Max tightened his arms around her, holding her, pressing his lips to her temple, her cheek, and her open, eager mouth. These final kisses were everything to him, a moment of connection when the tides of lust receded.
Her arms folded around his neck, and she kissed him back, murmuring things he shouldn’t hear but strained to hold onto.
“That was amazing,” she said.
“So are you.”
He tilted off her and rolled to the bed, where he got rid of the condom, turned out the light, and wrapped her in his arms.
He didn’t want her to see.
“Don’t leave,” she pleaded.
“I won’t,” he said. “Not for a while. My flight is early in the morning, though.”
“Mine is later,” she said. “I need to leave the hotel about ten.”
“I’ll be gone when you wake.”
Her small fingers crawled into his. “You’re amazing. I had the time of my life these few days. Thank you for everything.”
He squeezed her soft body. “You have enchanted me. I hope you find what you’re looking for, and I wish we could meet again someday.”
“But we can’t.”
“I know,” he sighed.
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Me, too,” he said, pouring all the meaning he could into those words.
“Who are you, really?” she asked in the darkness.
“Prince Augustine of Monagasquay, second in line to the throne and the spare heir who will never inherit,” he said. “Because while I’ve been with you, I’ve felt more myself than I have in years. Any other name that I have been called isn’t me anymore.”
“Okay, fine,PrinceAuggie.What do your tattoos mean?” she asked sleepily.
He stretched one arm into a slice of Paris’s light that peeked in through the curtains and lay across the bed. The ink on the inside of his forearm above his wrist looked gray and black in the moonlight, but it wasn’t. “My friends, Arthur and Casimir, have the same tattoo, but rotated,” he said. “The red and white harlequin pattern, the diamond checkerboard here, represents me because I am a prince of Monagasquay.”
She snorted, and Maxence smiled in the darkness.
He said, “Casimir is a Dutch prince, so the orange field and white lion is a symbol of the Dutch royal family.”
“Uh, I hate my junior-high geography teacher, Mrs. Galbraith, right now. Where’s Dutch-land?”
“The Netherlands, actually,” Max told her.
“Not just a place in Minecraft, huh?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a video game. You learn some weird things when you have an autistic nephew. I babysit Victor a couple of times a month so Mandi can go grocery shopping in peace. What’s the other one, the one with three crowns?”
“Not crowns but coronets.”
“They look like crowns.”
“Arthur would tell you that there is a significant difference because the coronet signifies that he is an earl, not a prince or a king. This is very important to him, that he is an English nobleman.”
