Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5)

by Blair Babylon

  Dree squeezed her notepad to her chest, and her shoulders scrunched up around her ears like she was hugging Marie-Therese, except that they were still walking through the palace. “Oh, that’s so sweet! And of course, you do. And you will. I think everyone who’s open to love will find it. Sometimes it’s the most obvious person, the guy who’s always been there for you. And sometimes,” Dree inhaled and gazed ahead as she strolled, taking in the immaculate, silver-veined marble floor that, every few yards, was inset with the red and white diamond pattern herald that also marked Maxence’s arm, “sometimes the most unlikely person in the world swoops in, and you’re just blown away by who he is.”

  Marie-Therese raised her eyebrows, a kind smile hovering below the dreamy look in her dark eyes. “Did Maxence blow you away?”

  Dree shook her head, shaking off the silliness. “He plucked me out of an awful situation when I was scared about what would happen to me, and he’s giving me the time and money to get on my feet. I mean, he’s—you know. He wants to be a priest. He might be a priest this time next month, and I don’t sleep with priests.”

  Except she did.

  Except that they were in Monaco, and Max had said that his vows sort of didn’t count in Monaco.

  It was complicated.

  “So, you’re not—” Marie-Therese asked.

  “No, no, not at all.” Oh hell yes, and in about ten minutes.

  “I’m surprised you can resist our Maxsy. Most women can’t.”

  Dree wrinkled her nose in disgust at herself. “I’m not going to throw myself at him. Right now, he’s a prince. And jeez, I’m just a little farm girl from New Mexico. And again, he wants to be a priest. Sometimes, even though you might care about someone, it doesn’t matter. He’s not the right man for me.”

  “He rescued you.” Marie-Therese nodded, her lips pursed with private knowledge. “That can influence feelings.”

  “You know, you’re right,” Dree said. “It’s probably just gratitude.”

  Her dark eyes turned impish. “But you’re going to his apartment in the middle of the night.”

  Dree clutched the blank pad of paper more tightly against her boobs, barely contained in the black dress. “He wanted to look over some notes. I’m employed here. When he says he wants notes, I bring him the notes.”

  “All right, I’ll stop. I would love to see Maxsy happy, though. He’s had some rough times.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Oh?”

  “When he was missing? And the boat?”

  Marie-Therese looked at the floor, and she nodded. “He doesn’t tell many people about that.”

  Dree shrugged. “There wasn’t any TV or internet in Nepal. We had nothing to do but talk for a month.”

  Marie-Therese cracked up. “I suppose so. And speaking of the internet, I haven’t posted on Instagram for three hours.”

  “Oh, yeesh. It takes over your life, huh?”

  “They rule with an iron algorithm.” Marie-Therese had a tiny purse swinging from one wrist, and she pried a cell phone out and handed it to Dree, glancing around at the sconces illuminating the hallway. “Can you stand over there? Frame me from the knees up, taking up about two-thirds of the screen.”

  Dree dropped her notepad on a hallway table they were passing, making sure it landed face-down, and stood on her toes to raise the lens well above Marie-Therese’s eye level.

  Marie-Therese curled herself in a perfect laughing pose, half-crouched with one shoulder forward and her dark eyes, just like Max’s, snapping with wild spirit. When Dree tapped the screen, clicks ruffled out of the phone.

  “Perfect!” Marie-Therese said. When Dree was handing her the camera, Marie-Therese grabbed Dree around her shoulders. “Selfie!”

  Dree had been having a friendly conversation so she was already smiling, and she had the good sense to mug for the camera as Marie-Therese’s arm shot out to the side and held up the phone. It erupted in another flurry of clicks.

  Marie-Therese released Dree and looked at the screen. “Oh, these are good! Do you want one?”

  “Sure!” Dree took her phone out of her little satchel-bag and swiped to turn on the Bluetooth. They held their phones close together, and Marie-Therese swiped several images upward on her phone.

  A funny flash of yellow light illuminated Dree’s screen, and the pictures appeared.

