At Midnight

by Blair Babylon

  The Russian guards standing on either side of the door glanced at each other but didn’t say anything.

  After the brouhaha when Anaïs, Océane, and the other women had visited all at once, the girls had been more circumspect, coming over to the house singly or no more than two at a time to chat and gossip. It was a relief to have people to talk to, and Flicka breezed through those days with extra energy.

  However, having them over irritated Valerian and Sophie, both of whom had been angry as hell for days about it the first time. Every new visit reminded them that Flicka had somehow made contact with the outside world, and people knew she was there.

  That knowledge may have already saved her and Alina’s lives.

  Flicka had hidden that burner cell phone extra well because it was, quite literally, her ace in the hole. At some point, it might become more dangerous for her not to call Wulfram than to call him.

  Plus, Flicka needed people to talk to. She was going stir crazy.

  But the way Sophie had said that Flicka had a visitor, and she should talk to him, didn’t sound like one of the Mirabaud girls had shown up for tea and cookies.

  “Who is it?” Flicka asked her.

  Sophie’s quick glance looked guilty. “I didn’t get his name. He said he has a message for you from Pierre Grimaldi. He seems like a nice young man, so very handsome, and so very—” she trailed off like she was trying to dream the words, “—attractive.”

  Oh.

  Flicka staggered to her feet and ran through the hallway to peer over the railing at her visitor standing in the foyer downstairs.

  For a moment, with the black-clad man in silhouette against the fog and stormy lake, Flicka thought everything looked black and white.

  The tall, slim man wore a dark suit, and he was looking at the gray expanse of Lake Geneva beyond the towering windows of the house’s rear wall. His black hair curled over his collar like he needed a haircut.

  Even from above and far away, even with his back to her, she knew who he was, and her heart beat faster.

  It made sense, when she thought about it.

  Pierre Grimaldi—her ex-husband, first in line to inherit the throne of Monaco after his uncle, Prince Rainer the Fourth, someday abdicated or passed away—needed to send a message to her.

  Would he come in person?

  No. Assuming Raphael wasn’t around to beat the crap out of him, the last time Flicka had seen that jackass Pierre, she’d given him a black eye and had nearly broken his arm because—

  She swallowed hard.

  —because he’d raped her.

  She might have ransacked the house for firearms and shot him from the high-ground vantage on the second-story balcony. She certainly would have told him to go to Hell and wouldn’t have listened to a damned word he said.

  So he wouldn’t have come himself.

  Would Pierre have sent the only man he trusted, his Head of Security, Quentin Sault?

  No. Quentin had dragged Flicka into Pierre’s bedroom and locked the doors. Flicka might have tried to shoot him from the balcony, too, and again, she would have told him to go to Hell and keep going there until he ended up in the lake of fire at the bottom.

  If the Prince of Monaco wanted to send Flicka a message, who would he send that she would listen to and might be able to convince her to go back to Monaco?

  Someone as royal as he was.

  Someone she loved and who loved her, in his own way.

  Someone who held a darkness in him that drew everyone in, who stole the breath of everyone who looked at him, and who was a gravitational force no one could resist.

  Flicka hung over the balcony and yelled, “Maxence!”

  He turned, and because the sun outside was hidden by cool fog, his smile lit the room. “Flicka!”

  She ran down the long, curving staircase, her hand skimming the bannister, and threw herself into his arms.

  He laughed and hugged her.

  When she wrapped her arms around Maxence—Pierre’s younger brother and thus second in line for the princely throne of Monaco—the fabric of the suit seemed to collapse. His waist was too thin.

  She looked up at his face, and even though he was smiling, he was gaunt.

  Flicka didn’t disengage herself but called over her shoulder, “Hey, Kyllikki! Can we get some scones and cookies and tea?”

  “Yes, miss,” the housekeeper called back. Flicka had gotten them talking to her in the past few weeks because that silent-service thing was weird. She needed human voices around her. “Do you want just tea or—”

  “Just tea,” Flicka told her. “In the blue sitting room.”

