The high-heeled pumps Dree had been wearing for the last eighteen hours were killing her feet. Her left pinkie toe might be mangled forever.
Why, oh why, hadn’t she left her running shoes in Maxence’s apartment? Not that she ever went running. Or her hiking boots from Nepal?
She was trying not to limp as they sped through the corridors of the palace.
OMG, this was it, the Crown Council meeting.
But Max’s hand-picked successor, his cousin Nico, was dead.
This might not go well.
Dree wanted to shine a spotlight in Max’s eyes and demand answers from him about what the hell had happened to him last night, whether he’d been the victim of a kidnapping or a capture or just a mistake or what. But, as soon as Max had talked to Magnus Jensen on the phone, those mercenary guys had swarmed into Maxence’s living room and announced they could immediately escort them to the Crown Council election meeting.
Dammit.
She wished she could have at least grabbed different shoes from her room downstairs. She’d barely gotten her girls tucked into a bra she’d had in his bathroom and the white sundress she’d stuffed in a drawer in Max’s apartment for less obvious walks of shame, shoved that panic-button key fob in her pocket because the sundress had pockets, and then the door had popped open, and then they were leaving.
Maxence had sucked on her right nip so hard that she might have a hickey on it, which was totally worth it, but the loose cotton of her sundress rubbed it the wrong way.
She’d grabbed the little black jewelry box that she’d carried in her bosom since Maxence had shoved it into her hands the night before and stuffed it into her bra again, arranging her girls so the jewelry box wasn’t poking her too much. A bruise was forming on her rib right near the bottom of her cleavage from that thing. The velvet did nothing to cushion it.
Considering the whole one-knee and proposal thing that Maxence had done at the gala the night before, there must be a ring in the box, right?
If the box had earrings in it, guys didn’t bend the knee and say romantic stuff like that. Dree’s heart swelled with the memory because it had been one of the only things keeping her going last night while she’d been lying on the floor of that closet.
But she wanted Max to do the whole reveal thing and show it to her. Then she could say yes, and he would put it on her finger for forever.
They should do it together.
She was only going to have one proposal in her life, assuming that was what was happening.
She might be wrong.
Sometimes people were wrong about really important things because—
—because she’d been so stupid when she’d pushed Francis to propose and hadn’t known what he was that she didn’t trust herself with Maxence.
Oh.
She almost stopped walking in the middle of the palace hallway, following Maxence and surrounded by mercenaries.
Yeah, she didn’t trust herself to know what was really going on with Maxence.
And she didn’t know how to deal with that.
Besides, from the worried scowl on Maxence’s face, he didn’t look like he had the headspace to deal with yet another thing, so she left the jewelry box between her boobs, poking her rib, and hoped she wasn’t an idiot.
At least she wasn’t going to lose the box with it snuggled up under her girls like that.
Dree was kind of aware that she was a little shocky from getting kidnapped and escaping and then boinking and then this, but she needed to soldier on.
Farm girls were tough.
She could do it.
She would be fine.
Surely, she would.
The Crown Council meeting was being held in the throne room of the Prince’s Palace, which was one floor down and over in a different wing of the palace.
It was a bit of a hike.
Dree had walked through the palace many times in the last few weeks, but the opulent chandeliers and layers upon layers of hand-carved chair rails and crown moulding and ceiling medallions still astonished her. Centuries of artisans had poured their lifetimes into this palace.
The mercenaries surrounding Dree and Maxence wore black fatigues with no patches or nametags, which she found unnerving.
Military soldiers were supposed to wear nametags and insignia according to some sort of war rules, right? She had enough cousins in the military that she should know that.
All six of these guys were very tall, very-very tall, as tall as Maxence, which truly made her feel like a shrub among the sequoias.
Maxence seemed to be marching, too, or at least walking more stiffly than usual. His dark eyes flicked left and right when they came to every hallway intersection.
He didn’t quite look nervous, not exactly.
The set of his strong jaw looked grim.
The military guys weren’t marching in formation, so their footsteps were a chaotic patter on the carpeted and tiled floors as they passed. Maxence was striding with them because his legs were long like theirs.
Dree struggled to keep up, skipping steps as she hurried. Busts carved from dark wood stood on pedestals in wall niches. She’d never really noticed them before because she’d always been rushing to Max’s office or hurrying and trying to find his apartment when he called for her.
Framed portraits and oil paintings hung on the walls. She wished she could stop and look at them and made a mental note to do that later. There were a lot of them, practically one every few feet, and she’d never really noticed them before.
She was noticing all the furnishings and art a lot.
