She stirred her cup of tea, gazing nonchalantly into the green brew. “So, where are you guys originally from?”
“Texas, but we live in London now,” Gen said.
“Georgia, but we live in Los Angeles.” Rox leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hand. “So, Andrea Catherine, where are you from?”
“Call me Dree. I was born and raised in New Mexico, and that’s why your husbands wanted to go along to the sheep ranch out in the boondocks and watch Maxence ask my daddy to marry me, but I lived in Phoenix for a couple of years. Have either of you guys been to Phoenix? Maybe come through the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital?”
They both shook their heads no, and Dree felt like flopping over dead.
Sheknewthem from somewhere. Shedid.
Rox asked, “Have you ever been to Los Angeles? Have you ever talked to a lawyer in Los Angeles?”
Dree shook her head. “I never left New Mexico as a kid, and then I moved to Phoenix. That was it. I’ve never even been to Disneyland.”
Gen and Rox glanced at each other, their confusion written in lines between their eyebrows and half-sad smirks.
Dree continued, “I’d never been to Europe at all until a few months ago when I went to Paris for the first time. That’s where Maxence and I met, in Paris. That’s a wild story, though. I don’t feel like I should be telling it at my wedding.”
Roxanne nodded. “I grew up in Georgia, and I’d never gone anywhere until I moved to LA to work at a law firm, which is where I met Casimir. I traveled with him as his paralegal for years before we got together. But I love Paris. It’s one of my favorite places in the world.”
Gen snorted. “Yeah, that last trip to Paris we took was crazy, though. We don’t need to repeat that one anytime soon.”
Rox chuckled at Gen and told Dree, “Yeah, that was a crazy night. We’d just rescued Max from Genoa after Simone Maina’s husband had threatened to cut his head off and feed it to the sharks. Estebe Maina was all over Monaco, so we sailed straight to Nice and then flew to Paris to get Maxence out of Monaco.”
That was the story Maxence had told about the night before he’d met Dree, rescuing Simone with two yacht rides that had traumatized him so much that he’d picked up the crazy girl with long fingernails at the Buddha Bar.
Dree chuckled. “Yeah, my Maxence has a Galahad complex, doesn’t he?” She grinned at him as he massaged her feet. He smirked back at her.
Rox laughed. “We keep telling him it’s going to get him killed someday. At least now that he’s the Prince of Monaco, he can have other people go do all of his Galahadding for him.”
The puzzle was almost clicking in Dree’s head, but a piece was still missing. “Wait, you guys were here in Monaco the night Maxence rescued Simone, and thenyoutook him to Paris?”
Roxanne nodded. “Quentin Sault and Monaco’s Secret Service used to call these two when they couldn’t find Maxence, especially if he went missingfrom Monacobecause Pierre kept low-key trying to have him killed. That should stop now, hopefully, on both counts.”
Gen nodded from where she was resting her head on the back of her chair. “Oh, yeah. We were staying at the Four Seasons George V Hotel for a babymoon, so we gave Max our room for the rest of the week. Arthur left his clothes there so Max would have something to wear. Max literally walked out of Monaco with the clothes on his back that night, and half of his tux was missing by the time we picked him up in Genoa.”
Arthur snorted. “He destroyed a bespoke Tom Ford tuxedo that night, and then a Kiton the night of the Sea Change Gala. Tragic.”
Dree mashed all that information up in her head. So, at that swanky Parisian hotel, Maxence had been staying in a room that was under somebody else’s name. Now that she thought about it, it was Lord somebody, Earl of something.
She’d been so impressed Max knew someone who was a real English lord, and she chortled in her head at herself.
Oh,so Dree had takenArthur’sclothes off of Maxence before she’d sucked his cock. That was something that she could’ve gone a whole lifetime without knowing. “Wow, that was the weekend I met Maxence.”
Roxanne and Gen looked at each other, then back at Dree. Rox asked, “Wait,what?Thatwas the weekend you met him?”
“Uh-huh.” Dree grabbed her little purse off the back of the chair and swung it around to lay it on the table. “I’d had a really rough couple of days in Phoenix that I do not want to go into right now, but I got on a plane and went to Paris with the intention of changing my life.”
Rox leaned on the table, her eyes widening.“Go on.”
“I was staying in a FlyBnB on the outskirts of Paris, but I’d always wanted to go to the Buddha Bar because I used to watch Sex and the City. I remembered the episode when Carrie and those guys went to the Buddha Bar in Paris—”
Gen asked,“The Buddha Bar?”
“—so I went there intending to do something I’d never done before,anythingI’d never done before.”
Dree reached into the little clutch and pulled outthe napkin.
