A few days after New Year’s Eve, Maxence stepped out of the limousine at the Monaco Yacht Club’s pier, nodded to Quentin Sault who held the car door, and greeted his cousin Marie-Therese, who was also waiting for the next tender to shuttle them out to the yacht for the party.
The sun was still well above the horizon, so at least he wasn’t going to have to sail out there in the dark.
The watercraft the party was to be held on wasn’t a boat as it was a superyacht belonging to an American film producer.
Maxence reminded himself there was a cocktail hour to attend and then supper. His goal was merely to promote Monaco as an excellent location for shooting movies and TV series. While the movie production itself would only bring a few million into Monaco’s coffers, the publicity for Monaco as an elegant destination was priceless. James Bond didn’t stop by the Monte Carlo casino by accident.
Not to mention that a movie shot in Monaco was how Maxence’s grandparents had met. While Max wasn’t in the market for an American starlet wife, keeping Monaco in the forefront as a romantic destination was beneficial.
And so, for all these very pragmatic reasons, Maxence would brave a boat.
His cousin Marie-Therese chattered about events and other cousins. Max nodded along, all the while watching the yacht moored beyond the harbor’s breakwater.
A small red speedboat arrived at the dock, and the pilot asked their names to check against the guest list. A chain strung between the rails barred access to his craft.
The tender’s red hull glittered in the sunlight.
Maxence told him their names in a low voice, making sure his words didn’t carry to the tourists standing in front of the yacht club.
The pilot checked his list. His eyes widened, and he scrambled to un-click the chain.
Max handed Marie-Therese onto the craft. Quentin Sault stepped in behind him and settled on the other side, watching the pilot from behind mirrored sunglasses.
Once they were underway, the pilot motored slowly so he wouldn’t hop the small boat over the wavelets.
Marie-Therese turned to Max and laughed. “Did you see his eyes when he figured out who we are?”
Maxence shrugged. “I don’t expect people to recognize me. Indeed, I’d be much happier if they didn’t.”
“That is why you don’t have any followers on Instagram.”
Maxence leaned back on the bench seat, resting his arms on the back of the bench, and turned his face to the sun. “Someone reserved those accounts for me years ago. I don’t use them.”
They left the harbor’s enclosed area and sped out into the Mediterranean Sea, heading for a boat the size of a small cruise ship anchored offshore. The sun neared the seam where the water met the sky, a bright line of fire as the day approached sunset.
Marie-Therese rolled her eyes at him. “You might as well be eighty years old. I’m surprised you even respond in the text group.”
The sea breeze rifled through his hair, and he mock-frowned. “I chat in the text group.”
“You type maybe ten percent of what anybody else does. I’m surprised you know any of the gossip.”
Perhaps Max should go back through that text group and read the gossip. If he was going to anoint someone as the next Prince of Monaco, he should probably know the inside information about them. It might save him headaches later.
As they neared the superyacht, the ship loomed and swallowed the horizon.
Maxence closed his eyes and breathed double-breaths in through his nose and sighed stale air out.
Small clouds puffed in the azure sky, the sun was an inferno in the west, and the small boat was predominantly white on the interior with royal blue cushions. Oak trimmed the rails and lined the floor.
The tender’s diesel engine growled. Wavelets slapped the edge of the boat as they coasted to a stop next to the towering superyacht.
The Mediterranean Sea’s salt scent filled his nose, mixed with the acrid diesel exhaust from the tender.
The cummerbund of his tuxedo was firm around Maxence’s waist, his silk socks were smooth under his toes, and the seat behind his back was warm.
He breathed the double-breaths again, feeling the oxygen flowing through his body.
He was not suffocating.
He was not trapped.
It was only a boat.
Marie-Therese was sitting a few cushions away, watching him. “You don’t have to go to this thing tonight. I have a cocktail party at nine o’clock at the palace, but I can stay until then. I can make sure Ralph sets five of his next ten movies here in Monaco. You can just stay on this tender and go right back to shore.”
Maxence didn’t succumb to weakness. “I’ll be fine, but thank you.”