Because she could actually see them.
Because there were no people in the way.
The palace—usually bustling with government office workers and dignitaries and people arriving to attend meetings like the main floors of a busy hotel—was deserted.
The opulent wall trimmings and busts of historically important people were visible because there were no people around.
Uh-oh.
Everyone must be at the Crown Council meeting.
Or holding their collective breaths in their offices.
But no one was walking the corridors except them.
Dree touched Max’s arm. “Doesn’t it seem a little weird—”
A gunshot blasted from a corridor to their right.
The military men splashed aside.
Maxence’s arm pulled Dree against his chest, his arms around her, just as two of their large men grabbed and shoved him aside.
They fell to the floor, rolling over and over as the mercenaries snapped into action. Some of the men took up positions around the entrance to the hallway where the gunshots had rung out, while the redheaded guy checked Dree and Maxence to make sure they were all right before scouring their position for an avenue of escape.
Maxence scowled. “What the—” and sprang up from the ground to standing.
The ginger merc dragged Dree to her feet and placed his finger on his lips.
Dree nodded while shaking like an earthquake and wishing she’d changed her damn shoes. She couldn’t run in these high-heeled pumps. She couldn’t fight in them, and she might need to.
The redheaded guy made some hand signals to some of the other soldiers, and one of them broke off to stand beside Maxence. The redhead whispered to Max, “Nearest stairwell?”
Max pointed and led them to a door that looked like all the others, but once they were inside, stairs wound up and down from the concrete landing.
Dree and Max started down the stairs, but the redheaded guy said, “Nope, we’re going up.”
Maxence frowned. “We could travel on other floors, I suppose, but the throne room is a floor below us.”
The guy shook his head. “We’re aborting the mission. We’ll take you out via a helicopter on the roof.”
The mercenary had a thick Scottish accent, which Dree hadn’t expected, but she wasn’t really sure what she had expected from a mercenary. Maybe she’d assumed they’d all have Texas accents.
“Absolutely not,” Maxence told him. “This Crown Council meeting is of the utmost importance. I must attend.”
The Scottish guy squinted at him. “Can’t ye reschedule it?”
“If I reschedule it, they will probably go on without me, which means my uncle Jules will be elected the next sovereign, and Monaco will become an authoritarian state.”
The Scottish guy tilted his head and stared a little more intently at Maxence. “Monaco isn’t already an authoritarian state?”
Maxence frowned at him. “It’ll turn into a criminal one. And no, it’s not. We can discuss political philosophy later. I need to get to that meeting.”
The mercenary clicked a radio microphone hanging on his shoulder and relayed this to someone else. Dree and Maxence couldn’t hear the response because the guy was wearing an earpiece, but he rolled his blue eyes just barely and said, “Come along, then. On to the council meeting. But don’t take us straight there. Keep to the stairwells and back hallways as much as ye can.”
Maxence led them on a circuitous route—down a few floors and then through the servants’ quarters and the kitchens, earning them some startled glances from chefs and servers. They trotted through increasingly more opulent rooms with higher and higher ceilings, the mercenaries stopping them and checking each room before waving them inside until they reached a massive double door that was shut tight.
Inside, a conundrum of voices rumbled.
Dree had been worrying that they’d evacuated the palace due to a bomb threat.
Max tried the door handles, but they didn’t move under his grip. Dree was trying to wish them to be unlocked with her mind, but it didn’t work.
He rattled them.
Still nothing.
“Dammit.”
Maxence glanced down at his phone. “Alexandre says that it already started, and he couldn’t hold them off any longer. That was ten minutes ago.” He thumbed something into his phone and then pounded on the huge wooden doors with ringing, echoing thumps. “Open up! As heir apparent, I demand entry!”
If this had been any other time, Dree would’ve giggled at how pompous that was. If Max had gotten any more archaic in his language, he would have sounded like he was reciting Beowulf.
But at that moment, nothing seemed particularly funny. She kept stealing glances behind them at the doors into the room, even though two soldiers were aiming their weapons at that door and alternating checks at other parts of the room.
Maxence pounded on the door with the side of his fist. “Open these doors! I demand entry!”
Finally, the door clicked as if being unlocked, and the mechanism and handle turned.
A pretty dark-haired girl, who Dree remembered was Maxence’s cousin Christine, Alexandre’s sister, stuck her head out and whispered, “Get in here quick before they have a fistfight. I unlocked these damned doors while they were spouting off about whether it was allowed or not.”
Maxence shoved the other door open so that he wouldn’t bump Christine and strode directly inside, walking toward the middle of the throne room.