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

by Blair Babylon

  Maxence snuggled her against his side more tightly. “You never did tell me whether or not you liked it.”

  “It’s beautiful. I’ve never even imagined anything like it.”

  “We’ll have to wait a little while. We’ll have the enthronement within a few months, and then we’ll wait for a few months after that for the wedding. We can start planning it anytime we want, of course.”

  Dree looked up at him, smiling and with her eyes nearly closed as if she was turning her face to the sun, and she said, “All this is contingent on you getting my daddy’s permission to ask me for my hand in marriage, of course.”

  Shock. “I beg your pardon?”

  Dree nodded, still smiling smugly. “We have to go to New Mexico so you can get permission to ask me. My daddy would be so mad if somebody didn’t ask his permission before proposing to one of his daughters.”

  “But—I already proposed. You accepted my proposal.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “And it’s not the 1600s,” Maxence reminded her.

  Dree raised one eyebrow at him and kept smiling. “Yeah, I know.”

  “And that’s horribly patriarchal.”

  “Yeah, but, ya know.”

  “And I’m a prince. I’m an actual sovereign of a country now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And you already said yes.”

  “Look, you know I said yes, and I know I said yes, and I guess all those people standing around us in the throne room and recording it on their cell phones and probably live-streaming it God-knows-where also know I said yes, but we can’t tell anybody until you ask my daddy.”

  Maxence tried to sort some sense out of his thoroughly stunned brain. “You really want me to do this?”

  She nodded.

  Maxence regarded the chandelier in his apartment, which reminded him of the chandeliers in the throne room and the frescoes painted on the ceiling above them of Alexander the Great’s surrender, one of the most successful conquerors in history whose empire stretched from India to Africa.

  Even Alexander the Great had known when to give up.

  Prince Maxence said, “I guess we’re going to have to go to New Mexico.”

  Arthur’s and Casimir’s heads swiveled toward each other, their expressions turning delighted as the situation dawned on them.

  Casimir said, “We have to see this.”

  Arthur nodded so hard that his short black hair wiggled around his temples. “It’s practically our responsibility to make sure he does it right. And we can ride on his plane for once. My plane is in London and couldn’t possibly get here in time. Besides, I told Gen she could use the plane if she wanted to go anywhere.”

  Casimir’s eyebrow lowered. “How did you get to Nice if you didn’t fly on your plane?”

  Arthur shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”

  Maxence chuckled. Of course, he couldn’t.

  Dree shot an angry look at Arthur that would have scorched the eyebrows off a lesser man, but she turned back to Maxence and smiled brilliantly before he could ask her why. “I can hardly wait to show you New Mexico.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Dubious Mama

  Dree

  When Maxence was safely gossiping with Casimir and Arthur about friends and acquaintances from their boarding school days, Dree borrowed Maxence’s phone. She sneaked into the bedroom for privacy and dialed her parents’ home phone number from memory.

  Hey, millennials and zoomers could remember phone numbers when they had to.

  Her mother answered. The weird dubiousness in her voice was probably due to the long international phone number showing up on her caller ID. “Hello? Who is this?”

  “Hey, Mama. It’s me, Dree.”

  “Hello, baby!” More muffled, she said, “Hey, everybody! It’s Dree! My baby called me!” And then into the phone again, “How are you doing, baby?”

  Dree looked down at the white couture gown lying on the bedroom floor at her feet, which had been shredded into rags when she’d been kidnapped and tied up all night with the expectation of her imminent death, and at the white sundress she currently wore that Marie-Therese had ripped when they’d fought. The deep scratches on her shoulder itched, and she was so exhausted from not sleeping for almost two full days that she was woozy. “Fine.”

  “Oh, good. I’m always so happy to hear that. I love it when my baby is doing fine. Details, please?”

  Those last two words were the point of all that talking.

  “So, Mama, I’m still over in Europe. Mandi mentioned that, right?”

  “Yes, your sister mentioned that because she calls home far more often than you.”

  “Yes, Mama. So, I met a guy here, and he’s really great. I want to bring him home to meet the family.”

  “Oh?”

  Jeez, she didn’t have to be like that about it. “Yeah. I hope you’re gonna like him.”

  “Europe is so far away.”

  “It’s not that far. There’re flights to Albuquerque every day.”

  “You hardly come visit us from Phoenix as it is.”

  “Yeah, well, about that. Working at the hospital didn’t leave me a lot of time to come home. If I moved here and worked as his secretary in his government office,”—yeah, that was a good way to put it—”I could set my own schedule, and I might be able to come home more than if I just lived over in Phoenix. I mean, it takes about ten hours to drive it now, with stops. Half the time I make the drive, I have to stay the night in Las Cruces with friends because it’s too long for one person to drive straight through. So, really, it takes me two days to get home and then two days to get back to Phoenix. It would actually be quicker to fly to Albuquerque and rent a car to drive the four and a half hours to the farm. I can do that in one day, easy. When you think about it, it’s actually faster for me to get home from Europe than to get home from Phoenix. There’s a good chance I would visit more often.”