She shrugged. “If it gets to be too much for you, just get in a tender and leave. You can text me on your way back to shore so I’ll know you left, and I’ll make sure I hit all the principals.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
The tender floated into the capture mechanism, which Maxence had always amused himself by thinking of as a tractor beam. Long levers lifted the small boat out of the water and carried it into a garage inside the yacht.
Staff members wearing white nautical uniforms handed Maxence and Marie-Therese out of the boat and offered them water bottles before they boarded an elevator to the upper decks.
The elevator was the size of a standard closet, so Maxence and Marie-Therese stood nearly stomach-to-stomach in the enclosed, suffocating space. They stared at the walls because they were, after all, first cousins.
The mirrors on the walls repeated Maxence’s ashen face millions of times until he vanished into the distance.
His breath whooshed in the tiny box.
Maxence placed one palm on the elevator doors to remind himself what was real.
When he blinked, the instantaneous blackness of his eyelids sliding down over the mirrors and glowing buttons jolted every muscle in his body. The horror of cold and pitching concrete under his raw legs, the choking stench of his own fear-stink clamped over his face like a wet rag, ripping hunger cramps for days, and his swollen tongue turning to cotton and filling his mouth and throat flashed through his body and were as present as if he were somehow inhabiting his nine-year-old self.
He coughed, choking.
Marie-Therese grabbed his other hand, clenching his fingers. “It’s just a few seconds, and we’ll be up on the deck.”
He counted down from ten in his head.
When he reached four, the elevator doors split apart, and Maxence staggered out.
Marie-Therese muttered, “Next time, we’ll take the stairs.”
Maxence sucked in a great draught of clean sea air and retrieved his handkerchief from the pocket inside his tuxedo jacket to blot the beads of sweat squeezing out of his hairline.
Sapphire-blue sea met the darkening sky at the horizon, far away.
He ran through a litany of sensations—the sun painting a blazing trail over the sea and the Christmas boughs and wreaths still up on every available square inch of the ship even though it was after New Year’s, to the scent of fish grilling nearby and the sour taste of bile in his mouth—to ground himself in the present.
It usually worked.
He gasped air, trying to calm himself down, though he was subtle about it because he was, after all, Maxence Grimaldi. His ancestors had held Monaco’s fortress for a millennium, and he turned to watch the setting sunlight glow on the golden stone high on the headlands above the yachts and ships in the harbor.
To anyone watching, he’d probably seemed to inhale deeply and look around.
Marie-Therese stood beside him and patted his back while she glanced at the crowd on the upper deck. “It’s not so much of a ship as it is an island. It’s practically a continent,” she said and looked to their left. “Here comes Ralph Silverman.”
Maxence snapped himself to attention and brushed his hand along the outer seam of his trousers to wipe the sick sweat off his palm. �
��Hello, Mr. Silverman.”
The tall, lean man bent sideways as he announced to everyone in the vicinity, “Your Serene Highness, Prince Maxence, it is an absolute pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty.”
“A pleasure to meet you. This is my cousin Lady Marie-Therese Grimaldi.”
After a quick greeting, Marie-Therese moved off into the crowd to mingle with the other producers, directors, and actors Ralph Silverman had brought along.
Ralph began to introduce Maxence around, calling him, “His Royal Majesty, the Royal Crown Prince Maxence, the Prince of Monaco,” until Maxence had a moment alone with Ralph to suggest that all those titles were, perhaps, overdoing it. Maxence was merely a prince of Monaco, not the Prince of Monaco, and the sovereigns of Monaco never used the term Royal Majesty.
If Max didn’t dampen this down, Ralph would go full Elizabethan courtier on him and appeal to Heaven for angels to sing Maxence to his rest that night.
Ralph Silverman laughed uproariously and slapped Maxence on his back. “You’re not just royalty in Monaco, Your Majesty. Any grandson of Grace Kelly is Hollywood royalty, too.”
Chapter Fourteen
Caught
Dree
Dree assumed that getting into Max’s royal apartments in the Prince’s Palace would be easy because she had a key.
