“Oh, I wouldn’t call them spies,” Arthur said. “Their tradecraft is abominable. I’m embarrassed for them.”
Casimir lifted his hands and let them fall. “People were following us. They might have killed us or something!”
Arthur’s shoulders bobbed as he suppressed a chuckle. “I wasn’t worried about it. I was rather worried that they’d end up killing each other by accident and we’d get blamed for eight murders.”
“Eight!” Roxanne yelled at him. “We had eight people following us, and you didn’t frickin’ mention it?”
Gen sipped her preggo tea and set down her cup. “If Arthur says there was no reason to worry, there wasn’t.”
“Geez, Gen!” Roxanne bellowed, ready to continue the battle, but Casimir put his hand over hers to calm her down. He had a bad feeling Rox had plans to corner him at the next available opportunity and demand answers about Arthur’s odd skillset. Concealing information from her just pissed her off, even when it was for her own good.
Gen continued, “And since they are still following us, it also stands to reason that Maxence, and assumedly Simone Maina, are not in Monaco.”
“But those guys are following us,” Casimir said.
Gen flipped her fingers dismissively. “Monaco is a throw rug of a country. Besides the fact that Pierre could have dispatched goons to check every cupboard and beat every shrubbery for him, Maxence wouldn’t be hiding in a cubby or behind a bush. The Monte Carlo casino is literally right outside our window and past the fountain, and three more casinos are within a mile of us. If Maxence were here, he would be dressed in something debonair and drinking scotch while he flirts with every woman in the house, especially the married ones. He can’t help himself.”
Arthur checked his watch. “It is nearly eleven in the morning. Were he in a casino or a bar, he would be comfortably numb by now. As Pierre surely has people in the casinos watching for a pile of women writhing atop a drunk, we must assume that he has fled Monaco for friendlier shores.”
Casimir said, “I find it hard to believe that Maxence would run off with Fournier’s wife. He’s not the home-wrecking type.”
Distaste as the thought of running off with a married woman soured in Casimir’s mouth. His parents had problems with infidelity to the point where the two of them grinned icily for cameras but had not spoken directly to each other in years. If they’d had a solid marriage, it’s possible that they wouldn’t have dumped him in boarding school at the age of six, though extenuating circumstances had contributed to that decision.
He must have gone quiet, because Roxanne took his hand and squeezed it. He smiled down at his wife.
Arthur nodded. “Simone didn’t seem like the type to stray when we were in school, either. She was serious. I thought she might become a doctor before she got married and seemed to give everything up. Also, as I was watching the surveillance video, Simone wasn’t skipping through the crowd to meet a long-lost friend. She sprinted across the room toward Maxence with desperation, trying to reach him before she was caught or stopped. It may have been genuine or feigned. I couldn’t tell.”
Roxanne settled back in her chair. “Maxence has always been happy to be anyone’s knight in shining armor.”
“Indeed,” Arthur said, picking up his cup to sip his tea again.
“Where’s she from again?” Roxanne asked, picking up her phone.
“Mauritius,” Casimir supplied, and then he asked, “Remember that gray field mouse that came into the dorms at Le Rosey? It took Maxence a month to tame it, and then he kept it as a pet. It was the only pet at school, and people wanted to hold it. We were so starved for anything warm and furry.”
Arthur nodded, doubtlessly thinking of his dog, Ruckus, at home, a gift from Maxence.
Casimir remembered, “It got fat on the cafeteria scraps and lived in that shoebox, and it came when he called it.”
“She,” Arthur said, smiling. “Her name was Violet.”
“Yeah, Violet. He rescues everything and everybody. He’s got a complex.”
“And he likes to keep pets, too,” Arthur said, one eyebrow rising just slightly.
They did not need to continue that line of conversation. Casimir was painfully aware that he was the stodgy, vanilla one and didn’t particularly like to discuss his friends’ sex lives. He was Dutch, not a Dane. “Anyway, we are agreed that if Maxence thought Simone was in danger or distress, he would leap to play Sir Galahad.”
