Order (A Romantic Suspense Royal Billionaire Novel)

by Blair Babylon

  “About God?”

  “About the Church, but it’s an obscure theology that is probably only of interest to Jesuits studying the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxis.”

  “Maybe you should tell me that. Sounds like it would put me straight to sleep.”

  “Or, I can tell you about my uncle, Prince Jules the Malicious of Monagasquay.”

  Dree snuggled farther down into her sleeping bag in the dark because cold air leaked down her neck. As they had been ascending in elevation to more distant villages, the temperature had dropped, especially at night. “Do you really call him that?”

  “We will as soon as I get back to a cellular signal and can text people. I have some cousins that are going to love that. No, Prince Jules the Malicious is the fourth son of my grandfather, Prince Rainier III. The current prince is his oldest son, Rainier IV, but he didn’t father any legitimate children. Thus, the next person in line would’ve been my father, but he died when my brother and I were teenagers. So after that, it’s my older brother Pierre, then me, then two of my cousins, and then Prince Jules.”

  Dree said, “Wait, I thought there was that Council of Nobles thing, and there was an election that isn’t an election and stuff.”

  “Excellent memory, but previously, the Council has always offered the throne to the next person in the theoretical line of succession. That could change, of course, and my brother worried that it might. Like I said, he’s definitely a psychopath, though he would have ordered the assassination of any psychologist who’d made that diagnosis. Finally, somehow, he figured out that he had screwed over enough people on the Council that they might want revenge. The last few years, he’s been engaging in damage control, so I think they’re going to give it to him. But if he hadn’t done that, or if something had happened to Pierre, me, and my two cousins, Jules would have been the next person in line. The Council probably would’ve offered it to him, even though he’s more psychopathic and delights even more in cruelty and evil than my brother. He is, however, better at politics with the other nobles than Pierre is.”

  “Well, if Pierre is going to be the prince, at least you know Prince Jules the Malicious is never going to get the throne.”

  “I hope not. It would be bad for the world if he did, not just Monagasquay. He’s a racist. I would call him a fascist, except that the principality is essentially a fascist dictatorship, in that all power does rest with the sovereign prince. Monagasquay is barely a constitutional monarchy. For the last couple of centuries, the princes who have ruled have been relatively benevolent, so no one has made an effort to change the fact that a hereditary sovereign rules with an iron hand. Plus, everyone likes the lack of income tax.”

  “No income tax?” Dree asked as her body relaxed in the warmth of her mummy bag. “How the heck do y’all get away with that?”

  “That casino that I mentioned brings in all the country’s revenue. Monegasque citizens are not allowed to go in and gamble. We only take money from other people because the house always wins. Wealthy Monegasques are expected to contribute in significant ways, such as sponsoring the ballet or Grand Prix race. Plus, there’s tourism and investments.”

  Dree laughed. “So, tell me the story about Prince Jules the Malicious.”

  “Prince Jules the Malicious is so awful that he got fired from one of the government ministry positions in Monagasquay. It’s difficult to get fired from whatever government job you want if you’re in the royal family. It was thought to be impossible before Jules managed it.”

  Dree listened from her warm spot, snuggled in her sleeping bag. “What did he do?”

  Her voice sounded a little too gleeful, even in her own ears. But hey, if Maxence was spinning these stories and talking to her, she’d go with it. It was kind of like being read a bedtime story and kind of like flirting with a scorching guy who was nearly naked and only inches away.

  Maxence said, “Jules started revoking citizenships for people who had been naturalized as Monegasque citizens unless they were billionaires. He threw dozens of people who owned small restaurants and shops or worked in the casino or hotels out of the country, the ones who keep Monagasquay going. There are fewer than forty thousand Monegasque citizens, so when you throw out a couple hundred people, that’s a lot of people we lost within two years. And the worst thing is that there definitely was a racial component. Jules was throwing out people who had immigrated to Monagasquay and worked hard to become citizens and build a life there, and he just stamped some paperwork and destroyed their lives.”

