“His parents want to size us up?” she asked, the dubiousness turning to annoyance.
“No. No, his parents have been with Jesus for a long time now.”
“Oh.Well, you tell him that we are sorry for his loss.”
Pity!Dree had scoredpity!
“Okay, yeah,” Dree said. “So, he has two friends from school who are kind of his brothers. They’re the ones who might be coming with us. They’re both married men, but they-all take care of each other.”
“I’ll get the barn ready for the three of them.”
Chapter Eight
The End of One Life
Maxence
Morning sunlight streamed in the office window behind Maxence and painted a bright square on his wide desk.
Dree sat across from him in one of the guest chairs, no longer confined to her little secretary chair where she’d taken notes the last few weeks. She’d already insisted she was still his secretary and would be hanging around his office every day. Max didn’t have the heart to throw her out of his office because her soft curves and light floral fragrance were his favorite part of the room, not to mention the things they’d done on that very desk.
He stretched his fingers over the green felt pad and the thickly polished wood.
She asked, “Are you ready for this?”
Maxence nodded. Oddly, his hand was already creeping toward the phone lying on his desk, and his fingers itched to pick it up and dial.
“And you’re sure about this?”
Maxence glanced up from where he’d been staring at the glassy phone screen. “Of course.”
“You could still change your mind and call another Crown Council meeting to elect somebody else. The electors will whine and stomp their feet because they have to stay in gorgeous, sunny Monaco for another week or so. Still, I’m sure they would survive another week of February here rather than going someplace where gloppy ice falls out of the sky from the clouds that never break.”
Maxence chuckled and reached for his phone.
Dree refolded her hands on her lap with her right hand covering his grandmother’s engagement ring on her left. “Marie-Therese and Jules have been arrested and are out of contention, even if they’re not saying anything to the police yet. There’s plenty of video evidence that they were both in on the coup attempt. You don’t have to worry that they’re the ones who are going to end up on the throne. You can still decide not to do this if becoming a priest is important to you.”
He gestured with one finger toward her hands. “Are you protecting the ring so I won’t leap across the desk and take it back? Because I’m not going to. I haven’t the slightest inclination to retract my proposal. Besides, I believe it’s traditional that if the gentleman were to break off the engagement, the woman keeps the engagement ring.”
Dree blinked a few times, and her mouth softened. “I would give you back the ring.”
He hadn’t meant that.
Maxence reached across his desk, unfurling his hand on the wood, palm up. “I don’t want to be a priest. I want to spend the rest of my life withyou.I would only renounce being the Sovereign Prince of Monaco if you didn’t want to be the princess. Do you have concerns about that?”
Dree shrugged, but her smile came back. She slid her small hand into his fingers, and the sunlight returned to her smile. “I’ll figure it out. Stuff like that is on-the-job training. And Chiara can help me pick out clothes and tell me what to do. At least some of it.”
“When Flicka was married to Pierre, a staff of people helped her. I could call her and get names, or I could introduce you to her for a consultation. At the very least, they are trained personnel who could fill in as an interim staff until you can find your own people.”
Dree’s lips parted. “I’ll have a staff?”
“You can have as large of a staff as you want or as little. We’ll have to discuss how you want to arrange this. Monaco is a very small country, and as such, our royals have leeway that larger countries would not. Casimir’s father, the King of the Netherlands, worked as a commercial pilot, flying short runs within the country three days a week in addition to being the king. If you want to continue your nursing career, there is a hospital a few blocks from here.”
Dree adjusted her hand in his, her soft flesh moving against his fingers and shifting the angle of the ten-carat diamond in the center of her engagement ring. The gemstone flashed stars onto the bookshelves and the ceiling far above when the sunlight hit it. “We have time to figure that out.”
Maxence said, “We have all the time in the world.”
He picked up his phone with his other hand and scrolled through his contacts with a practiced flick of his thumb. The nameGustavo Merinoand his mobile phone number scrolled into view, and Maxence tapped it and then thumbed the icon to route the sound through the speaker of his phone. “I may want to talk to him privately, at the end.”
