Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence
Series Order
Free Series Starter:
Indecent Proposal (Book #1)
A Game of Billionaires (Book #2)
Main Series:
Rogue (Book #3)
Order (Book #4)
Prince (Book #5)
Royal (Book #6)
Reign (Book #7)
The first books (Indecent Proposal and Game of Billionaires) are free expanded samples of Rogue. They contain the first part of Rogue so you can read a longer, expanded sample rather than just what the “sample” allows.
The main series is the series order you want to read.
Contents
Royal
1. Another Night in Monaco
2. Dark
3. The Goddamn Easter Bunny
4. Sunlight
5. Narcotics Smell like Acid and Poisonous Plants
6. The Pirate King
7. Quentin Sault
8. Dree Speaks Spanish
9. Mother Hen
10. Closet
11. The Monaco Yacht Club
12. The Slowest Escape Ever
13. A Warehouse Outside of Nice, France
14. The Prince’s Palace
15. Prince Monster, The Earl of Givesnofucks, and . . .
16. Whispers
17. Heaven
18. Crown Council
19. Disaster
20. Duchess Georgie
21. Princess Marie-Therese
22. Losing It
23. With A Little Help from My Friends
24. Dree Explains It All for You
25. First Try
26. An Interrogation and One More Question
27. Coup
28. Coup d’état
By: Blair Babylon
Dree has been swindled, chased, heartbroken, conscripted, and kidnapped.
What on Earth could be worse than all that?
Don’t ask.
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Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2021 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Chapter One
Another Night in Monaco
Casimir van Amsberg
Casimir answered his ringing phone, fumbling in the dark for the glowing, buzzing contraption. “What?”
“Turn on the television.” The man’s deep, British voice on the line belonged to his friend Arthur Finch-Hatton.
Casimir fumbled for the remote in the dark hotel room. “What’s going on? Was there an earthquake in Los Angeles?” Caz’s wife, Rox, was still in LA, overseeing the day-to-day operations of their law firm.
“Just look.”
“Tell me if it’s Los Angeles!”
“It’s not LA. It’s Monaco.”
Oh.
Casimir found the power button on the remote and flipped through the channels, looking for news as he asked Arthur, “Did Quentin Sault call you again because Maxence ditched his security?”
“Just find a news channel. Where are you?” Arthur asked.
“Copenhagen.”
The last time Max had gone missing in Monaco just a few months before, Casimir and Arthur had undertaken a desperate sleuthing mission to find him. Their efforts had culminated in a quick dodge and a yacht ride through the Mediterranean. Because anything that involved Monaco might have dire implications for Maxence, Casimir and Arthur had erred on the side of caution.
They’d run to Monaco to find Max four times total over the last decade, so twice within a few months would be weird.
But with Max’s older brother dead and Monaco’s throne up for grabs, Prince Maxence of Monaco might be in trouble.
Finally, among the shopping shows and reruns on the hotel’s TV, Casimir found a news channel.
Blood and gunfire filled the television screen.
The crawl across the bottom read, Mass shooting in Monaco. Five known dead, more unaccounted for.
Casimir sat straight up in the bed. “Jesus Christ!”
More footage followed of people running and screaming from the Grimaldi Forum, the convention center in Monaco. Some of it was shaky cell phone video. Other shots were grainy security footage.
Casimir choked, asking, “Have you heard from him?”
“His secretary called me from his phone and said they were at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco when this went down. She said his security had double-crossed him, and they’d kidnapped him and taken him out in a helicopter from the roof.”
God, they were never going to find Max. There was little chance they’d find his body. “It was the Sea Change Gala. He was listed as the host on the invitation. We almost went to that.” Meaning Casimir and his wife.
“Us, too,” Arthur said. “There’s a close-up of him being hustled out of the convention center by security, including Quentin Sault.”
“I never trusted that guy. Jesus, Arthur.”
“I’m calling in favors now. Have your sister put you on a military plane to Nice. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Where are you?”
“I’ll see you in France.”
Chapter Two
Dark
Maxence
Darkness.
Cold air chilled Maxence’s bare skin. His back rested against the ship’s frigid steel wall.
He maintained a steady rate in his breathing: five seconds inhale, hold for five seconds, five seconds exhale, and hold for five seconds.
Repeat.
The steel of the ship groaned around him as the vessel crested a small wave, the floor rising and sinking under Max’s butt and legs in the dark. He was naked except for his torn tuxedo trousers, which he’d ripped the legs off at his mid-thigh.
Maxence shivered in the wintry, damp air.
