Maybe they’re just having too much fun, Dree texted. Maybe they’re all fine and just playing cards and drinking and stuff, and none of them had a minute to check their phones.
Maxence’s text flashed on her phone’s screen. We might have to postpone the wedding.
Dree looked up at her reflection in the expansive mirror in the bathroom in the penthouse suite of the Hôtel de Paris Monte-Carlo.
Her face looked porcelain-flawless because she’d had a dermablading a few days ago, which had truly freaked Dree out at having someone without any proper medical training take a scalpel to her face. Émilienne had applied four layers of foundation makeup for two hours, swirling the brush to ensure each square millimeter of her skin was as matte as the Mona Lisa, before perfectly sculpting her face with contour and highlighter.
Dree’s hair was twisted back in a sleek blond chignon that was perfectly the color of the hairpiece bun at the nape of her neck. Princess Grace’s tiara nestled in her hair, the five diamond scallops looping up out of her hairdo like Nessie the Loch Ness Monster’s snaky humps cresting out of the water, but in diamonds.
Her wedding gown was hanging in the next room, perfectly pressed without the tiniest crease anywhere on the ivory silk, the cathedral-length train pinned to the walls so it wouldn’t wrinkle or get stepped on.
Her reception dress was also pressed and hanging on a different wall, and the coordinating shoes and tiny clutch purse sat beside it. In the purse, she’d tucked an extra lipstick and the napkin from the Buddha Bar that had started this crazy, crazy journey a few months prior.
Nearly half the items had been crossed off, including Find someone to love who loves you and is worthy of your love, and hold onto them your whole life.
Their relationship had begun with one crazy night to fulfill an item on the Guidance of the Napkin.
Dree’s mom was going to hold the purse during the wedding, and then Dree could carry it to the reception. It just seemed like good luck if the napkin was present at the result of it.
She’d been getting texts all morning from Chiara at the palace with updates about the ceremony and from Alcide over at the convention center, noting that the chefs were hitting the time stamps for the preparation of the appetizers, supper, and desserts for over a thousand people perfectly.
Dree had been watching the guests arrive at the palace for an hour via the television coverage. People were crowding inside the castle walls in the Court of Honor and outside to watch the wedding on the Jumbotrons bolted atop the walls. She’d been flipping back and forth between the English channel and the one where the journalists were speaking Monegasque, which she was just beginning to understand here and there. Each one of the wedding guests looked as impeccably put together as Dree was going to in exactly five minutes when Émilienne was going to lace her into her underwear and dress.
She texted back to Maxence, Let’s not do anything drastic.
They couldn’t fly in the storm yesterday, Maxence texted to her. I told them both that they should come for a week before and make a vacation out of it, but Casimir had some big studio negotiation and Arthur was being typically vague. I dropped everything and was at both of their weddings. I flew from Africa to Los Angeles when Casimir had a freak out because he had a scar on his face.
Dree texted back, Yes, dear.
And then Arthur ran afoul of his own government and I had to swoop in and pluck him out of London before 007 got 86’d.
Dree texted back, Yes, dear.
I practically saved both of their lives several times, and they couldn’t even get to my damn wedding on time.
Dree texted back, Yes, dear.
I don’t know why Casimir, Roxanne, and Julianna even flew to London first. They should’ve flown directly to Nice so they would be sure to arrive in time. Austin is six months old. He can probably walk from the heliport to the palace. Where the hell are they?
From her vantage point several stories above most of Monaco, Dree saw a helicopter with the Union Jack flag painted on the tail lowering onto the palace’s roof like a very British dragonfly.
She texted back to Maxence, Looks like they’re here. We won’t have to postpone the wedding of the century after all. And she began to call Chiara.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Landing
Lord Arthur Finch-Hatten, Earl of Severn
Arthur leaped from the helicopter as soon as the skids touched the helipad on the Prince’s Palace and held the door open for his wife and the others to disembark. He crouched, and the propwash ruffled his black hair. “Come on, come on! We haven’t a moment to spare!”
Casimir opened the rear door and stepped down onto the tarmac, reaching back into the aircraft for a tiny human being who was passed to him. “It’s okay, Julianna. Daddy’s got you.” He secured the toddler under one arm and then held out the other to steady his wife, Roxanne, who was clambering down.
Arthur braced the door with his back and reached inside for the infant carrier. He slung the handle over one arm and then helped his wife, Lady Genevieve Finch-Hatton, the Countess of Severn, step out of the helicopter. She was still more voluptuous than usual after she’d been delivered of their son six months ago, and Arthur had half-convinced himself that she was as delicate as a soap bubble in this condition. If he tried to lift her down from the helicopter, she would probably fend him off out of habit. The diaper bag swinging from her arm was big enough to hold Liechtenstein.
After Casimir and Arthur settled their wives and children on the tarmac, they both reached back into the helicopter to hand their respective nannies out. It seemed inadvisable to take children under two years old to an internationally televised event that involved silently sitting and not moving.
Gen took the infant cradle back from him and crowded the babysitter off to the side. “What are we going to do with Austin and Lydia? They can’t come to the ceremony with us. We didn’t have time to check into the hotel. They don’t have anywhere to go.”
