“You’re a few years younger than I am, and I was seven when she had the car accident.”
“The roads around here are treacherous. I’ve nearly gone over an edge a couple of times when I just blinked.”
After supper, Maxence consulted his watch. The blue steel face told him that it was nine-thirty and time for the dancing to start, so he sent Quentin Sault to find Marie-Therese.
Nico and he only had a few moments to conclude their conversation before Quentin returned with Marie-Therese, who appeared to have availed herself of the bar and was just the slightest bit tipsy.
They’d both learned the usual ballroom dances at boarding school and were proficient enough not to make an absolute embarrassment of themselves at a charity event like the Sea Change Gala. Luckily, the band struck up a waltz for the first dance, an easy one. Marie-Therese settled one hand on his shoulder and Maxence grabbed her other one, lest one of her hands end up on his ass. He led her through the steps, alternately gazing fondly at his cousin and looking up to make sure that he wasn’t going to bulldoze into the edge of the crowd. They didn’t need to keep this up for very long, so after two verses, Maxence slowed them to a stop and bowed to his cousin.
Maxence was just holding out his arm and motioning for everybody else to join them on the dance floor so he could make his escape when, in the crowd of black tuxedos and dark-gowned women, one sunny blonde wearing a shimmering silver dress stood out like a sunbeam in the night.
Around her smooth throat, she wore a platinum cross necklace that glimmered in the candlelight, a momento of stolen time in Nepal and a quiet, personal Christmas morning that stood out among all the others in his life, when he’d given it to her because angels should wear a cross.
His breath caught in his throat.
He nearly fell to his knees but did not move.
Dree.
Chapter Thirty-One
An Extravagant Honeymoon
Dree
Dree Clark, New Mexican sheep rancher and certified nurse practitioner, was at a royal ball.
Something must be horribly wrong with the world.
She’d arrived only half an hour earlier. After her name was found on the guest list stored on a computer tablet that had obviously been tampered with by the staff from below stairs, she’d been shown to a large round table in the back of one of the banquet rooms. Her tablemates were all giggly and toasting each other with the free champagne that the waiters kept pouring into their glasses even though the waitstaff eyed everyone at that table with suspicion.
An American couple from Back East sitting next to her were named Ford and Charley Dalio, and they were on their honeymoon and traveling all over Europe for a month. They seemed ridiculously, stupidly in love, giggling all over the place and pecking each other with tiny kisses when they thought no one was looking.
Dree refused to allow herself to get upset. There was no reason why she should be saddened by somebody else’s happiness. She was not that kind of a person.
Besides, she was sneaking into a high-society charity event to spy on Maxence, and really, what could be more fun? Chiara and her other friends on the palace staff had told Dree to seduce Maxence so that he wouldn’t run off and be a priest, but Dree didn’t know how she was going to find him in this melee or how to do that, anyway.
After supper, the other people at the table took pity on the country bumpkin who didn’t know the order of events for the evening and told her that the next thing would be dancing.
Dancing.
Oh, hey.Another opportunity to gawk and plaster herself to the edges of the room, a perennial wallflower.
But Dree tagged along with Ford and Charley, and they found the enormous ballrooms with glass walls that overlooked the Mediterranean Sea.
The jazz band that had been playing earlier had been filled out with more musicians and was now closer in size to an orchestra. Dree was standing in the crowd when Maxence walked out of the other side of the throng of people toward the middle of the dance floor, leading his cousin Marie-Therese.
All sorts of very bad words went through Dree’s head, but the last time Dree had seen that skank, Marie-Therese had been in Dree’s boyfriend’s bed wearing slutty underwear. A few bad words were probably warranted.
And yet, Lady Marie-Therese Grimaldi was the girl in Maxence’s arms that night because Dree Clark was, after all, just a New Mexican sheep-herding farmgirl, standing on the sidelines after sneaking into a royal ball.
The two of them spun around the ballroom dance floor in an elegant waltz. Maxence wasn’t all stiff and show-off like a professional ballroom dancer, but he led Marie-Therese around the floor with confidence, maybe nonchalance, because he was going through the steps and everybody was looking at him while he did it.
Yes, waltzing was just another thing Prince Maxence Grimaldi could do. Of course, he could. Waltzing was probably an essential skill written into the job description of being a prince.
He didn’t do it for very long, though. After one circuit of the dance floor, Max released his cousin and gestured for the crowd to join him on the floor, and that’s when his dark eyes found Dree.
He froze for just a heartbeat.