Fetid garbage stink filled the sea air so strongly that Maxence could taste spoiled meat on the back of his tongue. The faint taste of rusted iron was his own dried blood that had flowed from his nostrils, and he’d spat from his mouth where his teeth had cut the insides of his lips during the fight.
After he’d stripped off his shirt and tuxedo jacket he’d been wearing, he’d tried to wipe the blood off of his face with it, but the metallic taste still pooled around his gums.
One molar wiggled when he probed it with his tongue where he’d taken a hard punch to the side of his face. The puffy flesh around his eye was tender, too.
The backs of his hands rested lightly on his lap, his raw knuckles touching the bare flesh of his knees below the torn fabric of his pants.
His Patek Philippe watch, a Christmas gift from his friend Arthur years ago, encircled his wrist, and the crucifix he always wore weighed on the back of his neck.
His bare toes explored rivets on the steel floor as he waited, resting.
Darkness.
His clothes and shoes were heaped beside him, touching his thigh. Maybe someone would find them someday, analyze his blood on them, and discover what had happened to the prince who’d been kidnapped from a gala during a mass murder. He doubted it. After his kidnappers killed him, they would doubtlessly throw anything of his into the Mediterranean Sea, where it would sink to the bottom, p
erhaps to settle near his body.
In the stinking darkness of the sealed room on the ship, Maxence couldn’t rule out that he had already been murdered and was confined to his own personal definition of Hell.
The floor of the small dark room on the ship fell, and Maxence slid with it in the dense black air.
His body stank of sweat, adrenaline, and terror. He hurt all over, from the constant strain of his wrenched shoulder and where the plastic zip-ties had flayed his wrists, to the soreness of bruises deep in his muscles and ribs where his kidnappers’ punches had landed.
He’d managed to slither out of the zip-ties within an hour of being thrown in the locked room, his blood acting as a lubricant as he slid them off.
Pain had ceased to have meaning for him years before. Most of the time, it felt—cold.
Only that morning, Maxence had awakened in Dree’s arms, and the day had offered him two mutually exclusive dreams that were both all he’d ever wanted in his life.
Father Booker had been dispatched from Rome to offer Maxence the chance to be ordained as a priest, which he’d been working toward for a decade.
And yet, the possibility of a life married to Dree Clark had tempted him so much that he had retrieved his grandmother’s engagement ring from the vaults of Monaco and proposed marriage to her in the middle of the Sea Change Gala.
And now—
His stomach roiled, and he vomited seasick bile on the other side of his clothes in the darkness.
Yes, he must be in Hell.
Time ceased to have meaning as minutes or hours crawled over his skin with the same weight.
His stomach clenched with hunger and nausea, though he knew it was nothing compared to what was going to come if he didn’t get off the ship.
Maxence breathed, completing what must’ve been hundreds or thousands of practiced respiration cycles meant to keep himself calm.
Something scratched at the door.
Maxence’s eyes turned toward the sound, the muscles around his eyes and in his temples straining to see in the absolute blackness.
His heart tapped faster.
Rusty gears in the door ground against each other.
Maxence rolled, lightly bracing himself on his toes and fingertips and crouching. He grabbed his discarded clothes beside him.
Metal squealed.
A slice of sunlight blasted into the room.
A man’s silhouette blocked the brightness, the barrel of a semiautomatic handgun visible in his black shape.
Maxence stayed low as he threw his clothes at the man, standing well to the side of the beam of sunlight. The dark fabric fluttered in the air in front of the guy like attacking birds.
The silhouette recoiled, and sparks and a gunshot slammed through the air in the tiny room. Acrid sulfur stung the inside of Max’s nose.
Maxence leaped and drove the man’s hand holding the gun against the wall beside the door. Steel clanged.
The gun discharged again, a blast that barreled pressure into Maxence’s ears. The bullet ricocheted off the metal with a sharp ping.
Maxence slammed the man’s hand into the wall again, forcing him to drop the gun. The heavy steel landed on Max’s bare foot. A spike of pain shot through the thin bones there.
The man bent, reaching for the gun skittering across the floor. Maxence drove upward with his knee, catching his assailant in the face. The man’s head whipped backward.
As the kidnapper was toppling out of the room, Maxence kicked the gun, and it skittered away into the darkness.
The man had another gun and was bringing it around to aim at Maxence.
Maxence punched him hard on the side of his head.
The guy crumpled at Max’s feet.
Shouts rang out on the deck of the ship beyond Maxence’s prison cell.
Maxence sprinted out of the darkness and into the fire of the morning sunlight.
Chapter Three
The Goddamn Easter Bunny
Dree
Dree Clark was pissed off.