  “Coming right up.” Kyllikki trotted toward the kitchen.

  She hugged Maxence more tightly, so glad to see someone, anyone, from real, normal life that she could not help herself.

  Maxence rubbed her shoulder with one hand. “If I would’ve known you would be this glad to see me, I would’ve come sooner.”

  She whispered in his ear, “Does Pierre know where I am?”

  He murmured near her shoulder, “Anaïs Mirabaud told my cousin Marie-Therese that she’d seen you or implied it at some point. Marie-Therese called Pierre. It was merely a matter of asking the right people at that point.”

  Of course, Marie-Therese Grimaldi had run straight to Pierre. She always was a little suck-up.

  Jeez, Flicka had wanted the word to get out to her friends or maybe to the public, but basically to everyone except Pierre.

  Maxence whispered, “Is there a problem?”

  Flicka looked up at the balcony, where Sophie had come out and was holding Alina’s hand.

  The four Russian guards—two from inside the suite and two from outside—strode into view behind Sophie.

  Four new guys, all wearing black suits with odd bulges under their armpits, stepped forward from where they had been standing at the corners of the room. One nodded to Maxence, while the others hovered their hands near their weapons and watched the Russian guys on the balcony for any slight twitch.

  The man who was second in line to Monaco’s throne always traveled with an armed security detail.

  Flicka said to Maxence, “No. There’s no problem.”

  “Should I get you out of here right now?” he whispered.

  Alina was still upstairs. There was no way Max’s men could fight their way past the Russian brutes before one of them put a bullet in the child’s head or snapped her neck. “No.”

  She relaxed her arms, and his hands slid around her waist as she stepped back.

  If things had been just a little different, if they had been slightly different people, she might have ended up with Maxence, she knew.

  They both knew it.

  From upstairs, Alina called, “Flicka-mama?”

  Maxence glanced at the balcony above them, and his hands dropped away from Flicka. He asked her, “And who’s this?”

  Alina let go of Sophie’s hand and bobbled down the stairs, calling, “Flicka-mama?”

  “That’s a long story,” Flicka told him.

  Alina peered up at Maxence from his feet, and her blond, baby hair floated in even the smallest breezes that infiltrated the house. “Bonjour.”

  Maxence crouched and spread his hands a little, inviting her but not grabbing. “Bonjour, je m’appelle Frère Maxence.”

  Flicka said, “Her English is better than her French.”

  “Oh? Then hello, little one. Who are you?”

  “Alina,” the toddler said.

  “What a pretty name, Alina,” Maxence said, smiling at her.

  Alina’s eyes were wide, and she stepped forward into Maxence’s arms and hugged him, holding onto his neck.

  Maxence closed his eyes and rested his cheek against the top of her head for a minute.

  Even from where Flicka was standing, she saw Alina’s arms tighten around his neck, holding on.

  Even the toddler felt Maxence’s—whatever it was. Interesting.

  Maxence waited a beat and
then set the baby back from himself, smiling.

  As he looked down at her, his expression changed.

  His gaze went from the open and guileless expression of a man who obviously liked little kids, the kind who would make an excellent father someday, to an examining look, like he was calculating something and was suddenly more interested in this particular child.

  As Alina gazed up at him with her pale green eyes and heart-shaped face, Maxence looked quickly from the child to Flicka, his eyes widening in shock. “Flicka?”

  “What?” she asked, watching him because you always watch guys, just to make sure everything’s okay, even though Max was just about the last guy in the world she would have worried about with little kids.

  “Is Alina—” he asked, gesturing between the child and Flicka. “Is she—yours?”

  It took her a beat to figure out what he meant. “Oh! No. I mean, she’s not mine.”

  From where he crouched, he looked from Alina’s pale green eyes, porcelain skin, and silvery blond hair to Flicka again. “If you say so.”

  “Really! I’m serious. Jesus—” She almost said something that she probably shouldn’t say around a guy who was studying to become a Jesuit priest. “She’s not my daughter. I don’t have any kids. I’m just babysitting her.”

