To anyone watching, he’d probably seemed to inhale deeply and look around.
Marie-Therese stood beside him and patted his back while she glanced at the crowd on the upper deck. “It’s not so much of a ship as it is an island. It’s practically a continent,” she said and looked to their left. “Here comes Ralph Silverman.”
Maxence snapped himself to attention and brushed his hand along the outer seam of his trousers to wipe the sick sweat off his palm. “Hello, Mr. Silverman.”
The tall, lean man bent sideways as he announced to everyone in the vicinity, “Your Serene Highness, Prince Maxence, it is an absolute pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty.”
“A pleasure to meet you. This is my cousin Lady Marie-Therese Grimaldi.”
After a quick greeting, Marie-Therese moved off into the crowd to mingle with the other producers, directors, and actors Ralph Silverman had brought along.
Ralph began to introduce Maxence around, calling him, “His Royal Majesty, the Royal Crown Prince Maxence, the Prince of Monaco,” until Maxence had a moment alone with Ralph to suggest that all those titles were, perhaps, overdoing it. Maxence was merelyaprince of Monaco, notthePrince of Monaco, and the sovereigns of Monaco never used the term Royal Majesty.
If Max didn’t dampen this down, Ralph would go full Elizabethan courtier on him and appeal to Heaven for angels to sing Maxence to his rest that night.
Ralph Silverman laughed uproariously and slapped Maxence on his back. “You’re not just royalty in Monaco, Your Majesty. Any grandson of Grace Kelly is Hollywood royalty, too.”
Chapter Fourteen
Caught
Dree
Dree assumed that getting into Max’s royal apartments in the Prince’s Palace would be easy because she had a key.
Gettingtohis apartment was the hard part.
Her dorm-like room was situated in the bowels of the castle. Other palace staff milled in the lower-level hallways, bustling to the next place they were needed in the medieval castle. Between housekeepers, kitchen staff, conservationists, and security personnel, the castle was stuffed to the gills.
Dree found a small tablet of paper and a pen in the staff office, fixed her makeup, and put on a black dress that fell just barely past her knee. In the mirror, she looked like a woman on her way to work and certainly not on a nookie run.
Dodging through the crowd that inhabited the lower hallways and clutching her paper pad to her chest, Dree’s high heels clip-clopped on the ceramic tile and then, when she got to the posher parts of the castle, the marble floors.
Her phone screen read eleven fifty-five.
Jeez, she was going to belate.
The corridors all looked the same to Dree because she’d only been in the palace for a few days. Everything looked doubly wrong because in the few days since New Year’s Day, the dozens of twinkling Christmas trees and red satin and velvet bows adorning every column had been stripped from the castle, leaving only solemn black mourning swags to remind everyone that Max’s older brother had killed himself less than a month before.
Something was wrong when she got to a room upholstered in blue and cream silk fabric. There wasn’t a hallway that led to the next room, but just wide doors at one end that led directly to the next room.
And, worse, people seem to be having tea, and none of them were Maxence.
Dree stopped and froze like a jackrabbit scenting a fox, which was a pretty good analogy except that she was actually a peasant scenting nobles who, a few centuries before, would have literally held the power of life or death over her.
One of them, a model-skinny, fabulously beautiful woman with dark eyes and creamy skin like Snow White, glanced over at Dree standing like a scared sheep. Her hair was a mass of ebony curls piled on top of her head like a Greek goddess, and the peacock-colored beads on her long evening gown shimmered in the dim lamplight. Chiara’s hairdresser had given Dree a crash course in cosmetics a few nights before, and even Dree could tell that this woman’s smoky eyes and Instagram contouring had been applied by a professional.
But Dree recognized her.
Dree shouldered her way through the high-society crowd to the woman who was sitting on a low footstool and holding a short highball glass in her hand. She bent over. “Um, excuse me?”
The man that the woman had been talking to raised one bushy eyebrow, but he swirled his drink with his age-gnarled hand, clinking the ice cubes together, and didn’t say anything to Dree.
Dree’s eyes felt like they were darting everywhere because the dresses everyone wore at the party flashed in the dim light. “Um, Marie-Therese? You’re Maxence’s cousin Marie-Therese, aren’t you?”
At first, the woman’s smooth face bore no expression, but her manicured eyebrows rose, and she excused herself from the group she was talking to. Marie-Therese drew Dree over to the side of the room. “Aren’t you Maxence’s little admin?”
Dree was not little.“Um, yeah,” she said.
