Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5)

by Blair Babylon

  “Such hyperbole, Uncle Jules. The Parlement français would send a registered letter to annex us, not tanks.”

  “Let’s make sure it doesn’t come to that. Once the French National Assembly begins delving into our treaties with them and they get their claws into Monaco, they might not let go.”

  Maxence was careful not to roll his eyes, but he kept his gaze level. “I am not concerned that France would commit an act of war to take over less than two square kilometers. We have too many wealthy citizens who enjoy our lack of income tax. We would not want for friends in the World Court.”

  Jules bounded out of his chair like a portly French bulldog with a sudden case of the zoomies. “I leave it to your discretion, Prince Maxence, but don’t wait too long to call a meeting of the Crown Council. Some might find it suspicious, like you’re attempting to hold onto unelected power longer than was right. You may not want people’s votes, but it seems that you do want your influence felt.”

  Maxence allowed himself to smile benignly as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him.

  “So, it is settled then. You and Marie-Therese will cohost the Sea Change Gala.”

  “It appears I have been conscripted,” Max said.

  Jules inclined slightly from the waist. “I’ll take my leave then. Thank you for a pleasant conversation, Prince Maxence.” He straightened and turned his head to look at Dree. “And it was a pleasure to see the lovely Miss Andrea Clark again, too.”

  Maxence did not allow his expression to change and shook Jules’s hand before he left, even though Max’s blood had become a rushing river of ice slush through his body.

  When Jules had left the room, Dree looked up at Max, her blue eyes laughing. “Ahn-DRAY-uh. Can’t anybody pronounce my name properly in this place?”

  Maxence nodded, preoccupied.

  She said, “And I can’t believe you’re taking your cousin to the prom.”

  Jules’s entire visit had been a pretense for that one moment when Jules revealed that he had information about Dree, which meant that he knew she was worthy of gathering information about. Saying her name had been a direct threat. His uncle Jules was a venomous snake coiled inside a deceptively harmless-appearing garden gnome, waiting for a soft, fleshy hand to pick it up. “Dree, I’m going to have to ask you to be more careful. I’m worried because Jules knows you’re important to me.”

  She smiled. “I’m important to you, huh?”

  He met her eyes. “You know you are, and I need you to be careful when you leave the palace.”

  Dree shrugged. “I don’t go that many places. When I do, it’s with Chiara and the other girls from below stairs. I’m in a crowd, just another anonymous girlie in a group of girlies.”

  He considered whether he should task a security detail for her, but he didn’t trust his security team, either. Plus, surrounding her with bodyguards would affirm her importance.

  Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t.

  “I’m careful,” she told him. “I promise.”

  Max nodded. “Good.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Pigeon Tunnel

  Maxence

  A few days later, Maxence and Dree were working in his office. She was scribbling nonsensical notes while he subtly interrogated his relatives about who they would consider a suitable candidate for the throne of Monaco.

  The succession was vitally important.

  The future of Monaco and the welfare of its citizens were at stake. His family was responsible for these people’s lives and well-being.

  His concern became intense focus, and his words acquired force when he spoke to Crown Council members about their votes in the next council meeting during their appointments.

  He knew he was doing it, but he couldn’t stop.

  With persuasion, one of his uncles decided that straying from the customary line of succession was a splendid idea, and he assured Maxence that he’d cast his vote with Max’s coalition.

  Another one of his cousins started nodding along with Max’s ideas and agreed with Maxence about everything, absolutely everything.

  Max needed to dial it back a little.

  But he was closing in on a majority of the votes. His notes assured it.

  If only his relatives would stay persuaded and elect a moral, effective sovereign.

  He’d met with nearly half of the Council’s members. With Alexandre’s voting bloc, he was confident he could elect whoever was best.

