Reign: A Royal Romantic Suspense Novel (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5)

by Blair Babylon

Obviously, Rox had never met the woman before. She’d been holding down the fort, meaning their Los Angeles law practice and their rambunctious toddler, while Casimir had gallivanted off to Europe because Maxence needed him.

  Not that she begrudged Casimir running off to help his friend. She’d called Arthur and Maxence twice when Casimir had been in trouble, and they’d both shown up the next morning.

  But Gen was squinting at Andrea Grace Catherine Clark, too.

  Like maybe Gen also thought Dree Clark looked familiar.

  As the wedding ended, Maxence and Andrea Catherine walked toward the gate of the Prince’s Palace to the outer courtyard. Citizens and overflow guests had watched the ceremony out there on giant television screens bolted on the castle walls.

  The reception was due to start in an hour. Maybe Rox and Gen could get a closer look at her there. The bride was wearing wedding makeup, after all, and until the middle part of the ceremony, a sheer veil had draped over her face.

  Maybe Rox needed glasses.

  After the bridal couple had left the castle, everyone stood, including the four of them.

  Gen stretched, raising her arms over her head. “That was lovely.”

  Behind Rox, Casimir said, “Yes, it was,” in a strange, strangled voice.

  Rox reached behind herself and held his hand. He always got so emotional at weddings. “I can hardly wait to meet Andrea Clark,” she said to Gen as she consulted the invitation. “She’s gorgeous. No wonder Maxence fell for her.”

  Gen nodded and said with a funny note of ambivalence in her voice, “Yeah, absolutely beautiful.”

  Rox poked Gen’s arm. “Did she look familiar to you?”

  Gen twirled to look at Rox, her brown eyes huge. “Yes! Did she look familiar to you?”

  “Yeah. Caz said she’s from New Mexico and worked in Phoenix. I pretty much haven’t been anywhere except Georgia and LA.”

  “I haven’t been either one of those places either. I mean, I grew up in Texas before I moved to London. Where would we meet somebody who was from New Mexico and worked as a nurse in Arizona?”

  Rox nodded. “It’ll come to us. We just have to keep thinking. If she recognizes us, maybe we can hint around so she’ll tell us where it was.”

  Gen bit her lip, nodding slowly. “Good plan.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Fourteen Hours

  Dree

  Fourteen hours.

  Between the final walk-throughs for the palace courtyard and the renovated Grimaldi Forum that morning, to the ceremony, and then the long, long reception at the convention center where the dancing had gone on all night, Dree had been on her feet for fourteen hours.

  The soles and the sides of her satin high-heeled shoes felt embedded in her skin.

  The boning of the corset under her pale pink reception dress may have fused to her ribs.

  Luckily, Dree knew some good surgeons who could tease the fibers out of her flesh. They’d seen worse.

  Maxence and Dree were sitting at one of the round tables beside the dance floor in one of the large halls of the Grimaldi Forum. The rest of the convention center was dark except for a trail of lights leading from this room to the front door.

  Casimir and Arthur and their two wives, Rox and Gen, sat with them. The guys were sitting properly in their chairs, but the girls had taken their shoes off and propped their feet in their husbands’ laps for massages. Pinkie toes were many different shades of red. Blisters were rising on toe knuckles.

  Plates and glasses littered the table. One of the catering staff had come by half an hour before and asked if they were hungry, mentioning the chefs were about to feed the staff. Since the staff person had assured them it was no trouble to add six more servings to the pot, they’d had a lovely late-night snack of soup and sandwiches.

  Dree could not place where she knew Rox and Gen from.

  And she was too embarrassed to ask.

  So she kept meandering around the subject, trying to elicit information.

  Nurses were good at asking direct questions. Dree sucked at this subtle stuff.

  She stirred her cup of tea, gazing nonchalantly into the green brew. “So, where are you guys originally from?”

  “Texas, but we live in London now,” Gen said.

  “Georgia, but we live in Los Angeles.” Rox leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hand. “So, Andrea Catherine, where are you from?”