“Probably not Galahad,” Arthur muttered. “More like Lancelot, bedding the queen at his first chance.”
“Oh, come on,” Gen said, smirking at her husband. “He wouldn’t poach me.”
“I don’t think he’d plan to, but I don’t leave you alone with him for a reason.”
Gen shook her head. “And yet he thinks he wants to be a—”
Arthur said, “He won’t. It’s not his nature. I don’t think they’ll take him.”
“But where is he?” Casimir asked, knowing every minute might be important if Pierre or Estebe Fournier were on Max’s tail.
“Genoa,” Roxanne said, looking at her phone screen. “He took her to Genoa, Italy.”
Arthur raised an eyebrow at her, while Casimir grinned. His Roxanne was pragmatic, organized, and a certified genius at researching any question, legal or real-life. He said, “Pray, tell us.”
Roxanne held up her phone, which showed a mostly blue map on the screen. “If he took her to the airport in Nice, France in one of those whirring, flying-death contraptions—”
She meant a helicopter, Casimir assumed.
“—he’d be back by now. He would’ve returned to Monaco and been back in the casino by one in the morning, probably looking for someone else to spend the night with, but he wasn’t. The airport in Nice is too obvious, anyway. Pierre and Estebe probably both have teams waiting for them in Nice, so they must not have gone there because those guys are still following us. So, what’s the next airport over, one where they wouldn’t be looking for him? Genoa, Italy. There’s a connecting flight to Mauritius at eleven o’clock this morning. He’s putting her on a plane in ten minutes.”
“We could wait for him to return with The Last Toy at the yacht club,” Arthur said, “but those brutes would follow us and be waiting, too. We need to slip away from them and find Maxence before they do to warn him about Estebe and Pierre. It’s a two-hour drive to Genoa, at a minimum. We’d never get there in time, and he might be almost back here before we got there. We need something faster.”
“Not another damn helicopter,” Roxanne said.
“I have an idea,” Casimir said, flipping over his phone and tapping the screen.
“Even in a Lamborghini, we couldn’t get to Genoa that fast,” Arthur said with a slight frown.
Casimir grinned. “One of my clients has a yacht here. It can cruise at seventy knots or more. I’ll see if I can borrow it. We can be in Genoa in under an hour.”
“Who’s that?” Roxanne asked him, swiping her phone closed.
“Alexandre Grimaldi. The one who wanted advice on how to refuse an inheritance. Maxence’s cousin.”
Arthur chuckled. “I’m sure we’re both related to Maxence somehow if you go back far enough.”
Roxanne laughed at him. “You bluebloods are like Deep South hillbillies, marrying cousin-wives.”
Gen smiled over her cup of herbal tea. “Bloodlines more tangled than the Plantagenets.”
“Oh, yeah,” Roxanne said to her. “The Plantagenets, like Rae says.”
Chapter Fifteen
Flirting with Disaster
Roxanne
Roxanne and Casimir walked from the hotel to the marina on their way to save Maxence.
Arthur had insisted that Gen should ride in a car due to her delicate condition. He also insisted that he could lose anyone tailing them in the tunnels under Monaco.
Roxanne had known Arthur for a few years, and there was just something there that she wasn’t quite getting.
Lord
Arthur Finch-Hatten, Earl Severn, was a rich guy who lived off the interest and income from his investments. He didn’t work for a living. He just owned things. Granted, Arthur owned things like an enormous manor house in the English countryside and a huge apartment in London near Kensington Palace, but that didn’t make him an expert in defensive driving.
Plus, there was that time when Rox had managed to lock herself out of her phone so thoroughly that the guys at the mall told her she’d just have to buy a new phone, but Arthur had plugged it into his laptop and unlocked it in five minutes.
And then, Arthur changed her phone’s background to a selfie of him winking at her with those haunting, silver-blue eyes of his. No matter what she’d tried, she hadn’t been able to change it for a month.
It was weird that Arthur was so confident that he could evade trained, professional mercenaries, or whatever they were.