  Lady Valentina Martini still hadn’t arranged a meeting with him, though. Max had seen her across the room at an event he’d been obligated to attend a few nights before, but she’d managed to dodge him. Perhaps because he was the new prince in town, thick crowds had thronged Maxence. Every time he’d tried to move toward Lady Valentina, he was intercepted and hadn’t managed to reach her before she’d retired for the evening. She was an elegant woman, her golden hair laced with silver, Her father had been a Norwegian prince, a superfluous fourth son of their king.

  Most of Max’s other appointments that day were mere business or diplomacy. Maxence didn’t mind all the little meetings that he knew drove other people simply batty. He liked people, and he wanted to talk. The minutiae of Monaco interested him.

  Max’s mind was an empty well that demanded water. Debating other Jesuit scholars during his Ph.D. had been one of the most fulfilling times of his life. Discussing policy crackled in his brain the same way.

  One meeting bled into another, into another, and another.

  Maxence learned about the mechanisms that kept Monaco humming.

  But that afternoon, in an odd coincidence, three meetings in a row canceled. None of them related to the election, so there was nothing to get paranoid about.

  Ergo, Maxence’s whole afternoon had become unscheduled.

  He asked Dree, “Is there something in Monaco you’d like to see?”

  Dree thought about it, tapping one scarlet-tipped fingernail against her chin. His shirt rubbed raw lines on his back. “I’d like to see y’all’s James Bond casino.”

  Max checked his watch, which read two-twenty. “It’s only just opened for gaming. Very few people go in the afternoons. Hardly any of the tables will be open. We could go tonight.”

  She shook her head, bouncing her soft curls. “I don’t want to gamble. I’ve never gambled in my life. I just want to see it.”

  A bad idea came to Max, but it was a very common bad idea of his, and he was pretty good at it. “Let’s see if we can duck out of the palace and just walk over by ourselves. I’m sure security won’t mind if we’re out of bounds for a short time. It’s only a twenty-minute walk.”

  Part of getting away with things is looking like you’re not getting away with things, and so Maxence and Dree ambled out of his office with him striding ahead and dictating notes to her, which she dutifully transcribed onto a tablet she held in her arms as she struggled to keep up. He loved to watch when she teetered on her high heels like a bobbly little doll.

  The pale gray dress she wore clung to her sumptuous curves, her wasp-waist bending as her hips swung.

  Gorgeous, but conspicuous.

  They breezed through the palace, the security guys trailing them at a discreet distance.

  Max sped up as they rounded corners, putting distance between them.

  The State Apartments were just ahead and open to the public. Crowds thronged the formal halls and throne room.

  Maxence grabbed Dree’s hand and took a quick turn outside and onto the loggia. They trotted along the covered walkway to the curving double staircase leading down to the courtyard and pattered down the stairs. With a quick sprint over the cobblestones, they pressed the wrong way through the throng queuing to go upstairs.

  A grin spread over Max’s face. That dodge always worked.

  When they were under the stone arch that led outside the castle, Maxence picked his blue pocket square out and yanked his black suit jacket off his arms, revealing his white dress shirt. He whirled the jacket
around Dree’s shoulders—

  “Oh, thanks! I was chilly!”

  —to conceal her dove gray dress and change her shape, and he tugged her aside to tie his silk handkerchief over her bright blond curls.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “Evading palace security. It’s a hobby of mine. Now stroll with your arm in mine like we haven’t a care in the world.”

  He tucked her hand under his arm, and they sauntered out past soldiers from the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince, the uniformed guards that secured the Prince’s Palace, into the crowd of tourists in the external courtyard.

  Bright January sunshine poured over the crowd and the bisque cobblestones under their feet. They stopped at the animal pens over on the side, where tourist children fed penned geese and sheep.

  “Would you like to take a turn and pet the sheep?” Maxence asked her.

  Dree’s baleful look at him suggested he’d lost his mind. “I’ve petted enough sheep in my life. They’re groomed pretty enough for a 4-H livestock fair, though.”

  He held her hand and led her around the back of the tourist traps and palace gift shop and through the narrow, medieval streets of Monaco-Ville.