  “Call me Dree. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and that’s why your husbands wanted to go along to the sheep ranch out in the boondocks and watch Maxence ask my daddy to marry me, but I lived in Phoenix for a couple of years. Have either of you guys been to Phoenix? Maybe come through the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital?”

  They both shook their heads no, and Dree felt like flopping over dead.

  She knew them from somewhere. She did.

  Rox asked, “Have you ever been to Los Angeles? Have you ever talked to a lawyer in Los Angeles?”

  Dree shook her head. “I never left New Mexico as a kid, and then I moved to Phoenix. That was it. I’ve never even been to Disneyland.”

  Gen and Rox glanced at each other, their confusion written in lines between their eyebrows and half-sad smirks.

  Dree continued, “I’d never been to Europe at all until a few months ago when I went to Paris for the first time. That’s where Maxence and I met, in Paris. That’s a wild story, though. I don’t feel like I should be telling it at my wedding.”

  Roxanne nodded. “I grew up in Georgia, and I’d never gone anywhere until I moved to LA to work at a law firm, which is where I met Casimir. I traveled with him as his paralegal for years before we got together. But I love Paris. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.”

  Gen snorted. “Yeah, that last trip to Paris we took was crazy, though. We don’t need to repeat that one anytime soon.”

  Rox chuckled at Gen and told Dree, “Yeah, that was a crazy night. We’d just rescued Max from Genoa after Simone Maina’s husband had threatened to cut his head off and feed it to the sharks. Estebe Maina was all over Monaco, so we sailed straight to Nice and then flew to Paris to get Maxence out of Monaco.”

  That was the story Maxence had told about the night before he’d met Dree, rescuing Simone with two yacht rides that had traumatized him so much that he’d picked up the crazy girl with long fingernails at the Buddha Bar.

  Dree chuckled. “Yeah, my Maxence has a Galahad complex, doesn’t he?” She grinned at him as he massaged her feet. He smirked back at her.

  Rox laughed. “We keep telling him it’s going to get him killed someday. At least now that he’s the Prince of Monaco, he can have other people go do all of his Galahadding for him.”

  The puzzle was almost clicking in Dree’s head, but a piece was still missing. “Wait, you guys were here in Monaco the night Maxence rescued Simone, and then you took him to Paris?”

  Roxanne nodded. “Quentin Sault and Monaco’s Secret Service used to call these two when they couldn’t find Maxence, especially if he went missing from Monaco because Pierre kept low-key trying to have him killed. That should stop now, hopefully, on both counts.”

  Gen nodded from where she was resting her head on the back of her chair. “Oh, yeah. We were staying at the Four Seasons George V Hotel for a babymoon, so we gave Max our room for the rest of the week. Arthur left his clothes there so Max would have something to wear. Max literally walked out of Monaco with the clothes on his back that night, and half of his tux was missing by the time we picked him up in Genoa.”

  Arthur snorted. “He destroyed a bespoke Tom Ford tuxedo that night, and then a Kiton the night of the Sea Change Gala. Tragic.”

  Dree mashed all that information up in her head. So, at that swanky Parisian hotel, Maxence had been staying in a room that was under somebody else’s name. Now that she thought about it, it was Lord somebody, Earl of something.

  She’d been so impressed Max knew someone who was a real English lor
d, and she chortled in her head at herself.

  Oh, so Dree had taken Arthur’s clothes off of Maxence before she’d sucked his cock. That was something that she could’ve gone a whole lifetime without knowing. “Wow, that was the weekend I met Maxence.”

  Roxanne and Gen looked at each other, then back at Dree. Rox asked, “Wait, what? That was the weekend you met him?”

  “Uh-huh.” Dree grabbed her little purse off the back of the chair and swung it around to lay it on the table. “I’d had a really rough couple of days in Phoenix that I do not want to go into right now, but I got on a plane and went to Paris with the intention of changing my life.”

  Rox leaned on the table, her eyes widening. “Go on.”

  “I was staying in a FlyBnB on the outskirts of Paris, but I’d always wanted to go to the Buddha Bar because I used to watch Sex and the City. I remembered the episode when Carrie and those guys went to the Buddha Bar in Paris—”

  Gen asked, “The Buddha Bar?”

