Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) by Blair Babylon (best books to read fiction txt) 📕

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

The tender floated into the capture mechanism, which Maxence had always amused himself by thinking of as a tractor beam. Long levers lifted the small boat out of the water and carried it into a garage inside the yacht.

Staff members wearing white nautical uniforms handed Maxence and Marie-Therese out of the boat and offered them water bottles before they boarded an elevator to the upper decks.

The elevator was the size of a standard closet, so Maxence and Marie-Therese stood nearly stomach-to-stomach in the enclosed, suffocating space. They stared at the walls because they were, after all, first cousins.

The mirrors on the walls repeated Maxence’s ashen face millions of times until he vanished into the distance.

His breath whooshed in the tiny box.

Maxence placed one palm on the elevator doors to remind himself what was real.

When he blinked, the instantaneous blackness of his eyelids sliding down over the mirrors and glowing buttons jolted every muscle in his body. The horror of cold and pitching concrete under his raw legs, the choking stench of his own fear-stink clamped over his face like a wet rag, ripping hunger cramps for days, and his swollen tongue turning to cotton and filling his mouth and throat flashed through his body and were as present as if he were somehow inhabiting his nine-year-old self.

He coughed, choking.

Marie-Therese grabbed his other hand, clenching his fingers. “It’s just a few seconds, and we’ll be up on the deck.”

He counted down from ten in his head.

When he reached four, the elevator doors split apart, and Maxence staggered out.

Marie-Therese muttered, “Next time, we’ll take the stairs.”

Maxence sucked in a great draught of clean sea air and retrieved his handkerchief from the pocket inside his tuxedo jacket to blot the beads of sweat squeezing out of his hairline.

Sapphire-blue sea met the darkening sky at the horizon, far away.

He ran through a litany of sensations—the sun painting a blazing trail over the sea and the Christmas boughs and wreaths still up on every available square inch of the ship even though it was after New Year’s, to the scent of fish grilling nearby and the sour taste of bile in his mouth—to ground himself in the present.

It usually worked.

He gasped air, trying to calm himself down, though he was subtle about it because he was, after all, Maxence Grimaldi. His ancestors had held Monaco’s fortress for a millennium, and he turned to watch the setting sunlight glow on the golden stone high on the headlands above the yachts and ships in the harbor.

To anyone watching, he’d probably seemed to inhale deeply and look around.

Marie-Therese stood beside him and patted his back while she glanced at the crowd on the upper deck. “It’s not so much of a ship as it is an island. It’s practically a continent,” she said and looked to their left. “Here comes Ralph Silverman.”

Maxence snapped himself to attention and brushed his hand along the outer seam of his trousers to wipe the sick sweat off his palm. “Hello, Mr. Silverman.”

The tall, lean man bent sideways as he announced to everyone in the vicinity, “Your Serene Highness, Prince Maxence, it is an absolute pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty.”

“A pleasure to meet you. This is my cousin Lady Marie-Therese Grimaldi.”

After a quick greeting, Marie-Therese moved off into the crowd to mingle with the other producers, directors, and actors Ralph Silverman had brought along.

Ralph began to introduce Maxence around, calling him, “His Royal Majesty, the Royal Crown Prince Maxence, the Prince of Monaco,” until Maxence had a moment alone with Ralph to suggest that all those titles were, perhaps, overdoing it. Maxence was merely a prince of Monaco, not the Prince of Monaco, and the sovereigns of Monaco never used the term Royal Majesty.

If Max didn’t dampen this down, Ralph would go full Elizabethan courtier on him and appeal to Heaven for angels to sing Maxence to his rest that night.

Ralph Silverman laughed uproariously and slapped Maxence on his back. “You’re not just royalty in Monaco, Your Majesty. Any grandson of Grace Kelly is Hollywood royalty, too.”

Chapter Fourteen

Caught

Dree

Dree assumed that getting into Max’s royal apartments in the Prince’s Palace would be easy because she had a key.

Getting to his apartment was the hard part.

Her dorm-like room was situated in the bowels of the castle. Other palace staff milled in the lower-level hallways, bustling to the next place they were needed in the medieval castle. Between housekeepers, kitchen staff, conservationists, and security personnel, the castle was stuffed to the gills.

Dree found a small tablet of paper and a pen in the staff office, fixed her makeup, and put on a black dress that fell just barely past her knee. In the mirror, she looked like a woman on her way to work and certainly not on a nookie run.

Dodging through the crowd that inhabited the lower hallways and clutching her paper pad to her chest, Dree’s high heels clip-clopped on the ceramic tile and then, when she got to the posher parts of the castle, the marble floors.

Her phone screen read eleven fifty-five.

Jeez, she was going to be late.

The corridors all looked the same to Dree because she’d only been in the palace for a few days. Everything looked doubly wrong because in the few days since New Year’s Day, the dozens of twinkling Christmas trees and red satin and velvet bows adorning every column had been stripped from the castle, leaving only solemn black mourning swags to remind everyone that Max’s older brother had killed himself less than a month before.

Something was wrong when she got to a room upholstered in blue and cream silk fabric. There wasn’t a hallway that led to the next room, but just wide doors at one end that led directly to the next room.

And, worse, people seem to be having tea, and none of them were Maxence.

Dree stopped and froze