  Maxence stood up and laughed so hard that he bent over and grabbed his knees. “Now I know you’re lying. You, babysitting?”

  “She’s a friend of mine’s kid.” Flicka wracked her brain, trying to come up with reasons to explain why the royal princess was babysitting. None sufficed. “It’s complicated.”

  “I’ve got to hear this.”

  Because there is evidently a God in Heaven and He heard Flicka’s frantic prayers that day, Kyllikki called out as she wheeled a tray bearing a silver tea service through the foyer, “Ma’am? You said the blue sitting room?”

  “Yes, Kyllikki!” Flicka grabbed Alina’s hand and walked after the housekeeper. “Come on, Max. You look like you could use a good cup of tea. Alina, want a cookie?”

  The toddler skipped ahead of them, following the silver tea service cart and the housekeeper because she knew where the good stuff was.

  Maxence chuckled all the way to the sitting room where he accepted a cup of tea and thanked the housekeeper. “Alina is around two?”

  “She’s not two yet,” Flicka said, picking up a chocolate-coated cookie. “Alina, you can have three cookies. Go eat them with Grand-maman.”

  The toddler carefully counted out three cookies, looking up at Flicka to check in that she was doing it correctly, and then she scurried out of the room with her stash.

  Maxence swallowed the cookie he’d been chewing on. “I do remember, right after you graduated from college, that you got a little—” Flicka could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought fast for a word that would not lead to her decking him, “—softer for a few months. You were absolutely beautiful, as I remember, as always, but you looked more—” another quick glance at her, “—voluptuous. You know you could tell me anything, and you know that I can keep a secret from absolutely anyone.”

  “Max!” The stress of the last few months had been overwhelming, and that was why Flicka snapped in half. “I fell in love with my bodyguard and had an affair with him. When he dumped me, I drowned my sorrows in sticky toffee pudding and cheesecake for a few months. I only gained twenty pounds, dammit. I was out in public the whole time. I was certainly not pregnant, ever. Meanwhile, my bodyguard went off and shagged a woman who looked freakishly like me for some odd psychological reason, and Alina was born.”

  Max sipped the tea, obviously digesting the information. “And the bodyguard is here?”

  “Of course. I didn’t steal the man’s child.” She chomped down on the cookie because the tea was not Sophie’s special brew.

  Maxence looked around the parlor, surveying the luxurious silk curtains draping the window and the ornate moulding around the ceiling. “Nice house, for a bodyguard. I think you’re overpaying him.”

  “You know whose house this is.”

  “Yes, I do, though I’m not sure how that fits together. And after what you’ve said, I’m not sure what to think at all. And this was, when, exactly?”

  He was staring into his teacup as he asked, but Flicka knew what he was really asking.

  She leaned over and lifted his hand, holding his fingers. “I started seeing my bodyguard about two years after you and I broke up, when I was twenty. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t anyone else, Maxence.”

  “Ah, well. Good to know.” He squeezed her fingers and released them. “And now you’re looking after his child. How civilized of you.”

  “Yeah, well, I kind of owe him. After Pierre raped me and beat me up, Raphael hid me and kept me safe until I could divorce Pierre.”

  Maxence had been raising the cup to his lips to sip his tea, but he reversed its course and set the cup back in its saucer he held in his other hand. He gently placed the cup and saucer on the table beside them and turned to Flicka, looking her straight in the eyes with his hands clasped in front of him and leaning toward her. “I beg your pardon?”

  Flicka sighed. “I didn’t know what else to do. You weren’t even at Wulfram’s wedding, so you can’t say that I should have come to you.”

  “No, the part where you said Pierre raped you? Did I hear that correctly? And beat you?”

  “Yeah. That happened.”

  “I’ll kill him.” His voice was lower, far more dangerous than she had ever heard it.

  “Maxence, no.”

  He sprang to his feet and paced, running his hand through his silky, black curls. “I mean it. I will slit the bastard’s throat.”