  “That’s reprehensible,” Dree said.

  “It’s malicious. He blackmailed the billionaires who had immigrated and been naturalized as citizens. He forced them to pay him exorbitant bribes or else he would revoke their citizenship, which would have meant that they would have had to go back to their previous countries and pay all those years of income tax in arrears, plus penalties. It would have financially devastated them, and they knew it. And he knew it. Thus, he demanded bribes, and they paid. Eventually, a few years ago, he tried to blackmail a French woman who was the head of a Paris fashion house, but she had been good friends with Prince Rainier the Third’s wife before she passed away. She told him and brought him proof of what Jules had been doing. Prince Rainier was furious. I mean, his rage against Prince Jules has become a legend in our family. Nobody is exactly sure what happened in the throne room that day, but there was blood on the floor, and Prince Jules needed minor reconstructive surgery afterward.”

  Dree couldn’t help herself and giggled at the thought of royal princes duking it out in a playground scrap. She clapped her hand over her mouth, lest Father Booker and the other guys outside hear her and think that something was going on that wasn’t.

  Not that she didn’t want it to, but he had made vows.

  She said, “It’s ridiculous how much I love these stories about Monagasquay that you come up with.”

  Maxence’s baritone chuckle in the dark sounded too much like any one of the times when he’d taken her to the panting edge of an orgasm and then deliberately stopped, which was infuriating and sexy as hell at the same time. It had been like he was so secure in his ability to make her come that he could waste all the opportunities he wanted to.

  It was a good thing her ex-boyfriend had never tried something like that. He’d maybe had a five percent success rate, and if he’d have wasted any of those, she might’ve slugged him.

  Maxence, though, was a different story. His confidence in his prowess was deserved, which made the revelation that he wanted to be a priest all the more unbelievable.

  Absolutely unbelievable.

  Just as she was working up the courage to ask Max again why he wanted to devote himself so completely to the Church that he would try to give up something he was obviously incapable of letting go, his breathing smoothed to the deep, even rhythm of sleep.

  Well, Dree would just have to ask him the next time she got her courage up.

  Which meant never.

  Chapter Nine

  The Importance of Milk

  Maxence

  Maxence sat on a rough-hewn kitchen table in a house in a hill village of Nepal, holding a small child in his arms while Dree examined the child’s teeth. She was frowning slightly, just a tightening of the smooth skin between her blond eyebrows, as she peered into the boy’s mouth.

  Dree worked harder and longer hours in each village they rode into. She was kind to everyone and smiled gently at them, tended to their needs quietly, and cried when she thought no one was looking.

  But Maxence was always looking.

  The child sitting on his legs was terribly light, much too light for his age, and profoundly unhealthy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this child smelled. His breath was sulfurous, and foul body odor wafted from his clothes every time he moved.

  The odd thing was that he didn’t appear dirty or oily at all. He looked recently bathed, and yet he reeked.

  The child’s mother was young, m
aybe still a teenager, and thin but not as sickly as the child. Three other women and one man surrounded the mother, petting her and discussing the child and the doctor with her. Batsa had said they were cousins, a sister, and her mother-in-law.

  Again, Maxence considered the effect on this tight-knit community of outsiders walking in, announcing they would build a thing that the community could not understand, and then leaving them without the information and skills to use or maintain it. This project was so ill-planned, and he needed to bring it to a halt.

  The mother and other family members had been struggling to hold the child, who was a willful little guy, so Max had stepped in. The child watched him from under his drooping eyelids, a baleful and suffering stare. Much of the child’s petulance was probably because he was sick, but kids always behave better for people who aren’t their parents.

  Dree glanced up at Max, her blue eyes worried, and turned the child’s head to look in his ears. Evidently, the child’s ears were normal because she rapidly returned to holding the child’s hand and gently rotating the boy’s arms to inspect his skin.

