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

her friends and hadn’t thought about the fact that she was in a church right next to the palace, so when Maxence and several other people walked in before the priests’ processional, she was startled.

He didn’t look at her.

He was staring straight ahead and didn’t seem to notice anyone as he took his seat in the front row of chairs just outside the altar rail.

Seeing him remain outside the rail and taking communion with the rest of the congregation instead of assisting at the Mass seemed jarring to Dree. If he had read the Scripture selections or delivered the sermon, the congregation would’ve been entranced, but they didn’t get the chance to see it.

Monaco didn’t know that side of him.

Chapter Eleven

Conclusion

Maxence

The next day, a new ambassador from the Netherlands arrived and presented his credentials. Maxence soberly received them and greeted the new emissary.

The letter of introduction addressed him as “Cousin,” as always. Power and position bind sovereigns more intimately than blood. The fact that the King and Queen of the Netherlands were the parents of one of Max’s best friends made the salutation especially amusing. He took a picture of the letter with his phone to razz Casimir about before he sent it off to the archives, planning to declare himself Caz’s great-uncle and thus entitled to boss him around.

Connections among sovereigns and royal families lasted centuries. The nouveau riche oligarchs and billionaires had formed more of a clique than a family, which left any one of them vulnerable if they lost their money-based power. If Monaco ever fell to guillotine-wielding republicans, one of Max’s “cousins” would send a plane to Nice to evacuate him. Royal blue blood was thicker than restless political tides.

He received a letter and solemn bow from the Dutch diplomat, who was a ruddy-cheeked Nordic man who looked as though the winter wind off the icy sea had chapped his cheeks. The appointment was for fifteen minutes and ran short.

After that meeting, Maxence sent Quentin Sault and one other security person, who’d hovered at the back of the room like castle ghosts, out of the office and instructed Dree to suck him off under his desk. Her petal-soft lips and warm tongue on his dick commanded all his attention even though he pretended to sign some paperwork. The pumping heat of her mouth and throat enveloped him, and the white flash of unthinking abyss snatched him away.

His fingers fisted in her hair so that the pale spider-silk strands were like thread knotted around his knuckles.

Then, Monaco’s Minister of the Environment arrived to meet Maxence and impress upon him the importance of combating climate change. A coastal country that was less than one square mile in area could not afford to lose even an inch of available land to rising sea levels.

Maxence concurred and reassured the minister that he would impress the importance of the issue upon the Council of Nobles as usual, and he would do his utmost to ensure that Monaco’s policies and commitments would not change after the election.

Afterward, Maxence had Dree sit naked on her knees while they discussed what he wanted.

“I’ve read those books,” she said. “I know what you rich pervs like. You want a ‘sub,’ don’t you? You like a woman on her knees, and you can screw her while she just lies there and submits? You like to ‘exercise control in all things,’ including your women?”

“Boring.”

She looked up at him sideways, truly skeptical. “That’s not what the books say.”

“It’s so formal. It’s staid. It’s almost rehearsed. Everything is too under control.”

“So,” she paused, and he could nearly see the gears grinding in her head, “what is it that you think is going to freak me out?”

She had to know. It wasn’t something you could just spring on people. “I like it—rough.”

Dree blinked her dark eyelashes over her big, blue eyes. “Like, how rough?”

His voice dropped in his throat. “Rough.”

Her eyebrows slanted down. “So, you like rape? Or consensual, acknowledged rapey-ish sex? I don’t know how to say it.”

“Disgusting. I would never force a woman to do anything. I can’t even pretend it. Not forced.”

The softness of the curves of her hips and breasts drew him. While he talked, his hands stroked her jaw, her shoulders, and the underside of her breasts.

She asked, “Then—what?”

Maxence’s face heated, not with embarrassment, but from the images in his head. “I don’t ‘exercise control in all things.’ I don’t like control at all. I want to lose control. I like to be out of control. I like to lose myself in a woman until I can’t think or rationalize at all. It takes over me. I lose control, and I make you lose control, and then we’re just an unthinking, unyielding, uncontrollable force of passion until we collapse, exhausted and nearly unconscious, in a tangle of sweat, heat, and blood.”

She looked down, frowning, and seemed to examine her fingers on her knees. “I can kind of see it, the losing-control thing, like when you drove me crazy in Paris until I practically attacked you.”

He nodded.

“I—I did attack you. And then again in Nepal, you were—” She looked up at him. “You were out of control.”

He nodded again, watching her.

“How much more out of control can you get?”

“As much as you can take,” Maxence said.

Dree bit her lower lip and nodded, obviously thinking about it.

“Does it always have to be like that? Can’t it sometimes be . . . gentle? Emotional?”

“Like that last night in Nepal, the second time?”

Dree nodded. “So, you’re okay with that, too. Sometimes.”

He drew his finger from her ear around to her throat, stroking the silk of her skin. “Sometimes.”

Her one comment was, “I don’t see how that could last in the long term.”

And that gave Maxence pause.

Because she was still considering a future between them, even after that night in Nepal when she’d refused to travel the world with him.

As was he.

The day wound down, and Maxence sent Dree out to the receptionist