One Night in Monaco Read online

  One Night in Monaco

  Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence

  Blair Babylon

  One Night in Monaco

  Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence

  * * *

  By: Blair Babylon

  * * *

  One night in Monaco, my best friend, Maxence, disappeared.

  I have no idea what Maxence was doing in Monaco that night. Yeah, he loves the Monte Carlo casino—the venue of British spy movies, billionaires, Russian mafia, and roulette.

  But too many people in Monaco think he might be a danger to them.

  He never should have been there.

  But he was.

  So was Simone. She’s trouble from our past at boarding school. Her husband is a good friend of some of the people who would be happier if Maxence wasn’t around anymore.

  They tell me Maxence was here in the casino, and then a few minutes later, he was gone.

  Like he dropped off the face of the Earth.

  Or like he was dropped off a cliff into the blue Mediterranean Sea, which was just a few feet from where he was standing.

  Arthur and I are here to find Maxence, no matter what it takes.

  But we might end up finding his body.

  * * *

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  Published by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Copyright 2020 by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Contents

  1. Paris

  2. Amsterdam

  3. Nice, France

  4. Monaco

  5. The Lobby

  6. The Cage

  7. Monte Carlo

  8. Hotel de Paris

  9. Métropole Shopping Monte-Carlo

  10. Yacht Club de Monaco

  11. Inside the Yacht Club

  12. Port Hercule

  13. Monaco-Ville

  14. Tea at the Hotel

  15. Flirting with Disaster

  16. On the High Seas

  17. The Hugger

  18. Phone Calls

  19. Traitor

  20. Paris, Too

  21. The Buddha Bar, Paris

  Free Books

  Chapter One

  Paris

  Arthur

  One night in the Four Seasons Hotel George V in Paris, in a small suite because this trip had been a sudden decision due to work concerns, a mobile phone buzzed on the dresser beside a sumptuous bed.

  Arthur Finch-Hatten thumbed the phone’s screen and brought it to his face, but he didn’t say anything. His chin stubble grated on the glass front.

  A man’s voice asked, “Hello? Lord Finch-Hatten? Maxence Grimaldi is missing.”

  Arthur rolled over and stared at the ceiling.

  Beside him, his wife, Gen, stirred but didn’t wake up. He was always whispering into his phone in the middle of the night. She didn’t bother to wake up anymore, especially now that she was carrying their child and needed sleep.

  Arthur said quietly, “Max always goes missing. You tossers lose him twice a week in those rural outbacks he inhabits.”

  The unidentified voice said, “He went missing in Monaco. He was in the middle of the casino, and then we lost him. It’s been four hours.”

  “On my way.” Arthur hung up and slid out from under the covers, grabbing his trousers from a suitcase as he stood. Worry sidled through him. They shouldn’t have called him after only four hours, even if Max had gone missing in Monaco, of all places. If he’d been anywhere else, they might not have called him if Max had been out of bounds for four weeks.

  But, Monaco, and from inside the very Monte Carlo casino.

  And—things had felt unsettled for weeks. None of Arthur’s informants had divulged anything specific about Monaco or the region’s jet-set power brokers, but a proverbial smell had hung in the air for some time.

  Arthur shook his head and stuffed one leg into his trousers.

  Gen peered up at him in the dim morning light. Her deep brown eyes squinted, her lashes dark against her porcelain skin. “What’s going on?”

  “Maxence seems to have been misplaced again,” he told her. Arthur thumbed texts into his phone, telling his pilot and flight crew to have the jet warmed up and ready to fly to Nice.

  “Oh.” Gen snuggled farther under the thick comforter.

  “Damn him. One night in Monaco, and he’s either on an epic pub crawl that will end up in the newspapers, in bed with someone else’s wife, or already dead.”

  Arthur prayed that Max wasn’t dead, and he grabbed his phone again.

  After he tapped a few more icons, a man’s voice, husky with sleep, asked in his ear, “What?”

  Arthur wedged his phone between his ear and shoulder as he shoved his feet into his trousers. “We have a problem, Caz. Max went missing from Monaco. What continent are you on?”

  Shuffling scudded from his phone. Casimir whispered to him, “We’re in Amsterdam. What the hell happened?”

  From the other side of the bed, Gen flipped back the covers and reached for the floor with her long, shapely legs that Arthur loved to bind and tie and bite. “You didn’t say Max was in Monaco when he went missing.”

  And she’d overheard him. Damn.

  “You’re not going,” Arthur told her.

  Gen yawned and walked toward the bathroom, waddling just slightly due to her moderate pregnancy. “Try and stop me, my lord.”

  Chapter Two

  Amsterdam

  Casimir

  Casimir rolled out of bed, alighting on his feet, and started scribbling a note for his wife, who lay on the other side of the bed with her glorious, mahogany hair spilling over the pillow between them.