  In the pictures, Marie-Therese was glamorously beautiful, and Dree’s skin looked alabaster-flawless. Her eyes were bright blue, and her smile was perfectly balanced. “Oh, these are cute. You take really good selfies.”

  “My filter app does a few things automatically. Because Instagram, you know?”

  “Oh, right. But thanks!”

  “No problem.”

  Dree grabbed her notepad, and they started walking again. They turned a corner and entered an even more magnificent corridor. Crystal chandeliers blazed sparkling light off the marble floors and mirrored walls.

  Marie-Therese said, “Here’s Maxsy’s apartment. Don’t let him keep you up too late.”

  Dree laughed at her. “I’m just an admin with a sad, hopeless crush on her boss, but thanks.”

  Marie-Therese grinned and walked back the way they’d come, the haze of beads on her dress swaying on her slim figure.

  Dree stood at the door, her arms crossed over the notebook pressed against her chest. The double door was black-stained wood, and the knobs and fixtures were silver. When she knocked softly, the solid wood didn’t move or rattle under her knuckles.

  There wasn’t any sound from inside the apartment.

  Dree glanced at Marie-Therese’s retreating back, which was bare in the backless evening gown she wore. Her raven-wing curls cascaded from the crown of her head and over her neck. The light from the chandelier sparkled on her dress’s beads.

  Marie-Therese wasn’t watching Dree.

  While holding her phone under her armpit, Dree slipped the key from her purse and rattled it into the lock. She was just twisting it when she glanced guiltily at Marie-Therese, who was turning the corner.

  Their gazes touched with that momentary tingle of eye contact, and Marie-Therese stepped around the corner and was gone.

  Dree hurriedly grabbed the long lever that was the doorknob and shoved the door open. It swung easily on well-oiled hinges even though it was at least twice as tall as she was.

  Inside, darkness fogged the room except for three strategically placed lamps centered on tables and the piano, spilling flickering light across glass and wood and lightly stroking the curving outlines of other furniture.

  She closed the door and locked it.

  One corner lamp with a dark shade flooded light on a dark figure of a man sitting in a chair and wearing a tuxedo. “You’re five minutes late.”

  Dree set her notepad, purse, and phone on the table. “I’m sorry. I got lost in the palace. I ended up over at some reception on the other side. I almost didn’t make it here at all.” She dropped the key back into her little pouch and tugged the drawstrings closed.

  Maxence said, “Take your clothes off. Leave them there. Sit at my feet, pet.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Little Prince of Monagasquay

  Dree

  Dree trailed her fingers across Maxence’s heavy pectorals and up the curve of his biceps as they lay on his living room floor, wrapped in the white comforter from his bed. Her thighs were sore from sitting on the floor at his feet with her legs folded beneath herself while Maxence stroked her hair and gazed into the distance. He’d told her to hold several unlikely poses while he silently toyed with her body, then she’d straddled him, riding him while he ground his teeth, nearly emotionless, until his back arched and his eyes squeezed shut like he was in agony. He’d grappled her waist, raked his teeth over her throat, and forced her down over his erection until she writhed in his arms, her breath rushing through her body into her head and turning the world white.

  When her consciousness had swum back and her vision fa
ded in, Max had been panting, his forehead pressed against her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her.

  As she looked down his back, the tattoo staining Maxence’s flesh from his shoulders to his waist was unrecognizable, almost a waterfall of black ink. Digging all that ink into his skin must have taken so long, hours and hours over many days. She smoothed her hand over his skin, trailing her fingers over the blackened feathers of a fallen angel’s wings.

  She would never have chosen a fallen angel’s destroyed wings for him. She hated that’s what his tattoo was. Some of the lines that formed the broken feathers faded away, and parts of it looked incomplete where the hollow bones were broken.

  He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look her in the eyes.

  That kind of distance wasn’t normal for him.

  Afterward, when they were entangled in the white comforter, he was lying with his fingers laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling, while Dree drew circles on his skin with her fingernails. She was trying to tickle him a little, but just any reaction would have sufficed.

