Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) Blair Babylon (ebook reader screen txt) 📖

said to Maxence. “I pulled together the coalition to keep Jules from getting elected in the first place. You find somebody who wants to go to all the bother of being the prince of this postage stamp.”

Dree took a few notes for the rest of the meeting, but it seemed like after that, everybody just gossiped about the escapades of relatives instead of making any plans.

But she did write in the document: Maxence’s job is to find a candidate for the prince/princess.

And then she erased the prince/princess part and wrote breed of sheep.

Georgie kept drawing Dree into the conversation and whispering background on the people they were gossiping about, so Dree talked too much.

Max didn’t scowl, though. He just ordered a cup of tea for her, too.

Later, after Georgie and Xan Valentine had left the office, Quentin Sault tucked a small notepad into the pocket on the inside of his suit jacket as he followed them out.

Dree turned back to Max. “So, you and Alexandre, were you two an item?”

Maxence startled and looked up from the tablet he was reading. “What?”

She shrugged. “I mean because, you know, he’s cute.”

Max squinted at her. “He’s my cousin.”

“Evidently, he’s your kissin’ cousin,” she giggled.

Maxence frowned. “No. He’s my first cousin. Our fathers were full-blooded brothers. We grew up together like brothers at boarding school even though he’s a few years younger than I am.”

“Doesn’t seem like that was a problem for most kings and queens, marrying their cousins and nieces and stuff.”

Maxence flicked his hand. “That was how the European royal families acquired their problem with hemophilia, which has never impacted us. And, no. And,” the side of his upper lip lifted, the opposite side from his raised eyebrow, “No. We have enough DNA in common that Alexandre could give me a kidney. We are not that kind of cousins.”

Everybody had lines they wouldn’t cross, Dree supposed.

“Besides,” Maxence said, his eyes returning to what he was reading, “he’s not my type.”

Opening.

“Who is your type?” Dree asked.

Maxence’s eyes slid to the side, and he smiled at her.

Oh, she knew that diabolical smile.

He swiveled his chair to the side and pointed at the floor in front of him. “Come here, pet.”

A thrill ran up her back, an almost-automatic response as she remembered all the times in Paris when he’d called her pet.

Now, this was why she’d come to Monaco, which was not to be a secretary.

Dree stood and placed the tablet on his desk. The black dress Chiara had selected for her was structured like a corset inside, and it kept her posture erect as she strutted around the desk, her legs pointing like a ballet dancer’s in the high heels.

He didn’t take his eyes off of her, and his smile became darker.

When Dree was standing in front of Maxence, he raised one eyebrow and pointed to the floor at his feet.

Instead, she braced her hands on the corners of the high back of his manager’s chair and pushed it, tilting him backward. She settled her knee on his thigh, parting her legs, and leaned toward him.

His fingers found her knee and slowly traveled up the inside of her thigh.

She lowered her head, letting her blond curls brush his cheek, and whispered in his ear, “Not until you call your buddy the Pope and have him revoke your Holy Orders.”

“What?”

Dree shoved herself backward, away from his fingers that had crawled up to the sensitive center of her thigh, and backed up. “When we were in Nepal, I thought I was having one last night with a man I was falling in love with but couldn’t spend my life with. But this? This isn’t one last night. This isn’t a game. This is something else. You keep telling people you’re going to take the next step of Holy Orders to be a priest. I don’t sleep with priests.”

Maxence folded his hands on his stomach, and his eyebrows pinched together. “I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“I can’t be laicized right now.”

She squinted at him, analyzing everything from his composed posture to his resting respiration rate. “You said you could, that your vows were written to be broken.”

He shook his head. “I’d be dead within a day.”

His absolute calm was convincing. He wasn’t lying to himself or her. He believed it.

Even though something in Dree’s mind wanted to become hysterical at the conflicting winds buffeting her, she clasped her hands in front of her and drew a deep breath. “Like, what? Like some sort of an assassin-priest will knock you off for wanting to back out?”

He shook his head again. “Not Rome.”

“You’re still an ordained deacon in the Church, and it bothers me that we’ve had relations when you’re not supposed to, and yet I don’t want to stop myself.”

Maxence spread his knees a little wider and patted his thigh. “Sit.”

“You’re just going to tell me some sophisticated argument that I’m not going to understand, and it’s gonna make my head spin around and I’m going to have sex with you anyway, and then I’m going to feel like this again.”

“Sit.” His voice was lower this time.

Dree sat on his leg.

As soon as she did, her body curled, and his strong arms encircled her and drew her down to lean against his shoulder. Her nose tucked beside his chin, where the faint scents of a clove-studded orange and fresh wood rose from under his collar and his skin, and a whiff of lavender emanated from his crisp shirt.

He smelled so good that she wanted to crawl inside his clothes.

Warmth floated around him, the fabric of his clothes saturated with the heat from his muscled body underneath.

As she wrapped her arms around him, Dree’s hand slid over his stomach, her fingers tracing the solid cobblestones and sinews of his strong abdomen under the soft fabric of his shirt.

His lips pressed against her temple.

Oh, when he did stuff like that, she melted like a big ol’ scoop of ice cream dropped on the hot sidewalk in August.

Maxence whispered near her ear, “It’s my