  Just as he got to the hard part in the note where he would have to explain why he was leaving, Roxanne rolled over and squinted in the darkness at him. “What’s up?”

  “I have to leave for a day or two.”

  “You’re leaving me here in the palace with your sister, Her Nefarious Majesty Anastasia, who will want to take me shopping in the downtown of The Hague again? I don’t think so, mister.”

  “It’s probably only going to be for one day. Maxence seems to be missing.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Grimaldi? That Max?”

  “Yep, that one.”

  “The hot one.”

  “Yes, I know he’s the hot one. Do you have to rate all my friends?”

  “Just him and Arthur. And it’s not me. It’s the whole office because Max and Arthur keep ‘just dropping by’ for pick-up basketball. You know that Wren uses a double-headed coin so that you guys will always be ‘skins,’ right?”

  “No. Why don’t you stop her?”

  “Because I like my friends. And I like them more than I like your friends.”

  “Whether you like them or not—”

  “Although I like Max better than Arthur,” she muttered.

  “—That was Arthur on the line. Max’s security team called him. Max is gone, and they can’t find him.”

  Rox flopped back onto the pillow and pulled up the duvet. “Max always throws his security. It’s traditional. He’s probably off playing Robin Hood or Galahad somewhere, or maybe he’s just on another global bender. Come back to bed.”

  Casimir sighed. “Max was in Monaco when he went missing.”

  She flipped around in the bed and ogled him with one very serious brown eye above the bedcovers. “Is
he alive?”

  “As far as Arthur knows.”

  “Where’s Pierre?”

  Pierre was Max’s older brother. “In Monaco.”

  She grimaced. “Anybody else gone missing?”

  “Arthur doesn’t know. I’m sure he’ll start calling in favors.”

  Roxanne threw back the covers and slithered out of the bed, landing on the floor with a thump. “I’ll pack.”

  “I’m not packing. I’m leaving right now.” He sniffed an undershirt he picked up from the floor, found it a bit musty, and traded it for a clean one in the drawer. “Go back to bed. I’ll be back soon.”

  “Is Gen going?

  “Arthur won’t let her go with him. If anyone knows about the dangerous stuff that Max might have gotten into, it’s Arthur. He wouldn’t let her near any danger.”

  “You keep saying things like that about Arthur,” she said and yawned, stretching her arms to the side. “Like he knows stuff about stuff.”

  Casimir wanted to nibble on her arms as he marveled at the way her white tee-shirt stretched across her breasts. “You’re not going.”

  “Gen says she’s going,” Roxanne said, reading a text on her phone, “so I’m going, too. I’ll go get Juliana and pack a toy bag for her.”

  “Just leave her with my sister and her cousins. Juliana won’t even notice we’re missing. She wouldn’t even come over and hug me today when I visited the nursery because she was having too much fun.” Their two-year-old was a bundle of gregarious lightning who loved playing with other kids. Casimir liked to think she took after him.

  “You’re sure Anastasia won’t mind?” Roxanne asked, dithering.

  “Ana has five of her own children and a full nursemaid staff. She probably won’t notice an extra one.”

  Chapter Three

  Nice, France

  Roxanne

  Roxanne Neil-van Amsberg hated helicopters.

  She had never mentioned her helicopter-phobia to her husband, Casimir van Amsberg, because it had rarely been a problem. She’d been Casimir’s paralegal assistant for years, and they’d traveled together all over the world for business. All that time, riding in helicopters as a means of transportation had never happened.

  Planes, trains, yachts, and limos, sure.

  Helicopters? Why on fiddle-dee-dee Earth would anyone need to ride in a helicopter?

  “Nope,” she said to Casimir as they walked across the tarmac from the plane at the private airport terminal. A chilly December wind blew from the west, even in Nice, which lies on the Mediterranean Sea. “Nope. Not happening.”

  He held her hand, smiling gently. He looked like the Scandinavian he was in the harsh lights from the streetlamps, with ice-pale skin and green eyes, a bit of auburn and blond streaking his brown hair. “Roxanne, my rock, my darling, you were the one who wanted to come along.”

  Roxanne planted her feet on the asphalt. They’d just landed after a quick, one-hour flight from Amsterdam to Nice, France. Arthur and Gen had already been waiting in the terminal for them because they’d arrived from Paris, which was closer. She said, “I am not getting into that whirring death trap. Why didn’t we just fly on the plane all the way to Monaco?”

  “Monaco isn’t big enough for an airport,” Casimir said, taking her elbow and nudging her toward the helicopter.

  “You are not fooling me with that. Lots of people go to Monaco all the time.”

  “Monaco is not physically large enough for an airport,” Casimir corrected himself as they approached the whirlybird. “A runway would take up half the country. One flies into Nice and then takes a helicopter or a car to Monaco. The road is narrow and winds along the edges of cliffs. The helicopter is much faster and safer than driving in the dark.”

