He paused, and the calculation in his green bottle-glass eyes sharpened. “Are you sure you don’t want to talk with Max?”
She waggled the paperback again. “I don’t need to. You guys enjoy yourselves. You don’t get to see each other much.”
“Right.” Casimir went back to talking to them, leaving her in peace to read.
At the Albuquerque airport, Casimir booked a plane ticket home to Los Angeles, while Arthur made arrangements for a flight back to London.
Arthur raised an eyebrow at Max. “I say, old sod, we’ll see you in a few weeks for yourenthronement,shall we?”
Casimir laughed. “I can’t believe one of us finally made it onto a throne. We’ll be there to see it happen. I’ll convince Roxanne to come this time.”
“And I’ll figure out a way to get Genevieve and the baby there.” Arthur shook his head. “He’s just such a wee lad. I quite want to lock him inside Spencer House and not allow the tyke outside until he’s twenty-one. I’m beginning to understand Henry Tudor’s obsession with an heir.”
Casimir and Maxence laughed at him. Max said, “Except that England won’t restart a century-long civil war ifyoudon’t have an heir.”
Arthur shook his head with a dismissive waggle. “The Finch-Hattens have always been instrumental in England’s monarchy. God only knows what would happen if our line ended. I tremble at the thought.”
At the entrance to the commercial terminal at the airport, Dree shook Casimir’s and Arthur’s hands good-bye, and she felt like they might be warming up to her a bit. She was trying. Arthur seemed to have entirely dismissed their little altercation on the plane ride to New Mexico, but she still couldn’t explain, even to herself, what was going on with the tattoo problem.
The men indulged in much shoulder-slapping and impressively aggressive hugs from Arthur, and then Casimir and Arthur walked toward the security station.
Oddly, instead of getting in the line to take their shoes off and be scanned by the X-ray machine, Arthur and Casimir both veered off to the side. They showed their passports to one of the security personnel, who tapped something into a handheld tablet and then waved them through the gate meant for airline personnel.
Dree pointed at his two friends blatantly skipping the security checkpoint and asked Maxence, “What was that?”
Max ducked and whispered near her shoulder, “Casimir is a member of the Dutch royal family, so he carries a diplomatic passport. He can do almost anything and get away with it.”
“And the Brit?”
“I couldn’t say.”
They walked out of the airport toward the private terminal where Maxence’s plane was parked in a hangar.
As they walked, Dree mentioned, “I wish we had time to stop off in Phoenix for a day or two so I could tell my friends goodbye. When I left Phoenix almost two months ago, everything was so weird. I went to work that day and expected to come back from Paris in less than a week, so I just said, ‘See you later.’ I’m not going to be living there anymore, and I didn’t even say goodbye to my friends.”
The Monegasque royal jet touched down in Phoenix, Arizona two hours later.
Chapter Twenty
Phone Call
Male voices spoke over the phone.
“You were right. She showed up at the hospital.”
“And I found them checked into the Four Seasons in Scottsdale for the night. Take her at the hospital if you can. Follow her if you can’t.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Nobody disrespects the Sokolov bratva like that and gets away with it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Good Samaritan
Dree
Dree walked into the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in central Phoenix. Maxence was following at a discreet distance.
