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

significantly different. The faster, the better. It’s funny. Directly before I met you in Paris, I was aboard Pierre’s yacht overnight. We sailed from Monaco to Genoa in a few hours. Because it was speeding along, the motion didn’t bother me too much.”

“And you were rescuing that friend of yours.”

“Right. Did I mention that to you?”

“Just that she had a Russian mafia husband who wanted to cut off your head and feed you to the sharks.”

“Oh, yes, that.”

Dree laid her head back on his shoulder. “And your knight-in-shining-armor complex kept your brain too occupied to notice the boat.”

He frowned. “My what?”

“Never mind.” She spread her fingers on his chest, his short masculine hair rough under her palm. His heartbeat had decreased somewhat, she counted, down to around ninety beats per minute. His regular heart rate was between fifty and sixty, so he still had a way to go. “But tonight, the boat was anchored.”

“There must be a storm somewhere tonight, whipping up the chop. That month with the pirates, before the little prince had convinced them he was a revolutionary like them, that he wanted nothing more than the downfall of the ruling party that had taken over their country and ground their villages into the dust, there was a storm. In the dark, sealed can of the locked storeroom, it sounded like something was brushing the walls, rubbing against them like snakeskin on sandpaper. Then, the floor under the little prince’s legs undulated. The whisper outside became a howl, and the floor bucked and threw him through the dark, banging his shoulders and arms against the steel walls.”

Dree forgot she was supposed to be interrogating him, and she wound her body more tightly around his. “That must’ve been terrifying.”

Maxence didn’t answer.

“Was it dark on the yacht tonight?”

“The movie producer preferred candlelight to floodlights. He kept remarking upon the stars, which were particularly visible because there was no moon.”

“Oh, Jesus. So, it was dark.”

“While we were eating, I kept my eye on the glittering crescent of Monaco, shining along the shoreline a few hundred yards away, but the sea around the ship was fathomless.”

As Maxence told the story, his body relaxed and his heart slowed, even while her body contracted around him.

Dree knew how the story ended, but she wanted to keep him talking. “How was the little prince rescued?”

“Princes have always been courtiers, especially younger princes who will not inherit the throne. The little prince finally found his voice. When a lackey brought him water, the little prince talked to him. When a kidnapper brought him some food, the little prince talked to him. They spoke French, and they couldn’t help themselves but talk back. Within a few days of the first time he managed to get one of his kidnappers to talk to him, the little prince knew their philosophy and had convinced them he was one of them. He recited their manifesto back to them. He railed against their oppressors.”

Dree brushed her fingertips over his muscle-bound flesh, his skin as warm as if the Mediterranean sun were captured in his body.

“Two weeks after the kidnapping,” Max said, “they allowed him out of the storeroom for meals. A few days after that, he was bunking with the crew’s junior members on filthy mattresses strewn among the pipes. He became a good little revolutionary, swabbing decks, peeling potatoes, cooking rice, and listening to the captain’s nightly tirade in French about dictators and tyrants. He taught them songs of revolution, even though he’d learned them from seeing musical theater in Paris and Geneva. A week later, he gave a speech in French to the pirates, a carefully crafted treatise that could only have been written by a child receiving a world-class education in rhetoric at one of the most elite schools on the planet. A few days after that, the little prince announced he would be their spokesman, he would convince the world their crusade was right and true, and so they set him adrift in a tiny rowboat just a few hundred yards from freedom. He rowed to the shore, swam the last fifty yards in a desperate attempt to wash the stink off himself, and walked barefoot through the streets of Monaco and up the road until he passed the statue of his ancestor, François Grimaldi the Malicious—who had captured a fortress by convincing the soldiers guarding the gate that he was a harmless monk before pulling a knife and slaughtering them—and into the palace where he had been born.”

“You saved yourself,” Dree said, coiling as tightly around him as a vine clinging to a tree.

“I talked my way off the yacht tonight, just like I convinced those amateur revolutionaries on the tanker ship that I was one of them, so they would release me to carry their manifesto to Monaco and France.”

“You did what you needed to do to survive, Max.”

Maxence nodded. His eyes were open, but his gaze was turned inward.

“What commitment did you get from Silverman?”

“Eight movies and a mini-series for HBO over the next two years.”

“Your goal was five.” She’d taken notes during the strategy meetings.

He shrugged.

“Good job, there, Max.” She snuggled closer to him. “If pirates kidnapped you now, you’d probably not only talk your way out of it, but you’d return in a month standing on the prow of the ship, with one foot braced on the pointy end, and invade Monaco as the Pirate King.”

He shifted and looked down at her. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yeah,” Dree said, caught up in her fantasy. “If they gave you a month, you’d take over a pirate ship. You’d start talking, and a few speeches later, they’d be your merry band of pirates, ready to raid and pillage. You probably wouldn’t just invade Monaco. You’d probably have to conquer France, too.”

He was silent for a moment, then chuckled. “That’s funny. You’re funny.”

“No, seriously. You’ve been back in Monaco for only a few days. Before that, you traveled all over the world, like Africa and Nepal