“I’ll talk to them,” Maxence said, mentally rearranging his schedule for the next day. “I’ll have them back in line before the meeting at five o’clock.”
“My father will be doing the same thing.”
Frustration welled in his chest. “Then what do you propose we do?”
“I think ‘propose’ is the operative word here,” she mused, holding her champagne flute near her cheek and gazing up at the glass ceiling of the convention center and the stars above.
“I beg your pardon,” Maxence said, still calculating votes and trying to figure out who had deserted him.
Marie-Therese reached over with her long, delicate fingers and stroked the red silk scarf tucked into the lapels of his tuxedo jacket, right above where his heart was beating. “You have a significant number of votes, just not quite a majority. I have a few votes, and I can siphon off a few more from my father.Together,we’d take about seventy-five percent of the votes, an easy supermajority that my father would never see coming.”
His grandmother’s engagement ring weighed heavily in his pocket. “Together?” he repeated her word, shocked to his core.
“Yes,” Marie-Therese said, looking up into his eyes with a dark, calculating stare, her tone a little too steel-edged to be considered bright. “We would announce our engagement at the start of the Crown Council meeting, which would sway additional sentiment toward us.”
Thatwas why she’d been in his bed. “That won’t work. We’recousins.”
She stepped back and sipped her champagne, surveying the crowd as she swallowed. “First of all,we’re royal,so it’s done all the time. And secondly, considering our parents, I’d say we’reprobablycousins. There’s maybe a fifty-fifty chance we’reactuallyrelated. I mean, what are the chances, really?”
“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” Max said.
“Well, I’m talking about mine, too. Only one of them needed to fool around to make us not genetically related to each other.”
“This is not the topic for a conversation in public.” Max’s relationship with his parents had been a complicated one, like most of his friends who’d been raised by nannies and then shipped directly off to boarding school when they were five. They’d both died when he was a teenager.
“You and Pierre look enough alike, and you both look like your dad and our grandfather. Me and him?” Marie-Therese gestured at her short, chubby father, Prince Jules. He was talking to some of their mutual relatives and some Russian oligarchs, the Sokolovs and the Ilyins from the look of them, and was surrounded by a ring of security who glowered at the other guests of the gala. “Not so much.”
One of the men standing behind Prince Jules, one of the more massive ones, angled toward Maxence for a just a moment, giving Max a view of his white bulldog silhouette and smashed-in nose.
Michael Rossi had shaved off the scruff of brown hair that had bristled from the top of his head. He sneered at the crowd as the bright LEDs glared white on his bald pate.
Puzzle pieces clicked together in Max’s head. His cobbled-together family in Kinshasa showing up in Monaco after being contacted byMichael Rossi,one of the people tracking Max and Dree in Paris turning out to beMichael Rossi,and now,Michael Rossiwas acting as a personal bodyguard for Jules. It was all a subtle web of threats and machinations that led back to Jules Grimaldi.
Always,Jules Grimaldi.
Maxence kept talking, lest Jules’s daughter standing right there with him see too much in his face. “That doesn’t mean—”
“My parents don’t need you to lie and defend their morality, Max. I know exactly what they are and especially whatheis, and that’s why I’m trying to throw my lot in with you, if you don’t screw it up.”
Desperation could make people do things out of character, which might explain Marie-Therese showing up in his bed the previous night. “You could have just told me your worries about the vote.”
She shrugged. “I was raised with my father in his house, at least during school vacations. Family resemblance or not, I am his daughter. Crawling into your bed seemed more likely to work than blabbing the truth.”
Just then, Maxence happened to notice his cousin Nico making his way away from the bar, holding a martini. “Nevertheless, I do not want the throne, and you said you don’t, either. So, I’ve already arranged for another candidate.”
“You’re joking,” she said, her voice flat.
“Not at all.”
“But who else could possibly,possiblybe a candidate for the throne?”
Max reached out and palmed Nico’s shoulder, directing him into the conversation with him and Marie-Therese. “Nico, so good to see you here.”
“You aren’t getting out of this conversation that easily,” Marie-Therese said.
Maxence asked, “Nico, have you made your decision?”
Marie-Therese looked between the two of them and emphatically said,“No way.”
