Page 38 of One Night in Monaco

“Yeah, Violet. He rescues everything and everybody. He’s got a complex.”

“And he likes to keep pets, too,” Arthur said, one eyebrow rising just slightly.

They did not need to continue that line of conversation. Casimir was painfully aware that he was the stodgy, vanilla one and didn’t particularly like to discuss his friends’ sex lives. He was Dutch, not a Dane. “Anyway, we are agreed that if Maxence thought Simone was in danger or distress, he would leap to play Sir Galahad.”

“Probably not Galahad,” Arthur muttered. “More like Lancelot, bedding the queen at his first chance.”

“Oh, come on,” Gen said, smirking at her husband. “He wouldn’t poach me.”

“I don’t think he’d plan to, but I don’t leave you alone with him for a reason.”

Gen shook her head. “And yet he thinks he wants to be a—”

Arthur said, “He won’t. It’s not his nature. I don’t think they’ll take him.”

“But where is he?” Casimir asked, knowing every minute might be important if Pierre or Estebe Fournier were on Max’s tail.

“Genoa,” Roxanne said, looking at her phone screen. “He took her to Genoa, Italy.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow at her, while Casimir grinned. His Roxanne was pragmatic, organized, and a certified genius at researching any question, legal or real-life. He said, “Pray, tell us.”

Roxanne held up her phone, which showed a mostly blue map on the screen. “If he took her to the airport in Nice, France in one of those whirring, flying-death contraptions—”

She meant a helicopter, Casimir assumed.

“—he’d be back by now. He would’ve returned to Monaco and been back in the casino by one in the morning, probably looking for someone else to spend the night with, but he wasn’t. The airport in Nice is too obvious, anyway. Pierre and Estebe probably both have teams waiting for them in Nice, so they must not have gone there because those guys are still following us. So, what’s the next airport over, one where they wouldn’t be looking for him? Genoa, Italy. There’s a connecting flight to Mauritius at eleven o’clock this morning. He’s putting her on a plane in ten minutes.”

“We could wait for him to return withThe Last Toyat the yacht club,” Arthur said, “but those brutes would follow us and be waiting, too. We need to slip away from them and find Maxence before they do to warn him about Estebe and Pierre. It’s a two-hour drive to Genoa, at a minimum. We’d never get there in time, and he might be almost back here before we got there. We need something faster.”

“Not another damn helicopter,” Roxanne said.

“I have an idea,” Casimir said, flipping over his phone and tapping the screen.

“Even in a Lamborghini, we couldn’t get to Genoa that fast,” Arthur said with a slight frown.

Casimir grinned. “One of my clients has a yacht here. It can cruise at seventy knots or more. I’ll see if I can borrow it. We can be in Genoa in under an hour.”

“Who’s that?” Roxanne asked him, swiping her phone closed.

“Alexandre Grimaldi. The one who wanted advice on how to refuse an inheritance. Maxence’s cousin.”

Arthur chuckled. “I’m sure we’re both related to Maxence somehow if you go back far enough.”

Roxanne laughed at him. “You bluebloods are like Deep South hillbillies, marrying cousin-wives.”

Gen smiled over her cup of herbal tea. “Bloodlines more tangled than the Plantagenets.”

“Oh, yeah,” Roxanne said to her. “The Plantagenets, like Rae says.”

Chapter Fifteen

Flirting with Disaster

Roxanne

Roxanne and Casimir walked from the hotel to the marina on their way to save Maxence.

Arthur had insisted that Gen should ride in a car due to her delicate condition. He also insisted that he could lose anyone tailing them in the tunnels under Monaco.