  “—so I went there intending to do something I’d never done before, anything I’d never done before.”

  Dree reached into the little clutch and pulled out the napkin.

  Gen and Rox reacted like Dree had flipped an eight-foot-long live shark out of her purse and thrown it on the table.

  Gen rabbit-kicked her husband while trying to stand up.

  Roxanne pointed at her and screamed, “Napkin girl!”

  Gen gabbled, “Oh my God, oh my God, you’re the girl with the napkin. I thought we’d ruined your life!”

  The three men were practically crawling over the backs of their chairs to get away from the three insane women screaming and pointing at each other around the table.

  Maxence asked, “You three know each other?”

  “No way!” Dree screamed at the two of them. “No freaking way! But you guys look different. I could’ve sworn I would have recognized you guys if I saw you again!”

  Gen had her hands up, and her head ducked. “I was seven months pregnant, and the women of my family become absolute blimps in our third trimester. I was retaining so much water that I was surprised any was left in the Atlantic Ocean. I would hope you don’t recognize me now. I’ll just take it as a compliment.”

  Rox was bobbling her head back and forth. “Yeah, maybe if I have a shot glass in my hand and drool hanging off my chin, you’ll recognize me.” She fluffed her chin-length hair. “Also, new haircut. I had longer, darker hair in Paris. And I was so wasted that night.” She gestured at Gen. “This wench was shoving booze into me because she was knocked up and couldn’t drink, so she was vicariously partying through me. And I’m a lightweight these days. Having a kid lets your liver get lazy. The next day, I was woozy about the details of that night.”

  Gen nodded. “And I had pregnancy brain. The next day, I could barely remember where we went or what we did. I crashed on the plane home. The next day, I was like, ‘Why aren’t we still in Paris? Why did we come home?’ Seriously, pregnancy brain is real.”

  Dree stuttered out, “That morning, I’d hacked off my long braids with surgical scissors, so my haircut was pretty ragged. The hairstylist put this fake bun in using handfuls of gel. I don’t know how I’m ever going to wash it all out.” She punched herself in her stomach and hurt her knuckles. “And I’m wearing cast-iron underwear under this dress.”

  Rox’s sage nod was affirming. “One usually does look different on one’s wedding day than when one is having a major life crisis and just flew halfway around the world.”

  Dree laughed. “Well, I would hope so.”

  Gen reached her arm across the table. “Let’s see the napkin.”

  Oh, jeez. Dree had crossed butt stuff off the napkin list. “I’m not sure—”

  Rox’s hand darted across the table and snagged the napkin before Dree could finish her sentence.

  “Hey!”

  Rox and Gen peered at the list and the things Dree had drawn lines through while Dree began to slink slowly under the table.

  Gen asked, “Nepal? You went to Nepal? Oh, yeah. I guess the priest mentioned that during the wedding.”

  Rox laughed. “And Monaco. She sure got to cross Monaco off of her list.”

  Gen said, “Aw, look, Rox. She crossed off Find someone to love who loves you and is worthy of your love, and hold onto them your whole life. That’s so sweet!”

  Arthur glanced over his wife’s shoulder at the napkin, raised his eyebrows, and then nodded to no one in particular.

  Rox sailed the napkin across the table back to Dree, who tucked it back into her purse.

  They talked far into that night, and then the three couples met for lunch the next day, and then they were best friends the rest of their lives.

  Three years later, Arthur, Gen, Casimir, and Roxanne were present for the baptism of Prince Nicostrato “Nico” Grimaldi as official witnesses because they weren’t Catholic. Lady Valentina Martini was listed as a godparent on the official record, as were Duc Alexandre and Duchess Georgianna Grimaldi, but everyone knew who Nico’s real godparents were.

  And three years after that, they did the same at the baptism of Princess Grace.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  To Catch A Thief

  Tristan “Twist” King

  Twist walked back to his yacht after collecting his mail from the concierge of the Monaco Yacht Club.