  When her arm got tired and she rested her hand on his chest, his heart under her palm was racing, battering itself against his rib cage at least a hundred beats per minute.

  Okay, that was odd.

  His respiration rate was normal, each breath measured and deep.

  Very measured.

  Dree propped herself up on one elbow. “Maxence, buddy? You okay?”

  “Of course.” His dark eyes didn’t move.

  The mismatch between his respiration and pulse rates were disconcerting. If he’d been in Dree’s ER, she would’ve hooked him up to an EKG or just sent him for an immediate cardiac consult. “Your heart is racing, but you don’t look upset.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Under her hand, his heart flipped and, if anything, accelerated. “Are you in the middle of a massive panic attack?”

  That got his attention, and his dark eyes flicked to meet hers. “Of course not.”

  “Max, you can’t fool a nurse practitioner. I’m taking your heart rate right now, and I’ve known you have panic attacks ever since Paris. Did you try your grounding strategy?”

  After a beat, Maxence nodded one dip of his head.

  “Is there something in particular that triggered this?”

  His gaze returned to the ceiling, a vast expanse of white interrupted by golden medallions around the chandelier fixtures. “No.”

  Oh, just “No.” There wasn’t anything suspicious about that at all.

  Dree snuggled down more firmly under the comforter and wrapped her naked leg around his. “Tell me a story about Monagasquay.”

  “Dree—”

  “No, really. Come on.”

  “We’re in Monaco.”

  “I know, but just tell me the story of the little prince and the pirates again.”

  “That’s not a very good story.”

  Under her calf, Maxence’s knee twitched.

  Pay dirt. “Tell it to me anyway.”

  He sighed. “There once was a little prince from Monagasquay—”

  “What was his name again?” When Maxence first had told her the story in Nepal, he said that the little prince’s name had been lost in history.

  “He didn’t have a name,” Maxence said. “He was just a nameless, faceless, unimportant ghost of a prince, a nobody, one of those younger brothers of royals who should fade out of the history books without a second mention.”

  A therapist could pick that apart for years. “Okay, fine.”

  “The little prince was sailing on his tiny sailboat, a dinghy, learning to sail using only the wind on the Mediterranean Sea as his ancestors had, as he did most days that summer when he had turned nine years old and was home from boarding school. He was sailing along, outside the breakwater of the harbor, when a dark red motorboat—” He trailed off.

  Dree watched the muscles in his jaw shift as he clenched them. She stretched her fingers over his chest, where his heart flailed under his skin.

  He continued, “The boat that pulled up beside him was red, that glittering acrylic paint that looks an inch deep.”

  Dree nodded. “My cousin Bonk had a red motorcycle with that kind of paint.”

  The skin around Max’s eyes tightened as he squinted, thinking. “The tender that shuttled us out to the yacht for the party tonight was painted with the same red acrylic paint.” He squinted down at her. “Your cousin’s name is ‘Bonk’?”

  “Nickname. He was never any good at driving that motorcycle.” Ah, now they were getting somewhere. The party that night had been on a boat. “So, did the tender tonight look like the boat that the pirates used to kidnap the little prince?”

  “It certainly wasn’t the same boat, not even close. The tender was much closer to the size of the dinghy sailboat, while the motorboat that sped alongside the little prince’s boat was probably four times the size.”

  “But it was red. And it was a boat,” she said.

  Maxence nodded. “I’ve only been on boats or ships a handful of times since. That was the first time I’d ridden a tender out and transferred to the larger ship.”

  “And then what happened to the little prince?”

  “The kidnappers were amateurs in search of ransom. They were pirates and revolutionaries, not professional criminals. They took him to a tanker ship that reeked of oil and diesel exhaust. They’d probably stolen it, or it had been derelict.” He stopped talking again.

  “So, exhaust fumes?” she prompted.

  Maxence nodded. “The tender tonight had a diesel engine, and the pilot didn’t stop the motor before the tender was dragged inside the yacht’s garage.”