  A flash of silver on her chest in the sunlight caught his eye. She was wearing that platinum cross he’d given her for Christmas in Nepal, as she did most days. Every time he saw it, it reminded him of those simpler times when they’d shared a tent in the Nepali countryside, talking in the darkness.

  Dree was twisting her neck to look up at the tall pastel buildings like a tourist, which was a perfectly acceptable way to behave in a crowd of tourists.

  A round bruise on the back of her shoulder, flooded with navy and magenta, peeked from between her blond curls and the collar of his black jacket where he’d marked her last night. God, she’d screamed when he’d bitten her and sucked at her skin, coming so hard that she had vised down on him, which had sent him over the edge.

  Maxence led her around the corner that turned them onto a different street and back toward the castle. “We need to go down the ramp on the outside of the castle walls. It’s shorter.”

  They emerged from the medieval village and kept to the edges of the cobblestoned courtyard, walking purposely but not furtively toward the long ramp that led down the base of the fortress’s headland.

  The large exterior courtyard was tiled in a sunburst pattern, and a statue stood over at the side where they would pass to get to the ramp.

  Dree was already looking at it, too, and before Maxence could hurry her past, Dree asked him, “Is that the statue you were talking about? The one of your ancestor, or at least the guy who lived a long time ago that you’re related to?”

  They slowed for a look. The bronze statue was of a bearded man wearing monk’s robes, reaching into the folds of the fabric for a weapon. The base of the statue read, François Grimaldi, MALIZIA.

  Maxence said, “François Grimaldi, the Malicious. He tricked the guards at the gates of the castle by pretending to be a pathetic monk who just wanted a warm, dry place to sleep for the night. Once inside, he pulled a long knife from his robes and killed them so he could open the gates and allow his army to take the fortress. Yes, that’s why I’m rich and royal, because François the Malicious convinced some exhausted guards that he wasn’t a threat by dressing up as a monk.”

  Dree tilted her head and squinted at the statue. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. But François did get a cool criminal nickname, ‘François the Malicious.’ I was just saying to someone yesterday that I can’t be a criminal like my ex-boyfriend’s drug-dealer partners think I am because I don’t have a cool criminal nickname.”

  “That makes perfect sense.”

  She peered at the statue some more. “With the long hair and beard under his hood, and looking down like that, he doesn’t look malicious. He looks haggard, like he’s exhausted and just wanted to end the siege any way he could. That’s the only reason why a nobleman would go up to a gate like that, right? Because he was so desperate to end the war that he would do anything?”

  “Perhaps the real message of the statue is that you can’t tell by looking at someone whether they’re malicious or not. Or perhaps just a warning that all the Grimaldi are malicious at heart.”

  Dree tucked her hand in his elbow. “I don’t think all the Grimaldi are malicious.”

  “You don’t know us well enough yet.”

  They strolled down the steep ramps that led to the base of the castle, and they ended up walking on a sidewalk high above the Mediterranean and Monaco’s harbor. Brilliant sunlight shattered on the waves and threw shards across the water.

  The breeze coming off the water freshened, flapping Max’s shirt against his chest. Dree pulled his suit jacket more tightly around her shoulders.

  “Cold?” he asked her.

  “You can take the girl out of New Mexico, but you can’t take New Mexico out of the girl. I’m a little chilly.”

  Maxence wrapped one arm around her while they walked, cuddling her against his side. He shortened his stride, and she matched his steps.

  She asked, “Are you supposed to be out alone like this? It seemed like we were escaping from the palace.”

  “I’m good at ditching my security detail,” he said.

  “I’m surprised you’re allowed to.”

  He laughed. “For the time being, I’m the acting sovereign head of this tiny, tiny nation, and I can go for a walk if I want to.”

  “But isn’t it dangerous for you to go off on your own?”

