It lurked.
It loomed.
Ithulkedin the predawn sky, its blades chopping the darkness. “Caz,no.”
Near her ear, Casimir whispered, “It’s a ten-minute flight, and weneedto find Maxence. Please get on this helicopter.” He backed off, and his emerald green eyes, just visible in the cabin light from inside, implored her.
Fine. Justfine.
“If we die,” Roxanne said as she clambered over the rail and toward the seats, “I swear on Baby Jesus’s tiny, holy toes that I will haunt you in this life and the next and you will never have any peace throughout all eternity.”
“Deal,” Casimir said as he handed her into the helicopter.
Roxanne buckled her seat belt and yanked the strap until she couldn’t breathe and probably wasn’t digesting last night’s supper, either.
The whirring of the helicopter blades above them took on more intensity, and the engine howled.
She grabbed both a handle on the ceiling and Casimir’s hand and clung to them for dear life. She wasn’t so much praying as wordlessly screaming for God to get her out of this insanity alive.
Chapter Four
Monaco
Gen
Rescuing people while pregnant isnotrecommended.
Genevieve Finch-Hatten—Countess Severn if you wanted to get technical about it—was about six months pregnant, and her bump was becoming unwieldy. She was carrying the still-unnamed heir to the Earldom of Severn who would someday, with a little luck, inherit the estate and fortune from her husband, Arthur-Finch Hatten, Lord Severn.
She had just used the bathroom in the airport terminal in Nice fifteen minutes ago, and she already needed to pee again.
That midnight call from Maxence’s security people to Arthur—begging him to come and find the guy who was their responsibility because they were not skilled enough to track one exceedingly tall man in a crowd—did not amuse her in the slightest. People needed to do their dang jobs and not call in unpaid and unofficial cavalry because they were incompetent.
Especiallywhen Arthur was needed in Paris.
And she was needed back in London at her law firm the next day.
And dang it, she needed to be in a house or an office with a bathroomright there,not traipsing around Europe in planes and helicopters and cars that weretoo farfrom proper facilities.
This was their third trip to mainland Europe in the last month. She was going to need to start staying home soon.
Gen and Arthur never discussedwhyhe was needed where he went, just that hewasneeded. Whether or not Arthur had a particular set of skills, as the cliché goes, was never a topic of conversation. It was obvious that his longstanding connections to the elite world of the very wealthy and royal made him an obvious asset for an intelligence service.
Not just any intelligence service, of course.
Arthur was first and foremost an Englishman. His noble family had placed several monarchs on the English and British thrones and toppled several others off of them, and he joked that he could dethrone the current family any time he wished.
Gen was relatively sure he was joking.
He was probably joking that hewouldever try to dethrone the current occupants, the House of Windsor. That, she was sure of.
Pretty sure.
But it didn’t speak as to whether hecould,and Gen would not have bet against him.
With his silvery-blue eyes, hard cheekbones and jaw, rock-hard body and elegant manners, his world-class education and unusual talents, and that extravagant, towering height of his, Arthur Finch-Hatten was a force of nature. He could produce results that others simply could not.
That night, he should be in Paris, doing whatever it was he did that no one talked about.