Casimir’s wife, Roxanne, was saying something very similar, except with the names Julianna and Maranda.
Arthur told them all, “We need to get away from the helicopter and into the palace.”
The door from the palace slammed open. Black-clad mercenaries stormed onto the roof, arms extended as they aimed handguns at the group of them.
Arthur and Casimir spun, their hands up.
Casimir called out, “We are here for the wedding! Please call Prince Maxence. I am Prince Casimir of the Netherlands, and this is Lord Arthur Finch-Hatton, Earl of Severn of Great Britain.”
The man with a short ginger beard under his sunglasses, wearing black mercenary fatigues and pointing a semiautomatic pistol at Arthur, didn’t flinch. Arthur recognized Aiden Grier from his stocky peasant build to the psychopathic deadness behind his blue eyes.
A man at the back, whom Arthur vaguely recognized from the last time they’d stood on this roof with Maxence, called out for the Rogue Security mercenaries to stand down and then said something in Dutch to Casimir, who laughed.
The rest of the mercenaries lowered their weapons to aim at the tarmac just in front of their feet.
Arthur took several sidesteps away from his wife and child so they wouldn’t get hit by a stray bullet or shrapnel, and he did not look away from Aiden Grier’s unblinking eyes.
Aiden Grier snapped his gun to his side, but he didn’t break the stare, either.
The door flung open again, and a slim woman wearing a black pencil skirt and suit jacket while holding a computer tablet walked out onto the helipad. Her tightly controlled hair wound into a bun did not move in the prop wash from the helicopter blades.
She stopped in front of the mercenaries, standing with her feet pressed together as she studiously consulted the tablet in her arms. “Your Highnesses and My Lord and Lady, please come right this way. Ms. Clark has tasked me with finding accommodations for your children in the palace while you attend the wedding. My name is Chiara Diallo, and I will make s
ure everything is perfect.”
Chapter Forty
Altar
Maxence
Maxence stood at the altar that again had been assembled at the base of the two curving staircases descending from the second-floor loggia to the courtyard of the Prince’s Palace of Monaco.
The roses and gardenias radiated their sweet scent into warm air that June evening, and Maxence twisted to wave to the crowd behind him.
Lady Valentina Martini had made a full recovery after her heart attack during Max’s enthronement and had resumed her place in one of the forward boxes reserved for the nobles. Her prim nod suggested such a spectacle would not happen again.
Alexandre and his wife Georgie were seated in their box reserved for the Duchy of Valentinois, and a couple whom Maxence didn’t know was sitting with them. The blond woman’s feet swung a few inches above the ground. She wore a flowing pink dress that floated around her in the light summer breeze.
The box directly behind himself had been designated for Casimir, Arthur, and their wives, and they were settled in. He would have to abuse them later for cutting their arrival so close.
Behind them in the crowd, an additional box had been reserved. People who followed such things might have been shocked to see the notorious recluse Wulfram von Hannover attending a public event so soon after he’d been at several during the previous year, but the people who followed such things would probably assume his new wife was having a good influence on him. Rae was there, too, smiling at Max, her dark auburn hair flowing over her shoulders as she elbowed Wulfram to smile, too. Wulf’s single raised eyebrow indicated confusion, not amusement.
Outside the castle walls, cheering erupted.
Maxence knew Dree and her parents must have emerged from the limousine and were walking between the velvet ropes toward the palace’s gate. Having her outside the palace walls where Kir Sokolov had tried his one last feint was maddening, but twenty Rogue Security, French soldiers, and Monegasque Secret Service surrounded them.
Still, when Maxence saw Dree Clark enter the gate on the left side of the courtyard on her parents’ arms and the three of them strolling down the assigned path—her holding a bouquet of white roses and gardenias and thirty feet of delicate ivory silk rippling on the ground behind her—his throat closed up.
From the sudden burn on his lower eyelids and a moment of trembling that passed through his hands, Maxence thought for a moment he was going to need one of the EpiPens that Dree had stashed in the first-aid tent as emotion choked him.
Most of his family lay under the stone floor of the cathedral just a few hundred yards away, and many of the remaining members had been transported to prisons in France, but he was starting a new family and a new chapter for himself and Monaco.
They reached him, and Maxence shook her parents’ hands before Bartholomew and Beatrice removed themselves to their waiting seats. Dree stood motionless beside him as attendants rearranged the long cathedral-length train on the red carpet behind her.
Maxence smiled down at her as the camera flashes blazed around them, saying, “You look amazing.”
He was amazed. He was dazzled by her beauty, her kindness, her heart, and the life they were going to forge together.
They turned to listen to the priest before them. Father Booker Jackson smiled down at them before he started the ceremony, repeating everything he said first in his Chicago-accented English and then in erudite French.