  The hollow thuds of his footsteps on the marina’s wooden floating sidewalks interrupted the lap of the sea on the boats and catcalls of the seagulls above. Past the end of the walkway, a superyacht was heading out to sea, the roar of its engines churning and releasing the clean salt scent of seawater into the air.

  Twist flipped through the envelopes in his hands. Just the usual stuff was in the mail that day, a wedding invitation from an old boarding school friend that Twist had confirmed by email a month ago, the new brochure from Le Rosey with campus updates, and a white cardstock mailer addressed to his legal name, Tristan Fortunato King.

  It wasn’t often that Twist saw his middle name all spelled out. At most, he usually got an F.

  Weird.

  Twist climbed over the back gate onto the stern of his yacht home and made his way to the small deck on the bow.

  Micah Shine, Blaze Robinson, and Logan Bell were lounging about, all of them recovering from hangovers earned at the wedding the night before.

  Micah was lying on a towel on the teak deck with his hat over his face. “Anything interesting?”

  “The usual.” Twist sprawled on a lounge chair and leafed through the boarding school brochure.

  Logan was sipping champagne from his coffee mug, having decided to medicate his hangover with the hair of the dog that bit him instead of coffee like the rest of them. “I have to admit, managing to coordinate Maxence’s wedding with celebrating the launch of Twist’s successful algorithm strategy and Micah’s IPO was efficient. My grandfather would be proud, that old scoundrel.”

  Twist lifted his coffee mug to the sky in a salute to Logan’s grandfather. “His way of doing business certainly was efficient.”

  “He never let minor details like international law get in his way,” Logan chuckled.

  Blaze spooned more sugar into his coffee from the tray between the deck chairs. “You could get away with doing things like that in those days. Fifty years ago, the kinds of deals he made couldn’t be traced, not that I would ever speak ill of our malefactor.”

  The four men chuckled at the nickname malefactor. Logan’s grandfather had called himself that on the few occasions the four of them had met with him.

  Logan said, “My father still insists on calling him ‘that Svengali asshole’ and won’t speak his name. He insists he has no father, and my grandfather didn’t leave him anything in the will, either.”

  Blaze stretched his arms above his head, the Mediterranean sun shining on his pale skin. “Who did he leave his money to then? I mean, if he could get plastered one night and write checks to each one of us for that kind of money
, there must’ve been more of it, right?”

  Logan snorted. “Yeah, there was a lot more of it. After his diagnosis, he spent a year trying to spend it all. I happened to meet his accountant over at his apartment on Fifth Avenue and expressed my concern about the rate he was spending it. Pindar laughed in my face and said that he wasn’t even coming close to spending the interest and rents. He said there was no way my grandfather could spend his fortune in a thousand years, even if the money quit coming in.”

  Micah asked, his voice muffled from under his hat, “Logan, did you ever tell your father you accepted your grandfather’s money?”

  Twist sat back in his chair. He wouldn’t have asked that.

  Logan shook his head, his eyes wide. “If I’d ever let on that I’d taken the old man’s money, my father would have disowned me as fast as his father disowned him.”

  Twist stared into the darkness of his coffee. “Then your father never knew about your grandfather’s lessons in capitalism he taught us, either?”

  Logan cracked up at that, and Twist suspected that he wasn’t just hung over but still a little drunk. “No, those are our little secret, too. Jesus, those were bizarre, right? All those late-night video chats when he would ramble for hours about how Marc Rich made his money trading oil futures with the ayatollah and violating US sanctions against Tehran, and Guo Wengui might have bribed Chinese government officials to buy shares in Minzu Securities below market value so he could control it. His story about Jay Gould kidnapping a financier to force him to invest in his railroad stocks was legendary. And William Randolph Hearst was such a criminal that he was the main character in a movie and the villain in a Broadway musical.”

  Twist said, “I’m not sure if he was trying to make us capitalists or revolutionaries.”

  Micah lifted his hat and looked at them all. The sunlight shone on his odd, opalescent eyes, drowning out the gray and bringing out the blue and electric green glitter. “I think he was trying to prepare us for the competition once we graduated from Le Rosey.”