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

She shook her head, bouncing her soft curls. “I don’t want to gamble. I’ve never gambled in my life. I just want to see it.”

A bad idea came to Max, but it was a very common bad idea of his, and he was pretty good at it. “Let’s see if we can duck out of the palace and just walk over by ourselves. I’m sure security won’t mind if we’re out of bounds for a short time. It’s only a twenty-minute walk.”

Part of getting away with things is looking like you’re not getting away with things, and so Maxence and Dree ambled out of his office with him striding ahead and dictating notes to her, which she dutifully transcribed onto a tablet she held in her arms as she struggled to keep up. He loved to watch when she teetered on her high heels like a bobbly little doll.

The pale gray dress she wore clung to her sumptuous curves, her wasp-waist bending as her hips swung.

Gorgeous, but conspicuous.

They breezed through the palace, the security guys trailing them at a discreet distance.

Max sped up as they rounded corners, putting distance between them.

The State Apartments were just ahead and open to the public. Crowds thronged the formal halls and throne room.

Maxence grabbed Dree’s hand and took a quick turn outside and onto the loggia. They trotted along the covered walkway to the curving double staircase leading down to the courtyard and pattered down the stairs. With a quick sprint over the cobblestones, they pressed the wrong way through the throng queuing to go upstairs.

A grin spread over Max’s face. That dodge always worked.

When they were under the stone arch that led outside the castle, Maxence picked his blue pocket square out and yanked his black suit jacket off his arms, revealing his white dress shirt. He whirled the jacket around Dree’s shoulders—

“Oh, thanks! I was chilly!”

—to conceal her dove gray dress and change her shape, and he tugged her aside to tie his silk handkerchief over her bright blond curls.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Evading palace security. It’s a hobby of mine. Now stroll with your arm in mine like we haven’t a care in the world.”

He tucked her hand under his arm, and they sauntered out past soldiers from the Compagnie des Carabiniers du Prince, the uniformed guards that secured the Prince’s Palace, into the crowd of tourists in the external courtyard.

Bright January sunshine poured over the crowd and the bisque cobblestones under their feet. They stopped at the animal pens over on the side, where tourist children fed penned geese and sheep.

“Would you like to take a turn and pet the sheep?” Maxence asked her.

Dree’s baleful look at him suggested he’d lost his mind. “I’ve petted enough sheep in my life. They’re groomed pretty enough for a 4-H livestock fair, though.”

He held her hand and led her around the back of the tourist traps and palace gift shop and through the narrow, medieval streets of Monaco-Ville.

A flash of silver on her chest in the sunlight caught his eye. She was wearing that platinum cross he’d given her for Christmas in Nepal, as she did most days. Every time he saw it, it reminded him of those simpler times when they’d shared a tent in the Nepali countryside, talking in the darkness.

Dree was twisting her neck to look up at the tall pastel buildings like a tourist, which was a perfectly acceptable way to behave in a crowd of tourists.

A round bruise on the back of her shoulder, flooded with navy and magenta, peeked from between her blond curls and the collar of his black jacket where he’d marked her last night. God, she’d screamed when he’d bitten her and sucked at her skin, coming so hard that she had vised down on him, which had sent him over the edge.

Maxence led her around the corner that turned them onto a different street and back toward the castle. “We need to go down the ramp on the outside of the castle walls. It’s shorter.”

They emerged from the medieval village and kept to the edges of the cobblestoned courtyard, walking purposely but not furtively toward the long ramp that led down the base of the fortress’s headland.

The large exterior courtyard was tiled in a sunburst pattern, and a statue stood over at the side where they would pass to get to the ramp.

Dree was already looking at it, too, and before Maxence could hurry her past, Dree asked him, “Is that the statue you were talking about? The one of your ancestor, or at least the guy who lived a long time ago that you’re related to?”

They slowed for a look. The bronze statue was of a bearded man wearing monk’s robes, reaching into the folds of the fabric for a weapon. The base of the statue read, François Grimaldi, MALIZIA.

Maxence said, “François Grimaldi, the Malicious. He tricked the guards at the gates of the castle by pretending to be a pathetic monk who just wanted a warm, dry place to sleep for the night. Once inside, he pulled a long knife from his robes and killed them so he could open the gates and allow his army to take the fortress. Yes, that’s why I’m rich and royal, because François the Malicious convinced some exhausted guards that he wasn’t a threat by dressing up as a monk.”

Dree tilted her head and squinted at the statue. “Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. But François did get a cool criminal nickname, ‘François the Malicious.’ I was just saying to someone yesterday that I can’t be a criminal like my ex-boyfriend’s drug-dealer partners think I am because I don’t have a cool criminal nickname.”

“That makes perfect sense.”

She peered at the statue some more. “With the long hair and beard under his hood, and looking down like that, he doesn’t look malicious. He looks haggard, like he’s exhausted and just wanted to end the siege any way he