  Her mother harrumphed. “Well, when you put it like that.”

  “So, can we come see you pretty soon? Because I want you to meet him?”

  “You know you are always welcome at home. You just bring this boy you’ve met on home with you, and we’ll take a look at him.”

  “He might be bringing some friends.”

  “His parents want to size us up?” she asked, the dubiousness turning to annoyance.

  “No. No, his parents have been with Jesus for a long time now.”

  “Oh. Well, you tell him that we are sorry for his loss.”

  Pity! Dree had scored pity!

  “Okay, yeah,” Dree said. “So, he has two friends from school who are kind of his brothers. They’re the ones who might be coming with us. They’re both married men, but they-all take care of each other.”

  “I’ll get the barn ready for the three of them.”

  Chapter Eight

  The End of One Life

  Maxence

  Morning sunlight streamed in the office window behind Maxence and painted a bright square on his wide desk.

  Dree sat across from him in one of the guest chairs, no longer confined to her little secretary chair where she’d taken notes the last few weeks. She’d already insisted she was still his secretary and would be hanging around his office every day. Max didn’t have the heart to throw her out of his office because her soft curves and light floral fragrance were his favorite part of the room, not to mention the things they’d done on that very desk.

  He stretched his fingers over the green felt pad and the thickly polished wood.

  She asked, “Are you ready for this?”

  Maxence nodded. Oddly, his hand was already creeping toward the phone lying on his desk, and his fingers itched to pick it up and dial.

  “And you’re sure about this?”

  Maxence glanced up from where he’d been staring at the glassy phone screen. “Of course.”

  “You could still change your mind and call another Crown Council meeting to elect somebody else. The
electors will whine and stomp their feet because they have to stay in gorgeous, sunny Monaco for another week or so. Still, I’m sure they would survive another week of February here rather than going someplace where gloppy ice falls out of the sky from the clouds that never break.”

  Maxence chuckled and reached for his phone.

  Dree refolded her hands on her lap with her right hand covering his grandmother’s engagement ring on her left. “Marie-Therese and Jules have been arrested and are out of contention, even if they’re not saying anything to the police yet. There’s plenty of video evidence that they were both in on the coup attempt. You don’t have to worry that they’re the ones who are going to end up on the throne. You can still decide not to do this if becoming a priest is important to you.”

  He gestured with one finger toward her hands. “Are you protecting the ring so I won’t leap across the desk and take it back? Because I’m not going to. I haven’t the slightest inclination to retract my proposal. Besides, I believe it’s traditional that if the gentleman were to break off the engagement, the woman keeps the engagement ring.”

  Dree blinked a few times, and her mouth softened. “I would give you back the ring.”

  He hadn’t meant that.

  Maxence reached across his desk, unfurling his hand on the wood, palm up. “I don’t want to be a priest. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I would only renounce being the Sovereign Prince of Monaco if you didn’t want to be the princess. Do you have concerns about that?”

  Dree shrugged, but her smile came back. She slid her small hand into his fingers, and the sunlight returned to her smile. “I’ll figure it out. Stuff like that is on-the-job training. And Chiara can help me pick out clothes and tell me what to do. At least some of it.”

  “When Flicka was married to Pierre, a staff of people helped her. I could call her and get names, or I could introduce you to her for a consultation. At the very least, they are trained personnel who could fill in as an interim staff until you can find your own people.”

  Dree’s lips parted. “I’ll have a staff?”

  “You can have as large of a staff as you want or as little. We’ll have to discuss how you want to arrange this. Monaco is a very small country, and as such, our royals have leeway that larger countries would not. Casimir’s father, the King of the Netherlands, worked as a commercial pilot, flying short runs within the country three days a week in addition to being the king. If you want to continue your nursing career, there is a hospital a few blocks from here.”

  Dree adjusted her hand in his, her soft flesh moving against his fingers and shifting the angle of the ten-carat diamond in the center of her engagement ring. The gemstone flashed stars onto the bookshelves and the ceiling far above when the sunlight hit it. “We have time to figure that out.”

  Maxence said, “We have all the time in the world.”

  He picked up his phone with his other hand and scrolled through his contacts with a practiced flick of his thumb. The name Gustavo Merino and his mobile phone number scrolled into view, and Maxence tapped it and then thumbed the icon to route the sound through the speaker of his phone. “I may want to talk to him privately, at the end.”

  “I don’t have to be here for any of this,” Dree said. “I can wait for you outside or back at the apartment. I trust you.”

  “After all we’ve been through, you deserve to see the end of this.”

  Some clicks were audible through the speaker as his call was routed from Monaco’s 5G network to Italy, and then a man’s hoarse voice asked in Spanish, “Buenas?”

  “Good morning to you too, Your Eminence,” Maxence said in Spanish. Gustavo and Maxence usually spoke Spanish together, even though they spoke English and Italian as well. Their most intense theological arguments had been in Spanish.

  Plus, Dree could follow along just fine, as she’d proved.

  “Brother Maxence? Why are you calling me at this ungodly hour?” Pope Vincent de Paul asked him.