Getting to his apartment was the hard part.
Her dorm-like room was situated in the bowels of the castle. Other palace staff milled in the lower-level hallways, bustling to the next place they were needed in the medieval castle. Between housekeepers, kitchen staff, conservationists, and security personnel, the castle was stuffed to the gills.
Dree found a small tablet of paper and a pen in the staff office, fixed her makeup, and put on a black dress that fell just barely past her knee. In the mirror, she looked like a woman on her way to work and certainly not on a nookie run.
Dodging through the crowd that inhabited the lower hallways and clutching her paper pad to her chest, Dree’s high heels clip-clopped on the ceramic tile and then, when she got to the posher parts of the castle, the marble floors.
Her phone screen read eleven fifty-five.
Jeez, she was going to be late.
The corridors all looked the same to Dree because she’d only been in the palace for a few days. Everything looked doubly wrong because in the few days since New Year’s Day, the dozens of twinkling Christmas trees and red satin and velvet bows adorning every column had been stripped from the castle, leaving only solemn black mourning swags to remind everyone that Max’s older brother had killed himself less than a month before.
Something was wrong when she got to a room upholstered in blue and cream silk fabric. There wasn’t a hallway that led to the next room, but just wide doors at one end that led directly to the next room.
And, worse, people seem to be having tea, and none of them were Maxence.
Dree stopped and froze like a jackrabbit scenting a fox, which was a pretty good analogy except that she was actually a peasant scenting nobles who, a few centuries before, would have literally held the power of life or death over her.
One of them, a model-skinny, fabulously beautiful woman with dark eyes and creamy skin like Snow White, glanced over at Dree standing like a scared sheep. Her hair was a mass of ebony curls piled on top of her head like a Greek goddess, and the peacock-colored beads on her long evening gown shimmered in the dim lamplight. Chiara’s hairdresser had given Dree a crash course in cosmetics a few nights before, and even Dree could tell that this woman’s smoky eyes and Instagram contouring had been applied by a professional.
But Dree recognized her.
Dree shouldered her way through the high-society crowd to the woman who was sitting on a low footstool and holding a short highball glass in her hand. She bent over. “Um, excuse me?”
The man that the woman had been talking to raised one bushy eyebrow, but he swirled his drink with his age-gnarled hand, clinking the ice cubes together, and didn’t say anything to Dree.
Dree’s eyes felt like they were darting everywhere because the dresses everyone wore at the party flashed in the dim light. “Um, Marie-Therese? You’re Maxence’s cousin Marie-Therese, aren’t you?”
At first, the woman’s smooth face bore no expression, but her manicured eyebrows rose, and she excused herself from the group she was talking to. Marie-Therese drew Dree over to the side of the room. “Aren’t you Maxence’s little admin?”
Dree was not little. “Um, yeah,” she said.
“Of course, of course. What on earth are you doing at our reception?”
Dree pressed her blank notebook against her chest. “His Highness Prince Maxence asked me to bring some notes to his apartment, and I got lost.”
The woman laughed. “I know where his apartment is. I can take you there.”
“I just need directions.”
Marie-Therese turned with a fluid motion that sent the iridescent beads on her dress swaying like the northern lights Dree had seen in Nepal. “I can at least take you partway and point you in the right direction. Come along. You really shouldn’t be caught at this reception. I wouldn’t want you to get into trouble.”
“Oh, I don’t want to put you out any, Miss Marie-Therese, ma’am.”
Marie-Therese touched Dree’s elbow and ducked her head to whisper because she was at least four inches taller than Dree. “It’s Lady Grimaldi. Among this crowd, some would take offense if you called me ‘miss.’”
Jeez. Touchy, much? “Oops. Sorry.”
“Maxence’s apartment isn’t far, but the palace architect must have designed the layout to confuse an invading army while the royal family escaped through hidden passages.” She angled back to the white-haired guy. “I’ll be right back, Lord Pastor.”
The man harrumphed and scowled as he took a swig from his glass.