  “It’s dangerous for me to walk around without any security protection because my malicious Grimaldi relatives might decide to assassinate me, and it’s dangerous for me to trust my bodyguards too much because they might have been bribed or blackmailed. Indira Gandhi was killed by her bodyguards. So was Xerxes the First, Caligula, Eric XIV of Sweden, a president of Somalia, and half the Roman emperors. In Monaco, it’s safer for me to be on my own and whereabouts unknown.”

  Dree grimaced. “If it’s that dangerous, why do you ever come back here?”

  The question splashed over him like a rogue wave. “I came back in November because my uncle was dying. He was the closest thing I had to a father. But I came back for school holidays when I was a child and teenager. My friends liked to come home with me because I live a few hundred yards from a casino and had almost no supervision.”

  “But it seems like you came back pretty often,” she said.

  “I grew up at a boarding school up in Switzerland and attended college elsewhere. Once I graduated from college, however, I needed a reason to leave Monaco. Otherwise, as the spare heir after my brother, I needed to be seen at galas and charity events. My schedule was prescribed. However, if I assured them that I wanted to be a priest and needed to study for a doctorate and work on charity missions, no one asked why I wasn’t in Monaco. Now that I’m the heir apparent, I can’t leave again. I’m more of a prisoner than a prince.”

  She laughed. “Poor little rich prince can’t leave his castle. And yet it’s pretty easy for you to escape your gilded prison cell, isn’t it?”

  He laughed. “I’ve had a lot of practice. And when you’re the prince, there are fewer questions than when you’re a teenaged heir.”

  “Well, okay then, Mr. Prince, sir.”

  Coming from Dree Clark in her perky little voice, Max liked the sound of that. A smile grew on his face, and he was just another guy taking a walk along the ocean with a woman he wanted. He was having too good of a time to let anything else worry him.

  As they toured the casino, Maxence lived vicariously through his funny little friend, who was seeing the Monte Carlo casino for the first time.

  “Oh, wow! Look at all the cars parked out in front!”

  Indeed, supercars of all stripes—Lamborghinis, Ferraris, Aston Martins, Porsches, the odd Koenigsegg—fringed the lawn in front of the casino.

  They went inside. “It’s so gold!”<
br />
  The cavernous entrance was built to look like a palace, to emphasize the royal aspect of Monaco and the casino. In some ways, the casino looked more like a palace than the Palais Princier de Monaco. Gold-veined marble columns suspended the walkways above. The color was not the tacky gold-plated shine of the nouveau riche, but a semi-matte lustrous finish that came from real stone polished by master artisans and centuries of good taste.

  Maxence passed money through the bars of the cashier’s cage, paying the entrance fee, and he dug around in his wallet and found an old UK driver’s license in the name of “Anthony St. Exsuperus.” Arthur had provided him with it one summer when they’d tramped around England incognito.

  Dree showed them her driver’s license from the States.

  She exclaimed, “Oh, slot machines! I could probably play those! That’s not real gambling.”

  “You’ve really never gambled before?”

  Dree shook her head, flipping her blond curls around her face. “My grandpa tried to teach some of my friends and me to play Twenty-One, but my mom caught us and yelled at him for corrupting our morals. She told the pastor, and he had a talk with grandpa about ‘the young and impressionables.’”

  “Do you want to try a slot machine?”

  She shook her head, her curls almost vibrating. “I’m afraid I’d lose the money.”

  Maxence laughed, found a hundred-euro bill in his wallet, and fed it into a slot machine.

  “No, no, don’t!”

  He tapped the button to spin the wheels, and the machine rattled and paid out a hundred and fifty euros.

  “Oh, that’s dangerous,” Dree said, shaking her head. “I can see how people become addicted to that.”

  The décor of the room called the Salle des Amériques was orange-red and the ubiquitous gold, though the walls were a softer brown. Slot machines blazed blue and violet and clanged incessantly. He told her, “The slot machines are some of the most lucrative gaming in the casino. Most of Monaco’s income now comes from tourism and billionaires seeking to escape income taxes, but in my grandfather’s time, almost all of Monaco’s treasury was funded by the casino.”