  Purplish bruises blossomed under the child’s mahogany skin, concentrated near the joints. The child flinched when Dree barely prodded him, and a thin film of blood smeared the fingertip of her protective glove. Her bright blue eyes became more worried.

  She asked Batsa, who was sitting in a chair beside the table, “How’s his appetite?”

  Batsa relayed the question to the mother and then came back with the answer, “He is very pious and will not eat milk or yogurt because it comes from a cow, which is sacred, and he will not eat yak yogurt or milk because they are too much like a cow’s. The family is vegetarian, and he eats all the subjis, which are cooked vegetables. His mother believes he will be a holy man.”

  “Eating both lentil and bread or rice?”

  Quick chat. “Yes.”

  “So, he’s getting all the amino acids, at least in theory.” Dree asked, “Does he eat eggs?”

  A quick chat in the Nepali language, and Batsa said, “She feeds him three eggs a week for strength, but he will not grow stronger.”

  “It’s definitely not protein deficiency,” Dree muttered under her breath. And louder, “Does he eat the egg yolks?”

  Batsa conferred. “Yes, he eats the yellow parts very much. She gives hers to him.”

  “Probably not fats or cobalamin.” Dree looked up at Max. “I thought it was going to be a lack of vitamin B12, but if he’s eating eggs, then it’s probably not. Any ideas?”

  Maxence shook his head. “Absorption? Maybe celiac disease?”

  “His stomach isn’t distended, though.” Dree asked Batsa, “How about diarrhea?”

  Batsa conferred and replied, “She says yes, for a month now.”

  Dree blinked and nodded. “Okay, then. Maybe it’s celiac or some other malabsorption problem.” She turned to Batsa. “Tell the mother not to feed him any wheat, wheat flour, rye, or barley. No more bread for him. Get him rice, and make sure she doesn’t put flour in anything that he eats. I don’t know if that’s it, but at least it’s something.”

  Batsa relayed the information to the child’s family, who seemed very upset at first that their child would not be able to eat rotis or naan and other bread. After a few more minutes of explanation, the family seemed to get it.

  The family thanked Dree and the two guys profusely, of course, as always. The male cousin who had arrived with them gathered the fussing, very ill child in his arms and carried him out of the house.

  Dree shook her head. “The pinpoint bleeding around his hair follicles, the bruising, and the joint swelling just doesn’t look like celiac disease, but I don’t know what it is. Celiac disease can look like almost anything, though.”

  Max agreed with her. “It doesn’t look like other vitamin deficiency diseases like beriberi or pellagra, which I’ve seen in children when working in remote villages in Western Africa. His hair was brittle. It was uneven and didn’t look like it had been cut, just broken.”

  Dree sighed. “I’m not a doctor. I’m just doing my best. I’ve got thirty more patients to see, and the sun goes down in three hours. I’ll have to put him in the back of my mind while I try to help these other people.”

  Maxence watched Dree and helped where he could as she whipped through the next couple dozen cases. Many of them were easy. Some needed a few sutures. Others needed reassurance that it wasn’t anything serious. A man needed one of Dree’s precious tetanus vaccines that she slept with to keep them from freezing, which would inactivate them.

  Dree was fluttering around her last few patients, dressing a wound on a little boy and explaining to a different young mother through Batsa that cradle cap is not life-threatening and just to scrub it off. She passed by Maxence and whispered, “I still can’t figure out what that boy had.”

  He shrugged. “I haven’t seen anything like it.”

  “Right,” she said. “Me, either. It didn’t look infectious. There were skin discolorations, but it wasn’t a rash. There wasn’t a wound that it stemmed from. It didn’t look like a parasite or a bacteria or a virus. A month is too long for most infectious diseases to slowly progress unless it was leprosy or tuberculosis, which it wasn’t. This was disseminated and progressive and weird.”

  “Why were you looking in his mouth?” Maxence asked.

  “His gums were puffy and swollen. His teeth were loose. He was just a little boy, and his adult front teeth shouldn’t have been loose at all. It wasn’t like he’d gotten hit or something, though. All his teeth were the same degree of loose.”

