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

them with his eyebrows raised, nearly grinding his teeth in excitement. His hands clenched, and he looked like he was holding himself back from running over and hugging them.

Beside Nico, Marie-Therese watched them with calculation in her eyes.

Dree blinked at Maxence, her china-blue eyes batting open and closed.

From where he kneeled, he leaned slightly toward her. “Breathe.”

That startled little gasp must have been her beginning to breathe again. “Are—are you sure?”

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life,” he told her.

He’d been so intensely focused on Dree because he was proposing to the woman he loved, a woman who had changed his life so completely in just slightly more than two months that he did not recognize himself, that he hadn’t noticed his ring of bodyguards had melted away.

A sharp crack slapped his ears.

And then another.

And another.

Dree had already ducked, one hand up to ward off the bullets. “Who the hell is shooting?”

Maxence snatched Dree’s arm, dragging her down and underneath himself as he crouched over her. He shoved the jewelry box holding his grandmother’s engagement ring into her hands as he tried to shield her.

More gunshots snapped and broke the air.

The crowd ducked.

Screeches expanded, filling the air of the Grimaldi Forum and then intensifying, wails becoming shrieks.

The fog of screaming thickened.

Maxence looked around, trying to figure out where the shots were coming from.

Nico was hunched over and trying to drag Marie-Therese under his chest to protect her, but she pulled away from him.

Half a dozen strong hands lifted Maxence from the floor, leaving Dree twisting to look around. No blood.

Quentin Sault said, “Your Highness, we have a helicopter on the roof.”

Max said, “Not without her.”

Sault scowled and told the men surrounding Max, “Take him and the girl.”

The security men began to hustle Max toward a staircase in the rear of the ballroom.

Max grabbed Quentin Sault and pointed. “Get my cousin Nico. He’s right there.”

Michael Rossi appeared behind Nico, who was stumbling toward where Marie-Therese had fled into the crowd. Rossi grabbed Nico and pressed a small handgun to the base of his skull. Blood poured down the side of Nico’s neck as he crumpled to the floor.

Maxence stumbled, disbelieving.

His throat wouldn’t work.

Nico.

Rossi turned to where the bodyguards were shuffling Max and Dree out of the room.

Maxence stepped between the assassin and Dree, shielding her.

Instead of raising his gun and taking a shot at Max, Michael Rossi raised his fist with his arm at a right angle, signaling. His gaze tracked slightly to Maxence’s left.

Rossi was looking right at Quentin Sault.

Betrayal.

Maxence snatched his phone out of his pocket and thumbed an app on the home screen. He pressed the phone into Dree’s hand and with every bit of strength he could put into his arms, shoved her away from himself and into a thick knot of people. “Run.”

Dree flew a short distance from him and then stumbled, but she looked back at him.

Maxence yelled at her, “Run!”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Kidnapped

Dree

They were dragging him away. They were dragging Max away!

She had to help him, and yet he’d told her to run.

The man who’d shot Nico had signaled to someone in Max’s security team. One of Max’s guys had double-crossed them.

This couldn’t be happening. She didn’t believe any of it.

Maxence roared at her, “Run!”

She clutched his phone and the little velvet box in her hands as she staggered to her feet. She didn’t even know where the exits were. There were no little red signs. There had to be little red signs. Why couldn’t she find any little red signs?

The crowd surged around her.

Dree ran with them so she wouldn’t get trampled.

At the door to the stairwell, the crowd bunched up.

More gunshots from below.

The phone in her hand squawked, and she raised it to her ear.

A man’s voice asked in a British accent, “Maxence? What’s happened?”

Bodies nudged and bumped Dree as she tried to press her way to the stairwell. “There’s been a shooting.”

“Who is this?”

“My name is Dree Clark. I’m Maxence’s”—she swallowed hard—“secretary. I’m his secretary. He’s been kidnapped. There was a terrorist attack, and he’s been kidnapped.”

Thumps rumbled in the background of the phone. “Where are you?”

“The Grimaldi Forum.”

“Dammit, Monaco. Why does he ever go back to Monaco? Tell me anything you can about what happened.”

The gunshots and Nico dying and blood on the ground and Maxence shoving her away jumbled up in her head. “I think his security double-crossed him. They killed his cousin. They dragged him away. They said there’s a helicopter on the roof.”

“Was he wearing—”

A hand swatted the phone away from Dree’s face and plucked the phone from her hand. “Hey! Give that back! I have to tell him what happened!”

An extraordinarily tall, gaunt man stood beside her. “Hello, Dree Clark. Francis Senft said you have the money he owes us.”

His accent was Russian.

Dree darted to the side, trying to get away, but a large man was already standing there and grabbed her.

She said, “I’m not Dree Clark. You have the wrong person.”

The cadaverous man smiled, revealing straight white teeth. “There were photos of you on his phone, and I saw them. I am Kir Sokolov.”

“He never gave me any money,” Dree insisted. “He spent all the money on cocaine and other stupid things, and he never gave me any of it! I don’t have any of his money!”

Kir Sokolov’s smile wrinkled his fleshless cheeks and pointed to his sharp cheekbones. “And yet here you are at a charity ball in Monaco, where the tickets were ten thousand dollars or more, wearing couture and shoes worth more than your old car in Phoenix. It certainly looks like you have our money.”

“I don’t! I’m just a secretary, and my friends in the palace staff got me all this to wear tonight!”

Kir Sokolov chuckled as he tucked Max’s phone into the breast pocket of his jacket. “I’ve never heard that excuse before. I’ll have to tell my wife for her to use it the next time she’s in trouble for spending