’m not just rebelling for the sake of it.”

  She shook her head, still thinking. “No, I don’t think you would rebel just for the sake of it. It’s not mere oppositional defiance. You’re not like that. There’s more.” She looked at him more intently, even leaning toward his face and scrutinizing him. “So, why don’t you want to go?”

  He blinked. “Why don’t I go where?”

  “Why not go to Monaco and lobby that council and be the prince? What’s stopping you?”

  Wan winter sunlight barely glowed from the front windows of the inn’s lobby, and the air was saturated with gloom.

  Three photocopied pictures of the Hindu gods Ganesh and Shiva were tacked to the wall behind the desk, and rustic hand-embroidered tapestries depicted scenes of gods and shepherdesses from the Vedas in violet and red.

  The cold wind whistled outside the front door, a clock on the opposite wall ticked loudly, and one of the commandos scraped his boot on the floor.

  Herbal incense smoke, grilled chicken and lamb from last night’s supper, and the cucumber and rose scent of Dree’s soap like an English castle’s kitchen garden filled his nose.

  The ceramic tile on the floor chilled his butt and the backs of his legs. The thin December air needled his forehead and the inside of his nose when he breathed.

  Dree’s fingers were warm.

  She was still scrutinizing him, waiting for an answer while he calmed his mind.

  He inhaled hard, and everything in his soul tumbled out to her. “You’ve seen what I can do. You’ve seen what it’s like when I read the Gospel or preach a homily. That must mean something. It can’t just be a parlor trick.”

  She shook her head. “No one who has seen you preach thinks it’s a parlor trick. Sister Mariam’s religious friends went to Mass that morning for you. I was amused at first because I thought they were going just to ogle you, but they went to hear you, not look at you.”

  “Then why can I do it? What is that light that blows through me, that pressure that happens when I feel something, and then I can convince people of almost anything? It can’t be an accident. It has to be in me for a reason.”

  Dree was listening to him, biting her plush lip and staring at the corner of the ceiling while she considered what he’d said. “But it’s not only religious.”

  “But it’s something—”

  “But that time at the Castle of Versailles, at the party—when you convinced Sir Marvin Meriwether-Stone to invest in the company that your friend, Micah Shine, the guy with the pretty eyes, was founding—you did it then.”

  Maxence tried not to let his jaw drop. “You remember their names?”

  She shrugged. “Nurses have to remember which patient is which and what drugs they were given and when. You need to know right away when a patient is crashing. A decent memory is part of the job. But the point is, you did it at Versailles, and you were doing it again at supper last night. It’s not just in church. And you said you’ve been able to do it for a long time, like, when you were a kid.”

  “Yes, but—”

  She pressed her lips together and nodded like she’d added something else to a list in her head. “How long have you been able to convince people of stuff?”

  He shook his head. “I convinced the kidnappers to give me a boat and let me go because they believed I was one of them.”

  “Right. So it’s not just about religion. Why do you want to be a priest?”

  It was all too confusing. “It’s my whole life.”

  “Have anyone ever asked you if you were sure about your vocation?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut and laughed a tortured chuckle. “Every priest I’ve ever met has questioned me about it. Father Moses, Father Xavier, Father Gustavo Merino—”

  “Who’s that guy?”

  “He took the pontifical name of Pope Vincent de Paul when he was elected pope.”

  “Oh, yeah, your buddy, the Pope. Wait, hold on a frickin’ second. The Pope asked you whether you really want to be a priest?”

  He shrugged.

  Dree shook her head. “Dude.”

  “But I’ve always wanted to be a priest.”

  She ducked and grow
led at him, “But you ‘slip’ every chance you get.”

  “Surely, not every—” He stopped talking because her blond eyebrows raised in disbelief. “But I shouldn’t.”

  “You keep asking God to grant you sobriety and chastity, but not yet.”

  “It’s a joke,” Maxence muttered.

  “I think it’s one of those jokes where you’re actually telling the truth. Would it be better for Monaco if you walked away from the throne?”

  That caught Maxence under his rib cage like a meat hook, and he couldn’t answer.

  She said, “You’ve said that you want to be a priest because you want to make the world a better place. Would the world be better if you allowed your uncle Jules to be the Prince of Monaco?”