  “Max—”

  “I knew he was a horrible person. I knew he was a goddamn asshole. But for the love of God, I never thought he would do such a thing!”

  “I was as shocked as anyone else.”

  “Was he violent?” Max asked, his dark eyes begging her. “Did he hurt you?”

  “I don’t want to discuss this.”

  “Were there bruises?”

  Flicka wished she hadn’t blurted it out at all. This was why princesses were trained to shut the hell up. “Yes. A lot of bruises.”

  “I will kill him.”

  That deep growl was more malevolent than any shouting could have been from him. “Max, please. You’re scaring me.”

  He stepped backward like someone had pushed him. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop right now. It was a shock. I don’t want to scare you. After this, after you trusted me enough to say this, I don’t want to scare you.” He braced his hands on his knees, leaning over like he’d been gut-punched. “But I am going to kill that bastard.”

  “That might look bad, Maxence,” she said.

  “I don’t care.”

  “I know you’re mad and you’re just exaggerating, but—”

  He looked up, and his eyes held black anger. “I’m not exaggerating.”

  She had to stop this. She’d never seen Maxence so angry before, and she’d seen him pretty angry a few times. “People will say you killed him because you wanted to be the Prince of Monaco.”

  He shook his head and flicked a hand in the air, dismissing the thought. “Everyone knows I don’t want it and wouldn’t accept it.”

  “Then Alexandre would kill you because he sure as heck doesn’t want to be the prince. We all know how this ends, in circles and chaos.”

  Maxence straightened. “That bastard recruited me to convince you to go back to him. I was here to make you a proposition for him after he did that to you.”

  “You are bloody good at convincing people to do things.”

  He flinched, and he sighed deeply. “Yeah, I know, and he knows it, too.”

  “So, what’s the proposition?” she asked, steeling herself.

  “After he did that? I’ll go back and tell him to f—” He shook himself, perhaps rephrasing what he had been going to say. “I’ll tell him you said no.”

>   “Just tell me what he said.”

  Maxence walked back over to the couch and sat beside her, angled in so that their knees were touching. His brows were lowered like his concern was for her. “I don’t want to do this.”

  “Tell me. I want to know what I’m dealing with.”

  Maxence took a deep breath and stared at their knees, not making eye contact with her. His voice droned in a flat monotone. “He said that he is sorry. He apologizes for everything, especially for ‘that night,’ as he called it, and for trying to use his military outside of the courthouse to force you to return to Monaco. He apologizes. He takes personal responsibility for all decisions. He wanted me to tell you that if you would agree to make an appearance of coming back to him, he would give you anything you wanted. He needs a small, civil wedding ceremony and some perfunctory pictures, just for people who might say the divorce was valid.”

  “He’s said all that before,” Flicka said.

  Maxence nodded. “He would need you to make several public appearances by his side per year, a limited and negotiable number. One dance at the Winter Ball. Other than that, you’ll have your own causes, your own charities, your own appointments and calendar. You would have a separate apartment in the palace. You can have other homes, elsewhere, where you could spend up to six months per year. He’ll release everything of yours back to you and give you anything you want, anything at all.”

  Flicka nodded. “He’s said all that, too.”

  “There’s more,” Max said, but he didn’t look up at her. His dark curls fell around his face, curtaining his gaze.

  “Of course, there is,” she muttered.

  “He needs heirs, two of them. An heir and a spare, because there always needs to be a useless spare hanging around, waiting in case the heir should die.” Maxence’s tone was a little dry when he said that. “He wouldn’t touch you. He wouldn’t ask that of you. He said it could be done medically. Now I know why he said it.”

  “Two children.” Her brain processed the words, but the thoughts seemed to bounce off her mind. Such a concept couldn’t be real. “He wants me to get pregnant and produce two children for him.”

  Maxence said, “You would have primary custody of them, if you wanted. He would need to see them. There would need to be pictures and official portraits with all of you. If you don’t want primary custody, you can switch that arrangement. They would need to live primarily in Monaco, at least until they were old enough to matriculate to Le Rosey school at the age of five.”