The two commandos lowered their weapons, but they kept them at the ready.
Sault asked, “Who’s this?”
From behind him, Dree asked, “Maxence, what’s going on? Did you renounce your vows as a deacon in the Church?”
Oh,those.
Those holy vows further complicated the situation.
Maxence told her, “These men aren’t from the Vatican.”
“You renounced something, but I don’t understand what’s going on. Did someone commit suicide?”
He turned and looked down at Dree and thought he might fall into the blue of her guileless eyes. “I would say that I haven’t told you some things about myself, but I think I’ve told you everything. I told you they were stories I’d made up.”
She raised one of her blond eyebrows. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Monagasquay.”
Dree shifted her weight onto one leg, bracing her fist on her jutting hip, and gazed up at him with a knowing, ridiculously cute grin. She said, “Monagasquay isn’t a real country.”
She was so adorable that he wanted to bite her. Just a nibble.
“It’s Monaco,” Max admitted. “Everything I told you is true, except the country’s name is Monaco. It’s a small principality on the Mediterranean Sea that cuts a small chunk out of southern France.”
She squinted at him, dubious. “I thought Monaco was in Africa, not France. Isn’t that whereCasablancatakes place?”
“That’sMorocco.Moroccois in North Africa, on the southern coast of the Mediterranean Sea.Monacois in Europe, and it’s a tiny city-state chipped out of the coast of France, north of Italy.Monacoiswhere James Bond films take place, in the Monte Carlo casino.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “You’d think twelve years of Catholic school would’ve taught me geography better than that. But you almost fooled me with Monagasquay, so I guess not.”
Maxence said, “I was second in line to the throne of Monaco after my older brother, Pierre Grimaldi—”
“Wait,you meanPrincePierre, the older brother from your stories when we were in France?” she asked, squinting at him.
“Yes,PrincePierre, but now I’m the heir apparent to the throne of Monaco since he committed suicide. I am His Serene Highness, Prince Maxence Charles Honoré of the House of Grimaldi of Monaco.”
Dree stared up at him with those fathomless, unblinking blue eyes, and he could practically see the machinery cranking inside her head.
She said,“Nuh-uh.”
If you’d have asked Maxence, he would have said that absolutely nothing in the world or the universe could have dispelled the grief-stricken shock that permeated him, but Dree’s canny refusal to be fooled by nonsense shattered his composure.
“You’re right. You’re right!” His legs weakened, and he sat on the floor at her feet, pulling her down to sit beside him. “This is the most absurd situation in the history of absurd situations. All my life, I have been denying any interest in the throne and insisting that I have no ambition other than to become an itinerant Jesuit who travels the world with nothing more than a rucksack to hold one extra black robe and a spare rosary, serving God and the Pope, not necessarily in that order.”
She squinted at him, concern written in her pinched eyebrows. “Max? You okay?”
He gestured with an open hand at the three Monegasque men who had tracked him to the lobby of a run-down inn in the rural district of Jumla in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains of Nepal, which wasinsane.“And now, Quentin Sault—the director of Monaco’s intelligence services and an officer in our military, the bane of my existence whom I believed would hunt me down and murder me one day—shows up out of nowhere and tells me that my psychopathic brother has offed himself, which makes him more of a narcissist than a psychopath, I think. But Pierre’s suicide makesmethe heir apparent to the throne of Monaco.”
Dree took his hand between her soft, tiny ones. “Max, honey, do you need a paper bag to breathe into?”
He waved her off. “Seriously, Sault might as well have shown up here and said, ‘You’re a wizard, Harry,’ but instead, he says, ‘You’re the prince, Max.’ Absurd. Utterly absurd.Immeasurably absurd.”
He shook his head and ended up with his head in his hands, finally breathing through the inappropriate laughter because every other reaction seemed more like a lunatic.
“Are you telling me—”
He nodded, flopping his head forward like a loon.