  Maxence’s teeth grated in his mouth. “No. The world would be very much worse if Jules had complete authority over forty thousand people and the power and wealth of the Principality of Monaco. He’s evil.”

  Dree was staring right into Max’s eyes, unblinking, not like a snake but like an angel, one of the cherubim whose righteous eyes could see everything but had no pity for flawed mortals. “You say you want to be a priest. Aren’t priests supposed to, like, fight evil?”

  Maxence couldn’t look away. God, she was beautiful, like a blazing fire. “Yes, but I can do that without being the Prince, and surely I can fight evil if I am a priest. The very fact that the crown and Monaco tempt me, that I want to take it and rule, proves that it is a sin to lust for that kind of power and wealth.”

  She glanced down at his chest, maybe even to his groin, and his cock jumped as if her eyes had stroked him through his clothes. She said, “Like you’ve never given in to temptation before.”

  His fingers found hers. “I was always meant to walk away,” he told her. “That was my role, to support Pierre in his bid for the throne because he was older and it was his right. I was never meant to be the Prince, so I found something else to want.”

  Dree glanced at Quentin Sault and the two soldiers by the door. She leaned over and whispered to him, and her gentle breath feathered his ear. “No man who fucks like you do wants to be a priest.”

  He tightened his hand on her fingers.

  Dree yelled over at Sault, “How long is this Crown Council thing going to take?”

  Quentin Sault shrugged. “The palace is in chaos. Prince Jules has called for a council meeting this weekend, but Duke Alexandre and his faction have refused to attend anything sooner than three months.”

  “Can he do that?” Max asked him.

  “There is a quorum requirement,” Sault told him. “As long as enough nobles stand with Alexandre and refuse to attend, a new prince cannot be elected.”

  “So, it could take three months,” Dree said, her voice firm.

  Max said, “If it takes longer than that, France will rumble that the treaties have been violated, and their army will march in our streets.”

  Dree turned so that she was kneeling in front of where Max sat on the floor. She knotted her fist around one lapel of his black leather motorcycle jacket and pulled his ear closer to her mouth. “Hear me out. For three months, go back to Monaco and take care of business. Live as a prince again instead of a priest.”

  “I can’t be trusted to do the right thing.” He leaned back. His spine pressed against the wall. “I should not be trusted with that kind of power. I should be locked into a hierarchal organization where others define what I do with it. I am an unguided missile. I am a brandished gun.”

  “Max, you’re smarter than that.”

  He muttered, “Even though I wanted to be a priest, I couldn’t keep my cock in my pants.”

  “Which is proof they never really controlled you. Those weren’t ‘slips.’ Those were decisions. You’ve always made your own decisions.”

  “Like when I—” He raised an eyebrow.

  She grinned. “Oh, yeah. Especially that.”

  “Dree, you’re funny. You’re damn funny. But the decisions to break my vows were fundamentally wrong.” He released his eye contact with her and stared at his heavily callused, deeply tanned hands clasped on his knees. “I never do the right thing. I should work harder on becoming a priest, not give in to this. I should take Holy Orders and go to a cloistered monastery. I should be locked inside the Vatican so I’m not tempted.”

  She raised an eyebrow again and whispered, “Men don’t tempt you?”

  He sighed, resigned to the fact that she was, indeed, a living, breathing bullshit detector.

  “Yeah, okay.” She whispered, her voice throaty and too close to his skin, “If you go back, if you break your vows, for three months, you can have me.”

  Maxence looked up. God help him, he was weak. “I’m listening.”

  “Anything you want,” she said, and her eyes glistened with excitement as she stared at him. “Everything you want, just like Paris, but for three months.”

  “What—but why—” Formulating the question zinging around his head took a few tries. “Why would you do that?”

  “Because you said I’m an angel,” Dree told him, “and no one’s ever said that to me before. Because angels fight evil, and if this guy Prince Jules is as bad as you say—”

  “Worse,” both Maxence and Sault said at the same time, and they glanced at each other, startled.

  “Then I don’t want him in a position of power,” Dree said. “The world is awful and brutal, and we should have kind people running countries. The world should be better. You’re a kind and good person.”

  “I’m not,” he murmured.