Not only had these jerks torn her Cinderella ball gown, which wasn’t even hers because her friends on the palace staff had borrowed it from some rich lady’s closet, but they’d also tied her hands behind her back. She was rolling around in the back of a stupid delivery van that was driving her God-knew-where, and to top it all off, that dang Russian drug dealer, Kir Sokolov, was taunting her.
Nobody should taunt a country girl who grew up castrating calves on her cousins’ cattle ranch.
Kir Sokolov was a tall, cadaverous man with a sickly, sallow cast to his white skin and epidermal lesions that made Dree consider a hepatorenal syndrome diagnosis. If he had walked into Dree’s ER, she would’ve immediately run a liver panel to screen for cirrhosis, acute hepatitis virus infection, and liver cancer, and then a renal panel to see if he needed to begin kidney dialysis immediately. In addition, with his height and gangly posture, she would’ve run a genetic test for Marfan’s syndrome and an echocardiogram of his heart in case his aorta was ready to rupture.
Yeah, this guy was a mess of diagnoses waiting to happen. She hoped he had good health insurance.
From her position on her stomach on the cold floor of the van, she yelled at Sokolov and the driver, “Just drop me off anywhere, okay? We don’t need to tell anybody about this. I’ll make my own way back to Monaco. But just drop me off here, ‘kay?”
Kir Sokolov said, “Give me your phone.”
“I don’t have one,” she said.
“Everyone has a phone.”
“I don’t, and I can’t ‘hand you’ anything anyway, buddy. You zip-tied my hands. Cut the plastic off, and I’ll show you I don’t have one.”
“Give me your phone,” he repeated like a dolt.
“I don’t have one and I can’t! And where would I hide a phone in this dress?”
“Give me your phone, or I’ll come back there and take it.”
“Are you even listening to me? I said I don’t have a phone!”
Kir Sokolov made good on his promise and crawled to the back of the van to frisk her.
He found her phone in the pocket of the white, cape-like jacket that matched her dress.
He asked her in a really snotty tone of voice, “If you don’t have a phone, then what is this?”
Dree cussed him out while he retreated, laughing, to the passenger seat of the van, where he stripped the SIM card out of the phone, crushed it, and then threw the phone on the floor of the van and stomped on it.
The sharp crack of shattering glass filled the van, inspiring Dree to cuss him out again. She wasn’t made out of money. She didn’t have the cash to go around buying new phones all the time because some jerkface drug dealer broke hers.
It was a good thing the guy hadn’t continued pawing her after he found her ratty old cell phone, though, and it was another good thing that Dree had an ‘ample bosom for feeding babies,’ as her grandmother had noted on every possible occasion.
Sharp corners poked her boobs inside her bra.
That jerk Kir Sokolov said, “We know Francis Senft gave you the money he stole from us. Not only did he tell us you have it—”
Dree shouted over him, “He only told you that because you were torturing him. I have no idea what he did with it. He probably snorted it all. I don’t have it.”
“—we also have bank records from his phone showing he transferred money to banking accounts in your name.”
“Well, then he must’ve opened up those bank accounts under my name and without my knowledge because I never saw any money.”
“We believe you can access it.”
“And I believe in the goddamn Easter Bunny, but I don’t see any eggs!”
He stopped talking to her after that.
The van didn’t drive far through the nighttime French countryside. Within an hour, the driver turned into a gravel parking lot, and then he drove the van into a warehouse.
Kir and the other goon hauled her out of the rear doors of the v
an, squeezing her upper arms and crushing her flesh against her bones until she knew they’d left bruises.
She wasn’t going to whimper, though. Farm girls didn’t whine.
Large boxes stacked to the rafters towered over the small, white delivery vehicle that they’d shoved her into.
Florescent lights striped the ceiling far above.
“Where are we?” Dree demanded, thinking she should collect evidence for when she escaped so these guys would go to jail.
The driver guy laughed at her. “Nowhere you need to know about,” he said in Russian-accented English.
Kir said, “We have a computer here that you can use to transfer the money from your accounts to ours.”
“I told you, I didn’t open those accounts. How would I know what the account numbers are?”
“We know account and routing numbers. We retrieved them from Francis Senft’s phone.”
“Well, I don’t know what the login information is,” she retorted.
“Try your usual banking username and password.”
“I don’t have a ‘usual’ banking username and password. For banks, I use one of those randomly generated ones that are a thousand characters long and half of them are punctuation.”
“How do you log in with a big password you don’t even know?” he asked.
Dree smiled. “It’s stored in my password manager.”
“Where is your password manager?”
“On my phone,” Dree said.
Royal: A Royal Billionaire Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 6) Page 1