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

There wasn’t any sound from inside the apartment.

Dree glanced at Marie-Therese’s retreating back, which was bare in the backless evening gown she wore. Her raven-wing curls cascaded from the crown of her head and over her neck. The light from the chandelier sparkled on her dress’s beads.

Marie-Therese wasn’t watching Dree.

While holding her phone under her armpit, Dree slipped the key from her purse and rattled it into the lock. She was just twisting it when she glanced guiltily at Marie-Therese, who was turning the corner.

Their gazes touched with that momentary tingle of eye contact, and Marie-Therese stepped around the corner and was gone.

Dree hurriedly grabbed the long lever that was the doorknob and shoved the door open. It swung easily on well-oiled hinges even though it was at least twice as tall as she was.

Inside, darkness fogged the room except for three strategically placed lamps centered on tables and the piano, spilling flickering light across glass and wood and lightly stroking the curving outlines of other furniture.

She closed the door and locked it.

One corner lamp with a dark shade flooded light on a dark figure of a man sitting in a chair and wearing a tuxedo. “You’re five minutes late.”

Dree set her notepad, purse, and phone on the table. “I’m sorry. I got lost in the palace. I ended up over at some reception on the other side. I almost didn’t make it here at all.” She dropped the key back into her little pouch and tugged the drawstrings closed.

Maxence said, “Take your clothes off. Leave them there. Sit at my feet, pet.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Little Prince of Monagasquay

Dree

Dree trailed her fingers across Maxence’s heavy pectorals and up the curve of his biceps as they lay on his living room floor, wrapped in the white comforter from his bed. Her thighs were sore from sitting on the floor at his feet with her legs folded beneath herself while Maxence stroked her hair and gazed into the distance. He’d told her to hold several unlikely poses while he silently toyed with her body, then she’d straddled him, riding him while he ground his teeth, nearly emotionless, until his back arched and his eyes squeezed shut like he was in agony. He’d grappled her waist, raked his teeth over her throat, and forced her down over his erection until she writhed in his arms, her breath rushing through her body into her head and turning the world white.

When her consciousness had swum back and her vision faded in, Max had been panting, his forehead pressed against her shoulder, his arms wrapped around her.

As she looked down his back, the tattoo staining Maxence’s flesh from his shoulders to his waist was unrecognizable, almost a waterfall of black ink. Digging all that ink into his skin must have taken so long, hours and hours over many days. She smoothed her hand over his skin, trailing her fingers over the blackened feathers of a fallen angel’s wings.

She would never have chosen a fallen angel’s destroyed wings for him. She hated that’s what his tattoo was. Some of the lines that formed the broken feathers faded away, and parts of it looked incomplete where the hollow bones were broken.

He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look her in the eyes.

That kind of distance wasn’t normal for him.

Afterward, when they were entangled in the white comforter, he was lying with his fingers laced behind his head, staring at the ceiling, while Dree drew circles on his skin with her fingernails. She was trying to tickle him a little, but just any reaction would have sufficed.

When her arm got tired and she rested her hand on his chest, his heart under her palm was racing, battering itself against his rib cage at least a hundred beats per minute.

Okay, that was odd.

His respiration rate was normal, each breath measured and deep.

Very measured.

Dree propped herself up on one elbow. “Maxence, buddy? You okay?”

“Of course.” His dark eyes didn’t move.

The mismatch between his respiration and pulse rates were disconcerting. If he’d been in Dree’s ER, she would’ve hooked him up to an EKG or just sent him for an immediate cardiac consult. “Your heart is racing, but you don’t look upset.”

“I’m fine.”

Under her hand, his heart flipped and, if anything, accelerated. “Are you in the middle of a massive panic attack?”

That got his attention, and his dark eyes flicked to meet hers. “Of course not.”

“Max, you can’t fool a nurse practitioner. I’m taking your heart rate right now, and I’ve known you have panic attacks ever since Paris. Did you try your grounding strategy?”

After a beat, Maxence nodded one dip of his head.

“Is there something in particular that triggered this?”

His gaze returned to the ceiling, a vast expanse of white interrupted by golden medallions around the chandelier fixtures. “No.”

Oh, just “No.” There wasn’t anything suspicious about that at all.

Dree snuggled down more firmly under the comforter and wrapped her naked leg around his. “Tell me a story about Monagasquay.”

“Dree—”

“No, really. Come on.”

“We’re in Monaco.”

“I know, but just tell me the story of the little prince and the pirates again.”

“That’s not a very good story.”

Under her calf, Maxence’s knee twitched.

Pay dirt. “Tell it to me anyway.”

He sighed. “There once was a little prince from Monagasquay—”

“What was his name again?” When Maxence first had told her the story in Nepal, he said that the little prince’s name had been lost in history.

“He didn’t have a name,” Maxence said. “He was just a nameless, faceless, unimportant ghost of a prince, a nobody, one of those younger brothers of royals who should fade out of the history books without a second mention.”

A therapist could pick that apart for years. “Okay, fine.”

“The little prince was sailing on his tiny sailboat, a dinghy, learning to sail using only the wind on the Mediterranean Sea as his ancestors had, as he did most days that summer when he had turned nine years old and was home