  “You’re the type of person who should run the world, Maxence. You should rule Monaco.”

  No, he shouldn’t. His chest clenched. A man with the ruined wings of a fallen angel tattooed on his back was exactly the wrong sort of person to become an absolute dictator.

  “At the very least,” Dree said, her gaze darting as she looked into his eyes, “you have to make sure it’s someone other than this Prince Jules guy, and make sure it’s someone kind and good, and not someone who’s an evil, racist, bigoted jerk.”

  Maxence couldn’t speak.

  Sault glared at him from over by the front desk, and the left-side soldier was watching them with wide eyes while his gun pointed at the inn’s front door.

  Dree touched his chin and guided his gaze back to her. “I’ll do whatever it takes to keep yet one more evil dictator away from the world, even if I have to do it on my back.”

  He touched her cheek as tremors thrummed through his veins. “Dree.”

  She said, “Or lying face-down on a bed.”

  The image of her curvy ass in the air as he stroked into her made him lightheaded. “Dree. Stop.”

  “Or on—”

  She exaggerated the succulent movements of her mouth as her plush lips pressed together.

  “—my—”

  Her nose wrinkled as her tongue licked into view behind her teeth.

  “—knees.”

  Maxence grabbed her up in his arms and dragged her to his mouth to kiss her, his lips devouring hers, because the thought of her lips tight around his cock was enough to bring him to his knees.

  She kissed him back, her arms tight around his neck.

  His hands ran down the curves of her back to her pinched waist, and he pushed her back. Her lips were swollen, red, and wet, and her eyes were as dazed as his must be. She asked, “So, you’ll do it?”

  “Because you want me to, not because of what you bargained with,” he said.

  “I want to do that, too.”

  He dug his fingers into her hips, just curving his fingertips.

  She smiled at him.

  “Let’s go,” Quentin Sault said. “I’ve got a helicopter waiting. We can be in Monaco by tomorrow morning.”

  A man cleared his throat on the stairs above them.

  Maxence turned his head.

  Above them, on the landing five steps up, Isaak and Batsa stood and were watching them.

  Isaak’s expr
ession was as plastic and emotionless as Max had ever seen him, but Batsa’s eyes and mouth were wide and round. In just a second, he’d probably gasp and point at them.

  Maxence swiveled his hand closer to Dree’s waist because he was nearly grabbing her ass.

  “Guys,” Maxence said and stopped. He was going to say something like, It’s not what it looks like, but it was even worse than it looked, especially if you included where he’d been the previous night.

  Isaak said, “We’ll notify Alfonso and Father Booker that you’ve decided to return to Monaco and that you’re taking Andrea Catherine with you.”

  “This mission is over,” Maxence said to him.

  “Yes, surely,” Isaak said, his tone very neutral.

  “I’ll contact you about the preemie pods and motorcycles, and about the grant applications.”

  Isaak sighed and nodded. “Those are important. When you return to Monaco and settle in, let me know. I’ll start working on them when I get back to France.” He shrugged and gestured between Max and Dree, who was staring at her hands in her lap. “So, okay. I mean, it’s not like we even had a chance to talk. I wish you the best. I wish you both the best.”

  Isaak turned and walked up the stairs.

  Batsa said, “I’ll make sure Father Booker and Alfonso get back to Kathmandu. Don’t worry about us. I’ll take care of them. Just, um, it sounds like there’s a mess you need to clean up.”

  He shook Max’s hand and then bounded up the stairs after Isaak.

  Two more soldiers who had been stationed outside were dispatched to clear out Max’s and Dree’s rooms, probably because Sault wasn’t letting Max out of his sight.

  Ten minutes later, their backpacks were tossed in the backs of Sault’s Jeeps—how had he gotten Jeeps?—and they were on their way to the tiny Chandannath airport, where a helicopter was warming up to fly them back to Kathmandu.

  Maxence muttered to Dree as they walked across the cracked tarmac, “You were persuasive. You should have been a Jesuit.”

  Dree snorted. “Yeah, well, I lack a necessary member—”

  He raised his eyebrows, repressing a grin.

  “—ship requirement,” she finished.

  Maxence laughed aloud as the helicopter blades knifed the air, blowing the leather of his jacket against his body.