The box directly behind himself had been designated for Casimir, Arthur, and their wives, and they were settled in. He would have to abuse them later for cutting their arrival so close.
Behind them in the crowd, an additional box had been reserved. People who followed such things might have been shocked to see the notorious recluse Wulfram von Hannover attending a public event so soon after he’d been at several during the previous year, but the people who followed such things would probably assume his new wife was having a good influence on him. Rae was there, too, smiling at Max, her dark auburn hair flowing over her shoulders as she elbowed Wulfram to smile, too. Wulf’s single raised eyebrow indicated confusion, not amusement.
Outside the castle walls, cheering erupted.
Maxence knew Dree and her parents must have emerged from the limousine and were walking between the velvet ropes toward the palace’s gate. Having her outside the palace walls where Kir Sokolov had tried his one last feint was maddening, but twenty Rogue Security, French soldiers, and Monegasque Secret Service surrounded them.
Still, when Maxence saw Dree Clark enter the gate on the left side of the courtyard on her parents’ arms and the three of them strolling down the assigned path—her holding a bouquet of white roses and gardenias and thirty feet of delicate ivory silk rippling on the ground behind her—his throat closed up.
From the sudden burn on his lower eyelids and a moment of trembling that passed through his hands, Maxence thought for a moment he was going to need one of the EpiPens that Dree had stashed in the first-aid tent as emotion choked him.
Most of his family lay under the stone floor of the cathedral just a few hundred yards away, and many of the remaining members had been transported to prisons in France, but he was starting a new family and a new chapter for himself and Monaco.
They reached him, and Maxence shook her parents’ hands before Bartholomew and Beatrice removed themselves to their waiting seats. Dree stood motionless beside him as attendants rearranged the long cathedral-length train on the red carpet behind her.
Maxence smiled down at her as the camera flashes blazed around them, saying, “You look amazing.”
Hewasamazed. He wasdazzledby her beauty, her kindness, her heart, and the life they were going to forge together.
They turned to listen to the priest before them. Father Booker Jackson smiled down at them before he started the ceremony, repeating everything he said first in his Chicago-accented English and then in erudite French.
After greeting the crowd, he said in his sonorous voice, “The time I remember most about Andrea Catherine and Maxence is when His Serene Highness, Prince Maxence of Monaco, fell off his motorcycle in the Himalayas of Nepal.” Polite laughter from the crowd. “When Andrea Catherine realized Maxence had fallen behind, she skidded her motorcycle like an X Games racer and wove through the rest of our little party as oncoming traffic to speed back and find him. What I remember most about our everyday lives in Nepal is that Sister Andrea Catherine worked herself to exhaustion providing medical care for our fellow human beings every day, and Maxence took care of her, making sure she ate and checking her motorcycle for maintenance issues while she slept.”
Dree turned and looked up at him, her delicately sketched eyebrows raised, and Maxence shrugged. After living in the world’s rural areas for a decade, he could check the tire pressure, oil, and other fluid levels of most vehicles.
Father Booker smiled down at them both. “I’ve known since then that they were meant for each other.”
Chapter Forty-One
Familiar
Lady Genevieve Finch-Hatten, Countess of Severn, Senior Counsel
Gen had attended several weddings over the last year and a half that she had known and been married to Lord Arthur Finch-Hatton.
The first wedding they’d gone to together had been when they’d been dating, sort of. That had been last year’s wedding of the century, which had been Princess Flicka von Hannover’s marriage to Prince Pierre Grimaldi, Maxence’s older and now-deceased brother.
She had to be careful she didn’t blurt out anything about that. Max was a nice guy. A little over the edge sometimes, but a nice guy. He didn’t need to be reminded on his wedding day that his brother had committed suicide because some clumsy American lawyer couldn’t figure out appropriate topics for discussion. She was still learning to be British.
Standing up there at the altar, Maxence looked happy, magnetically so.
There’d always been somethingentrancingabout Maxence Grimaldi.
That Andrea Clark was a lucky girl.
Not that Gen didn’t consider herself a lucky girl. Genevieve considered herself stupidly lucky that she had found someone as protective and gallant and honorable as Lord Arthur Finch-Hatton and managed to marry him, even though the circumstances when they’d met and faked a relationship had been odd, to say the least.
Under the theatrical lights suspended over the courtyard, Maxence nearly glowed with happiness, and she thought she saw him blinking.
Must’ve been the lights.
As the priest pronounced them man and wife and Maxence and Andrea leaned toward each other to share a quick kiss in profile, Gen thought Dree Clark looked familiar, although they’d never met. Max and Andrea had had a whirlwind courtship that Gen didn’t really understand the timeline of. Arthur and Casimir had managed to get down to Monaco to meet her, but Gen and Rox hadn’t been able to come those times.
Not that it was a problem.
Rox had said that Casimir had only good things to say about Andrea, though Arthur had been a little more tightlipped.
She squinted in the bright theatrical lights at the bride.