  “It’s odd,” Max said. He felt like he should know what this was.

  Dree shook her head and cared for her other patients, but Max could see she was fretting about the little boy.

  As soon as they closed the door on her clinic and began to pack up the supplies for the motorcycle ride back out to the campsite, Dree said, “It’s got to be something. He was around six years old. He wouldn’t have lived this long if he had some inborn error of metabolism. I mean, they’re all skinny, but they don’t seem malnourished like some other villages we’ve seen.” She ran her hand down the side of her waist and over her hip, emphasizing her hourglass figure. “I wouldn’t call any of the people here curvy, though.”

  Maxence’s mouth had gone dry, and he stared down at his motorcycle boots because his hands wanted to follow hers over her lush body. “No, I wouldn’t call any of these villagers curvy.”

  When he looked up, Dree was staring at him. “What’d you say?”

  Maxence muttered, “I just said I didn’t think that anyone here has your curves.”

  “No,” she said. “Scurvy. You said scurvy. Oh my word, that’s it. I would never have thought that that little boy might have scurvy. An eighteenth-century British sailor trying to sail to the Maldives would get scurvy, not a little boy, now. But that’s it. It explains the gums, and the loose teeth, and the bleeding under the skin and into his joints. He needs vitamin C. If we give him some vitamin C, he’ll be fine in a week.”

  “I’ve read about it in history books, but never seen it before.” Max sighed. “And that explains the child’s abominable body odor and breath. Scurvy causes both as the body rots away from the inside, out.”

  Dree nodded, her eyes wide. “I know, right? That poor kid. That poor mom.”

  Maxence had thought it might be a symptom, and it was.

  She was already digging through their supplies, discarding multivitamins and other supplements until she found packages of drink mixes with large doses of vitamin C. She held them up. “The sisters thought of everything. I thought they threw these in so we’d have something to put in our water bottles for taste. We have vitamin C.”

  “Excellent,” Maxence said, smiling. She was just so adorable when her eyes flashed with excitement like that.

  One of her eyebrows dipped. “But why would he be so affected when none of the other kids are?”

  Batsa had been helpin
g them pack up, and he said, “Vitamin C is found in fresh fruits and greens.”

  “Right,” Dree said, but her voice was low like she already knew that.

  Batsa continued, “No fresh food has grown around here for two months. None of the kids have been eating anything fresh since early October. Why was this kid the only one to get scurvy?”

  Dree was scooping their supplies into their backpacks so they could leave. “Most other mammals, like cows and pigs and dogs, make vitamin C in their bodies. Humans and primates are one of the very few animals that don’t make vitamin C and have to get it from our food. That’s why it’s an essential vitamin, because we can’t build it.”

  “It’s heat-inactivated,” Max said, musing. “She said he was eating cooked food, but not milk.”

  “—Right,” Dree said, thinking about it. “The mother said that he wasn’t drinking milk. But milk doesn’t have vitamin C—” She snapped her fingers. “American milk doesn’t have vitamin C because it’s pasteurized. These guys are drinking raw milk, straight from the ewe, um, the cow or yak. Raw milk has vitamin C in it because other animals make it, and especially powdered milk does. If all the other kids are drinking milk or eating yogurt and this kid isn’t, then that explains it.”

  Maxence zipped the backpacks up and slung one over each arm. “Batsa, do you know where that kid lives?”

  Batsa hoisted a heavy cardboard box and balanced it on his shoulder. “I can talk to people and find out.”

  With Batsa engaging every person they saw, it took only a few minutes for them to figure out which house the little boy lived in. Everyone knew how sickly he was and had been praying their kids didn’t get whatever he had.

  At the house, Batsa translated as Dree emphasized that the little boy must start drinking milk, especially powdered milk from the tiny store but also fresh milk. They mixed the vitamin C powder into water, and luckily, it made a refreshing orange drink that the boy guzzled right down.