  “Coming from you, that’s quite the condemnation, Holy Father.” The time in the upper left corner of Max’s phone said that it was a few minutes after nine o’clock, but Gustavo had always been a late riser. In seminary, he was notorious for bustling into the early-morning Office of Readings at the very last possible minute and then going back to bed to sleep until Lauds.

  “You know I don’t like that Holy Father business from you. You’re one of the few people from seminary days whom I can talk to. What couldn’t wait until later?”

  “I have two very large problems, Brother Gustavo, and I’m sorry to lay them at your feet.”

  “As long as you kiss my ring while you do it.”

  Maxence chuckled. “The first one is something you told me would happen.”

  “Ah,” Gustavo said, and Maxence had the distinct feeling he was rubbing the side of his face. “Has the day come when you would want to be laicized?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry.” Gustavo’s voice brightened, and rustling suggested sheets being thrown back. “You owe me a good bottle of scotch. I would like a bottle of Gordon and MacPhail, the Generations Mortlach 75 Years Old.”

  “You didn’t even hesitate,” Max complained.

  “I have had my eye on a bottle of that for some time. I am but a poor priest, and I would never indulge in such a worldly acquisition.”

  Maxence was already laughing at Gustavo before he could finish. While it was probably true that Gustavo still considered himself a poor Jesuit in spirit, as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, he could probably have a bottle of scotch if he wanted it. “No, I meant you didn’t even hesitate at my admission that I want to give up my status as a deacon.”

  “Oh, Brother Maxence. We’ve been friends too long for that. I have now reached my desk in my humble cell—”

  Which Maxence knew was the pontifical bedroom, and he’d probably had to struggle out of the enormous four-poster bed and shove aside several attending cardinals holding his robe and slippers out of his way as he’d made his way across the room, but we all have our little stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

  “—and I am now signing and dating the document that converts your position as a transitional deacon to a member of the permanent diaconate. You may still assist at Mass. You are still considered a representative of the Church, but I am granting you a dispensation from the obligations consequent to ordination, including that of celibacy. That is what you want, right? Or did you want to give up your deacon status entirely? I have that paper around here somewhere, too.”

  Max glanced up at Dree. Oh Lord, what she must think of him if the pope was so ready to toss him out on his ass. “You had the documents already drawn up?”

  Gustavo’s laugh rang from the phone and echoed in Max’s office.

  Maxence considered telling Dree to leave, and he considered crawling under his desk to die. “If you would allow me to remain as a permanent deacon, I would appreciate the offer.”

  “Do you feel the position of a permanent deacon is appropriate in your heart?”

  “I do, Holy Father.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing you were never ordained as a presbyter, no matter how many times you asked. The transition from an ordained priest to a deacon or a layperson is more difficult to justify.”

  Which brought Max to his second topic of the phone call. “Do you realize that Pope Emeritus Celestine VI offered me ordination two days ago?”

  Something clattered in the background of the phone call, and Pope Vincent de Paul shouted for someone else in the room to get out in three languages. After some muffled shuffling, Gustavo asked, his tone lower and almost sinister, “Could you say that again?”

  “His Previous Holiness,” a joke about Celestine between the two of them for some years, “sent Father Moses Teklehaimanot to offer me ordination immediately. He said to get on a plane and come to Rome, and he would personally ordain me that afternoon. I believe Father Moses was merely obeying a directive and
did not instigate the situation.” Maxence thought that should protect Father Moses from punishment.

  “I have expressly forbidden any priest or cardinal, and that includes Meinhard Waltz,” he said, spitting Pope Celestine VI’s birth name with venom in his voice, “from granting you ordination unless or until I approved.”

  “Gustavo, I’m hurt.” Oh, yes, Dree was hearing that, too, even though she sat serenely in the chair across the desk from him with a kind smile on her luscious lips.

  “You wanted it so badly that I suspected you would shop around for a bishop to ordain you. I was just telling Father Benito last week that if you didn’t get married or crowned as the Prince of Monaco in five more years, I was going to give in. Which one was it?”

  “Both.”

  “Then you owe me two bottles of the Gordon and MacPhail. You didn’t already attempt marriage, did you?”

  “No.” Max wasn’t stupid or foolish enough to attempt the sacrament of marriage before he’d been released from his deacon vows.

  “Good, good. That would be hard to reconcile. But you can, starting tomorrow. I will need Father Moses to make a statement that his Holiness Celestine VI has defied me.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t stop there,” Maxence said, waving to Dree to let her know that she should leave the office now.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” His Holiness swore, and then he continued to swear in increasingly colorful Spanish that made Dree raise her pale eyebrows and giggle silently.

  He waved for her to leave, and this time she rolled her eyes, nodded, and vacated her seat. Maxence watched Dree’s voluptuous body sway, the generous swells of her breasts and hips bending around her narrow waist as she walked the long, long length of the office, between the bookcases and to the door at the end, where she turned and winked at him before exiting.

  The door clicked shut.

  Maxence related the entire scandal to his friend Gustavo, including Celestine’s apparent interference in Monaco’s princely election and the coordinated attempt by a Russian bratva to do the same.