And it was weirder that Casimir and Gen had accepted this without comment, so Roxanne didn’t argue.
She did need to talk to Cash about Arthur sometime because it seemed that a whole heck of a lot was going unsaid.
But later.
Right now, they had to get to Genoa to find Maxence.
The plan was for the four of them to converge on the yacht they were borrowing just seconds before the boat cast off, lest the thugs who’d been following them either get their own boat or board theirs, probably leading with their guns.
So, Roxanne and Casimir walked out of the hotel’s lobby and into the bright midday sunshine, threading between neon-colored Lamborghinis parked in front of the casino that the tourists rented by the hour and drove on the winding, crowded streets of Monaco.
Christmas ribbons and balls festooned the fountain and small courtyard between their hotel and the Monte Carlo casino, and they strolled across the lawn to begin their escape.
Casimir glanced behind them. “They’re back there. Like Arthur said, at least four guys are following us. Some were in the lobby. Others were hanging around the entrance outside. I can’t believe I didn’t notice them before.”
Roxanne squeezed his hand and watched her step as they walked onto the sidewalk. “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’ll get through this.”
They dodged through the accumulating crowd and crossed the busy street to the public garden on the other side. As Arthur had instructed, they were walking in the opposite direction from the yacht club and the marina.
After a quick trot through the twisty paths of the Little African Garden, the Jardins de la Petite Afrique, where the warm-weather plants grew lush and full in southern France, they emerged on the opposite side.
After that, they made a loop back around the garden and through the shopping center, the place with the diamonds and the bakery where Roxanne and Gen had eaten second-breakfast that morning, and worked their way back.
They hurried as they walked on sidewalks by the sea, busy streets where fleets of luxury sports cars sped past, down staircases that led to passageways underneath roads, through shop-lined tunnels, and finally arrived at the marina to approach the designated slip from the opposite direction.
The air was fresher and cooler on Rox’s face from the breeze blowing directly off the salt seawater that lapped at the sidewalk built on the quay. Wooden piers extended over the water.
Dang, but Roxanne was glad she hadn’t worn heels when they’d left Amsterdam in the wee hours that same morning. Monaco required a lot of walking.
She risked a glance back at the sidewalk behind them. “Did we ditch those guys?”
Casimir whispered, “We’ll know in a minute. Here’s the boat.”
The name of the boat, written in black script on the gunmetal gray hull, was Flirting with Disaster. Crew members in black tee-shirts and white pants were scrambling, drawing in ropes hand-over-hand and preparing to cast off.
Ahead of them, Arthur was ushering Gen onto the boat, making sure she stepped in just the right place on the small ramp. The trailing ruffles of her fluttering maternity dress disappeared inside the back of the ship.
The yacht was built like an arrowhead, smooth lines from its sharp point flowing to the back of the hull. Unlike many of the yachts around it, Flirting with Disaster didn’t look like a miniature cruise ship. The round, high hull was shaped more like a futuristic version of a naval patrol torpedo boat, built for agility and racing through the sea rather than luxury and comfort.
Of course, Alexandre Grimaldi would own a death trap of a boat and name it Flirting with Disaster.
Roxanne lowered her head and walked faster.
Dang it, when they got home, she and Casimir needed to speak about this.
Ahead of them, Arthur beckoned to them with one hand and then looked over their heads. His pale eyes narrowed, and he waved them up more insistently.
Roxanne and Arthur ran.
Behind them, footsteps pounded.
Rox wasn’t entirely sure that Pierre guy was on the up-and-up even if he was Max’s brother, and everything that had been said about Estebe Fournier made him seem like the type of mobster who would dump bodies into the sea.
And both of those jerks had thugs tailing them.
Damn it.
Roxanne turned on a burst of speed, her short legs pumping harder than when she was at the gym. She had a baby back in Amsterdam who needed her, and she wasn’t going to die in a stupid marina in Monaco just because Maxence didn’t have the sense that God gave a nit on a gnat’s ass.