  “Everywhere in Georgia could have a runway even if they don’t actually have one! Why would anyone live in a place too tiny for an airport?” she argued.

  “Because Max was born there, I imagine. Come on. Quentin is going to think that we’re not grateful for him sending a chopper for us.”

  “Gen!” Roxanne called back to where Countess Genevieve Finch-Hatten, Arthur’s wife, was walking with her husband. “You’re not getting on that overgrown bumblebee, are you?”

  In the early-morning darkness, Gen shrugged, her tent-like black dress flowing over her pregnant tummy. “Seems okay to me.”

  “These things crash all the time! They’re fundamentally unsafe!” Roxanne yelled, struggling a little but not too much because she just wanted someone to tell her that it would be okay.

  Behind her, Gen turned to her husband, Arthur. “Is that true?”

  Casimir took Rox’s hand in his large, warm one and told her, “I promise that it’s perfectly maintained and will not crash. It’s a ten-minute flight, and we’ll be right there at the heliport, minutes from the casino, and we can start asking people what’s going on with Max.”

  From behind her, Roxanne heard Arthur tell Gen, “If it were unsafe, I wouldn’t let you near it. It’s perfectly fine as long as Maxence himself isn’t flying it. He’s terrible at piloting anything.”

  Gen asked him, “You’ll make sure he isn’t flying the helicopter, then?”

  Gen’s little bit of native Texas accent soothed Rox. Just anybody Southern or Western did, these days. Sometimes, she felt like a tiny Georgia peach tossed into the ocean and floating around from shore to shore.

  “We’re here to find Max,” Arthur said to Gen. “If Max is flying that helicopter, then we’ve found him, and we’ll go right back to Paris. I do need to get back to Paris. I didn’t get what I went there for.”

  “What’s that?” Roxanne turned and asked them.

  “Art,” Arthur said, as Gen called back, “Cheese.”

  They looked at each other.

  When Roxanne turned back, the helicopter was right there.

  It lurked.

  It loomed.

  It hulked in the predawn sky, its blades chopping the darkness. “Caz, no.”

  Near her ear, Casimir whispered, “It’s a ten-minute flight, and we need to find Maxence. Please get on this helicopter.” He backed off, and his emerald green eyes, just visible in the cabin light from inside, implored her.

  Fine. Just fine.

  “If we die,” Roxanne said as she clambered over the rail and toward the seats, “I swear on Baby Jesus’s tiny, holy toes that I will haunt you in this life and the next and you will never have any peace throughout all eternity.”

  “Deal,” Casimir said as he handed her into the helicopter.

  Roxanne buckled her seat belt and yanked the strap until she couldn’t breathe and probably wasn’t digesting last night’s supper, either.

  The whirring of the helicopter blades above them took on more intensity, and the engine howled.

  She grabbed both a handle on the ceiling and Casimir’s hand and clung to them for dear life. She wasn’t so much praying as wordlessly screaming for God to get her out of this insanity alive.

  Chapter Four

  Monaco

  Gen

  Rescuing people while pregnant is not recommended.

  Genevieve Finch-Hatten—Countess Severn if you wanted to get technical about it—was about six months pregnant, and her bump was becoming unwieldy. She was carrying the still-unnamed heir to the Earldom of Severn who would someday, with a little luck, inherit the estate and fortune from her husband, Arthur-Finch Hatten, Lord Severn.

  She had just used the bathroom in the airport terminal in Nice fifteen minutes ago, and she already needed to pee again.

  That midnight call from Maxence’s security people to Arthur—begging him to come and find the guy who was their responsibility because they were not skilled enough to track one exceedingly tall man in a crowd—did not amuse her in the slightest. People needed to do their dang jobs and not call in unpaid and unofficial cavalry because they were incompetent.

  Especially when Arthur was needed in Paris.

  And she was needed back in London at
her law firm the next day.

  And dang it, she needed to be in a house or an office with a bathroom right there, not traipsing around Europe in planes and helicopters and cars that were too far from proper facilities.

  This was their third trip to mainland Europe in the last month. She was going to need to start staying home soon.

  Gen and Arthur never discussed why he was needed where he went, just that he was needed. Whether or not Arthur had a particular set of skills, as the cliché goes, was never a topic of conversation. It was obvious that his longstanding connections to the elite world of the very wealthy and royal made him an obvious asset for an intelligence service.

  Not just any intelligence service, of course.

  Arthur was first and foremost an Englishman. His noble family had placed several monarchs on the English and British thrones and toppled several others off of them, and he joked that he could dethrone the current family any time he wished.

  Gen was relatively sure he was joking.

  He was probably joking that he would ever try to dethrone the current occupants, the House of Windsor. That, she was sure of.

  Pretty sure.

  But it didn’t speak as to whether he could, and Gen would not have bet against him.