  Dree propped herself up on her elbow again. “Are you telling me that the big boat has a garage, like the big boat was pregnant with the litter of little boats?”

  A smile ghosted across Maxence’s face, and his shoulders lowered perceptibly. “Superyachts of that size cannot come into a harbor. Small speedboats, tenders, are used to shuttle people to and from the land.”

  “And tanker ships can’t pull right into a small port like Monaco, either?”

  Maxence shook his head. “They need a deep-water port, but they were hiding out on the Mediterranean, anyway. The pirates were using speedboats as tenders. They hauled them out of the sea with ropes and pulleys to a landing bolted to the side of the ship, and then we had to climb a ladder to the deck. I didn’t have to do that tonight, of course. The yacht tonight had an elevator the size of a closet.”

  She winced. “Sounds claustrophobic.”

  Maxence nodded slowly. “It was.”

  Claustrophobia was a problem for him. She’d seen him very quietly not-quite freak out more than once. Claustrophobia-plus-boat must’ve been agonizing. “And then what happened to the little prince?”

  “They threw him into an unused, windowless storeroom and locked the door. The little prince’s royal family didn’t notice he was missing for a week because the little prince was unimportant. He wasn’t the heir to the throne. He was just a younger, extra prince, a spare repository of royal genetic material in case something happened to his older brother.”

  Dree wrapped her arms more tightly around Maxence. This was the part of the story that had broken her heart when they’d been in Nepal. “On the farm when I was growing up, we always knew where each other were. It didn’t matter if one of my brothers was three mountains over finding lost sheep or whether my little sister wandered off toward the creek. We could just point. My mom has a sixth sense, a radar for where all of her chicks are. I’ve seen her stop in the middle of kneading bread dough and hightail it out of the kitchen and grab my little sister or cousin just before a bobcat got them.”

  Max’s laugh was one chuff. “That’s a useful skill.”

  “It’s an important one in rural New Mexico.”

  “It’s a pity that the little prince’s royal parents didn’t have an uncanny ability to locate their son. They ignored the pirates’ deman
ds for ransom, believing that the little prince was safe with his nanny, while the nanny thought the little prince was studying with his summer tutor. The summer tutor assumed one of the prince’s aunts had liberated him to play with his cousins for a few days. Meanwhile, the pirates forgot the little prince existed for days at a time, ignoring the banging coming from the sealed storeroom, only occasionally remembering to toss food or fresh water inside. The metal walls were hot to the touch from the summer sunlight, and the air was a steam bath that stank of sweat and fear and shit. It was midnight-dark for days.”

  Dree tightened her hold on him, trying to force his senses to place him in the here-and-now. “Tell me what happened.”

  “They served supper in a dining room inside the yacht. There was a shocking lack of windows on that yacht,” Maxence mused. “Most private ships of that size are fitted with large windows so the owner can enjoy the fact that they own a sea-going yacht and may be reminded of their wealth and class at every opportunity.”

  Dree kept her snickering to herself. It was pretty funny when the prince of Monaco snarked about privilege. “Anything else?”

  One of his broad shoulders lifted, a gesture that seemed both dismissive and helpless. “The universe seemed to be conspiring to remind me of the time I spent aboard that other ship. There was no reason for the rolling of the waves to be any different today than they usually are, but because the ship was anchored and not underway, more motion was perceptible.”

  Dree asked, “A little choppy, huh?”

  “Barely noticeable to everyone else. If a ship is underway, the motion bothers me less because the deck’s movement underfoot is significantly different. The faster, the better. It’s funny. Directly before I met you in Paris, I was aboard Pierre’s yacht overnight. We sailed from Monaco to Genoa in a few hours. Because it was speeding along, the motion didn’t bother me too much.”

  “And you were rescuing that friend of yours.”

  “Right. Did I mention that to you?”

  “Just that she had a Russian mafia husband who wanted to cut off your head and feed you to the sharks.”