After greeting the crowd, he said in his sonorous voice, “The time I remember most about Andrea Catherine and Maxence is when His Serene Highness, Prince Maxence of Monaco, fell off his motorcycle in the Himalayas of Nepal.” Polite laughter from the crowd. “When Andrea Catherine realized Maxence had fallen behind, she skidded her motorcycle like an X Games racer and wove through the rest of our little party as oncoming traffic to speed back and find him. What I remember most about our everyday lives in Nepal is that Sister Andrea Catherine worked herself to exhaustion providing medical care for our fellow human beings every day, and Maxence took care of her, making sure she ate and checking her motorcycle for maintenance issues while she slept.”
Dree turned and looked up at him, her delicately sketched eyebrows raised, and Maxence shrugged. After living in the world’s rural areas for a decade, he could check the tire pressure, oil, and other fluid levels of most vehicles.
Father Booker smiled down at them both. “I’ve known since then that they were meant for each other.”
Chapter Forty-One
Familiar
Lady Genevieve Finch-Hatten, Countess of Severn, Senior Counsel
Gen had attended several weddings over the last year and a half that she had known and been married to Lord Arthur Finch-Hatton.
The first wedding they’d gone to together had been when they’d been dating, sort of. That had been last year’s wedding of the century, which had been Princess Flicka von Hannover’s marriage to Prince Pierre Grimaldi, Maxence’s older and now-deceased brother.
She had to be careful she didn’t blurt out anything about that. Max was a nice guy. A little over the edge sometimes, but a nice guy. He didn’t need to be reminded on his wedding day that his brother had committed suicide because some clumsy American lawyer couldn’t figure out appropriate topics for discussion. She was still learning to be British.
Standing up there at the altar, Maxence looked happy, magnetically so.
There’d always been something entrancing about Maxence Grimaldi.
That Andrea Clark was a lucky girl.
Not that Gen didn’t consider herself a lucky girl. Genevieve considered herself stupidly lucky that she had found someone as protective and gallant and honorable as Lord Arthur Finch-Hatton and managed to marry him, even though the circumstances when they’d met and faked a relationship had been odd, to say the least.
Under the theatrical lights suspended over the courtyard, Maxence nearly glowed with happiness, and she thought she saw him blinking.
Must’ve been the lights.
As the priest pronounced them man and wife and Maxence and Andrea leaned toward each other to share a quick kiss in profile, Gen thought Dree Clark looked familiar, although they’d never met. Max and Andrea had had a whirlwind courtship that Gen didn’t really understand the timeline of. Arthur and Casimir had managed to get down to Monaco to meet her, but Gen and Rox hadn’t been able to come those times.
Not that it was a problem.
Rox had said that Casimir had only good things to say about Andrea, though Arthur had been a little more tightlipped.
She squinted in the bright theatrical lights at the bride.
It was just weird that Andrea Grace Catherine Clark looked so familiar, but Gen couldn’t quite place her.
Chapter Forty-Two
Stalwart and Dutch
Prince Casimir van Amsberg of the Netherlands
Weddings were lovely.
Casimir didn’t get emotional at them of course. It was probably his stalwart Dutch constitution that assured that while he might feel as deeply as any Frenchman or Monegasque, Casimir was more reserved and expressed his emotions privately and modestly. He was made of sterner stuff.
Arthur, Gen, Casimir, and Roxanne were sitting in roped-off, front-row seats directly behind where Maxence and Andrea Catherine were kneeling as the priest prayed over them. Casimir sat on one end and Arthur on the other, with their two wives sitting between them.
Arthur was also keeping it British, reclining slightly in his chair with his long legs crossed at the ankles in front of him. As always, one side of his mouth was slightly higher in a very English smirk.
Their wives, Roxanne and Genevieve, should have been dabbing their eyes due to the emotions of remembering their own weddings to Arthur and him.
They weren’t.
They should be.
Casimir glanced around the interior courtyard of the palace. The white roses and gardenias hanging in bunches and swathes from the medieval architecture and Italian Renai
ssance double staircase leading to the second floor were lovely. The singers and orchestra were excellent. The priest was both amusing and heartfelt.
When Maxence and Dree exchanged rings and said their vows, their evident love for each other was Earth-shattering.
Everything about Maxence’s ceremony brought back memories of Casimir’s own royal wedding in the Netherlands, though their wedding had been Protestant. But the love Max and Dree had for each other and this incredible expression of it should have moved the two women to tears.
Not himself of course.
Casimir’s eyes burned, and his nose felt scorched inside like acidic vapor filled the air.
He had brought two extra handkerchiefs and had carefully folded additional tissues into his wallet in case those weren’t enough.
Roxanne should be happily remembering their wedding.
The display of love at this gorgeous ceremony should move her.
Why wasn’t Roxanne sobbing?
Why was she looking at the bride with her head tilted to the side, one frown line creased between her eyebrows, and blinking like that?
Casimir grabbed the handkerchiefs out of his tuxedo’s inner breast pocket, foisted one upon a very confused Roxanne, and wiped his nose because he must be allergic to all the beautiful, beautiful flowers.
Chapter Forty-Three
Familiar II
Princess Roxanne van Amsberg of the Netherlands and Georgia
Familiar.
How could Andrea Catherine Clark look so familiar?
Reign: A Royal Romantic Suspense Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) Page 19