Dree said, “I—I’m sorry, Lady Grimaldi. I didn’t mean to—”
Marie-Therese swept through the crowd.
Dree trotted to keep up with her. Marie-Therese must be all legs under that dress to be able to move that fast so gracefully. Dree was not all-legs and bobbled along like four beads bouncing on a string.
Once they’d gone through several rooms and then into a smaller hallway, Marie-Therese paused for Dree to catch up. “Sorry to be so high-handed, but one never knows who’s listening.”
“Oh. Certainly. I’m sorry I called you the wrong thing.”
Marie-Therese glanced out a dark window at the floodlit courtyard below. “I can’t believe Maxence is working so late. When we were growing up, he was never the type.”
Dree nodded, hoping she looked helpful. “He works hard at everything. When we were up in Nepal, he worked all day, taking care of everything and managing everybody.”
Marie-Therese’s faultless dark red lipstick pressed as she smiled. “Being in charge sounds more like my Maxence. But he’s far more at home in a casino than on a charity mission. Is that where he picked you up? Was ‘Nepal’ another one of his missions?”
Maxence’s lies came easily to Dree’s tongue. “Yeah, that’s where we met. I’m a nurse practitioner.”
Marie-Therese began walking again, this time more slowly, and Dree sauntered along with her. The one syllable Marie-Therese uttered, “Oh?” was full of innuendo.
Dree laughed. “It wasn’t anything like that. Evidently, I’m efficient, and he needed somebody who was efficient to be his admin for a month or two until he goes back to his charity work.”
“Right.” Marie-Therese nodded. “But what would a nurse practitioner be doing in Nepal?”
Dree was beginning to feel like she was getting the third degree, and it was easier to keep track of the truth than lies. “I was doing a mission with Catholic Charities. They needed professional medical personnel.”
“That’s very noble of you.”
Dree shrugged. “Not really. I needed to get out of Phoenix.”
“Did you get someone pregnant or gamble your way into deb
t? That’s why my relatives usually have to leave town.”
Dree laughed. “My ex-boyfriend got in some trouble with drug dealers, and then he lied to them that he gave me a bunch of their money he’d stolen. They wanted me to give it to them. I didn’t have any money, certainly not drug dealer-type of money. But there was some weird stuff going on, and they were threatening me. So, even though I was never involved in anything, I had to leave. My old high school principal was a nun and involved in some missions, so she got me on a plane.”
Marie-Therese giggled as they walked. “Oh, how terribly sordid. You’re surely the most frightening criminal I’ve ever met.”
Dree laughed. “Yep, that’s me.”
“Do you have a criminal nickname? Like Al ‘Scarface’ Capone? Or John ‘Dapper Don’ Gotti?”
Marie-Therese was funny. Dree liked her more and more. “Nope. I can’t be a criminal mastermind because I don’t have a cool criminal nickname. I don’t think it would work out for me, though. I’m not scary enough. Instead of ‘The Iceman,’ I’d be ‘The Ditsy Blonde.’ Or instead of being Sammy ‘The Bull’ Gravano, I’d be Andrea ‘The Fluffy Sheep’ Clark.”
“I, too, would surely be tagged with a harmless, embarrassing nickname if I were to turn to a life of crime. ‘Marie-Therese’ is the most ridiculous, froufrou name ever to be named. I’d probably get something like Marie-Therese ‘Vision Board’ Grimaldi. Or “Marie-Therese ‘The Pekingese.’ Oh, God, that rhymes. That’s definitely what it would be.”
Dree laughed. “Do you make vision boards?”
“I do a vision board for my Instagram account and a different one just for me. Can you imagine someone like myself, a wealthy person who has everything, on her hands and knees on the floor, cutting and pasting together a vision board? Isn’t that ridiculous?”
“No, I think it’s great! Money isn’t everything. I grew up believing that money isn’t anything, quite honestly. What’s on your vision boards?”
Marie-Therese glanced at her and blinked her long eyelash extensions at Dree as they walked. “Love.”
Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) Page 13