The yacht began to pull away from the dock, frothing the seawater behind it.
When they neared the boat, Casimir yanked her hand, wheeling Roxanne around and pushing her ahead of himself.
She had just one step to plant her foot and leap, reaching to grab Arthur’s outstretched hand.
Arthur grabbed her fingers out of the air and spun Roxanne around, practically throwing her at Gen, who was just three steps inside the boat.
Roxanne flailed in the air, not wanting to tackle Gen and the unborn baby in her tummy. She piked to the side like she was diving into a lake back home.
Gen sidestepped Roxanne’s tumble and tried to catch her but missed.
Roxanne landed on her back, and she scrambled to her elbows to look back. “Caz!”
In the bright sunlight streaming in the square opening of the back of the boat, Casimir was leaping, his hand outstretched, and Arthur caught his hand just as Casimir began falling, not quite able to make it.
But Arthur yanked Caz’s arm and threw himself backward, hauling both of them into the ship. They landed in a tangle of long legs and broad shoulders and scuttled apart, looking around to see what they had to fight next.
Back on the dock, eight burly men gathered, cursing the boat that was too far away for them to board and then eyeballing each other.
Then, the shoving started.
Roxanne started laughing.
Casimir and Arthur looked behind them, and then they started laughing, too.
Even Gen was chuckling, then laughing, by the time an all-out fistfight erupted on the sidewalk.
The yacht accelerated hard, making all of them grab a handle or rope to keep from toppling out of the back of the ship.
And they were away.
Twenty minutes later, Roxanne was hanging onto the railing on the top of the boat, one of two parts of the yacht with a real deck where you could stand outside. There was also some deck space near the prow, the pointy end of the boat.
Flirting with Disaster had cleared the edge of the marina and turned on the proverbial afterburners, increasing its speed up to more than seventy knots and barreling toward Genoa and, hopefully, Maxence.
Casimir stood behind her back, his arms holding onto the rail on both sides of her, making sure she didn’t fly off the top of the boat. “This isn’t safe,” he yelled into the wind.
“I don’t care!” Roxanne yelled back.
It felt exactly like riding in the bed of a pick-up truck at seventy miles an hour and standing to raise your arms above the cab
and feel the wind.
The yacht was skimming over the rough winter chop of the Mediterranean Sea, so add in that the pick-up wasn’t driving down a flat highway but bouncing over moguls out in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe not smart, but exhilarating.
Chapter Sixteen
On the High Seas
Maxence: Just after midnight
Maxence kept his footing on the tilting floor and touched a wall of the ship to steady himself. With the wind and chop that night, even a superyacht rolled in the water. He clutched some fabric wrapped around a bunch of tiny things to his stomach so they wouldn’t spill all over the hallway.
At the door to the stateroom where he’d left Simone, Maxence knocked and waited, the adrenalin ebbing in his blood. He was supposed to be serene and imperturbable, not high as a kite from their brush with danger.
All his life, he’d been trying to tame himself.
When Simone opened the door, Maxence held out his offering, his big hands full of women’s clothes, sample-size products, and a white silk scarf. “I don’t know what you need for tonight, but you’re going to be on a plane all day tomorrow. I’ll look in the galley for vitamins with folic acid in a minute. I found some things in one of the other staterooms. It looks like Flicka must have been here because there are a bunch of women’s clothes in one of the closets. You can pick something else out if you want. The toothbrush is still wrapped in cellophane, so it’s brand new. I found a silk scarf for your hair while you sleep.”
Maxence held out his meager offerings with both hands, white cotton and silk overflowing his fingers and small, plastic vials mounded in the center.
Simone looked at the valiant but inadequate gifts he held out to her and burst into tears.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Maxence said. “I know it isn’t enough. I know these stupid, little conditioners aren’t good enough. Maybe there’s some coconut oil in the kitchen. I can find something. When we reach Genoa tomorrow, I’ll see if I can find a store to sell us some better hair things.”
One Night in Monaco Page 10
