Page 24 of Order

Seriously, he worried about their adenoids.

It didn’t help that right after they had turned out the lights to go to sleep, Alfonso had quipped, “If you’re uncomfortable on the floor, Max, I volunteer to go bunk with Nurse Andrea Catherine.”

“You’re pronouncing it wrong,” Max had told him from the floor between the two beds. “It’sANN-Dree-uh,notAhn-DRAY-ah.”

“How did she get on this mission, anyway?”

Max gritted his teeth. “She’s a nurse practitioner. Our peds doctor backed out, and she volunteered.”

“But, how did she come to volunteer? Did you know her from your previous drunken debauchery before you took Holy Orders?”

Not from before, no.“Her Catholic high school principal knows Father Thomas Aquinas of Immaculate Conception Church in Arizona.”

“Oh, Catholic Charities mafia.”

The wooden floor rubbed a sore spot on Maxence’s tailbone, and he shifted over to his side, pulling the two thin blankets with him. His butt became cold. “Yes. Quite.”

Alfonso said, his voice rising wistfully, “She is very beautiful.”

Max growled, “This is a Catholic Charities trip, not a hook-up cruise.” He coughed so that it sounded like he had something in his throat.

Isaak said in the dark, “I didn’t take a vow of celibacy, and neither has she.”

Max breathed slowly, feigning sleep.

Alfonso and Isaak hadn’t taken vows of celibacy, and neither had Dree.

Max reminded himself that, while he may be there to keep Dree safe, he was not there to be her chaperone, and he was not her father.

But if either one of those two assholes laid a finger on her, Max was going to kill him.

They would be out in the wilds of Nepal.

No one would find a shallow grave covered with rocks.

That was rather further down that line of thought than he had meant to go. He wasn’t going to kill anyone and bury them in a shallow grave.

No one in Max’s family had done that for at least a few generations. His ancestors definitely had, but those were different times. His father probably hadn’t. Neither had his uncle, most likely.

Maxence’s older brother Pierre, however, was probably a tossup.

And then there was his cousin, Alexandre, but Alex hadn’tburiedanyone in a shallow grave.

That Max knew of.

But if Alex had killed someone and successfully buried them in a shallow grave and no one found them, Maxence wouldn’t know about it.

Alexandre was probably an outlier.

Max’s thoughts flopped and scurried around for six hours until daybreak. He blamed his utter lack of sleep on the floor and the blanket for a pillow, not on his mind grinding over what those two bastards had dared to say.

The next morning, Maxence dragged himself downstairs to the small lobby of the inn, exceedingly ill-prepared for a four-hour motorcycle ride on a dirt road with a slightly off-centered backpack.

Overnight, snow had dusted the town and mountains, covering everything with white. Their boots crunched the crisp layer like they were walking on a giant, delicate eggshell laid over the earth.

The farmland beyond the town was a monochromatic landscape of white canvas sliced by the black-ink pen strokes of stone walls delineating the fields. The mountains around the valley grew more imposing when covered with ice because only the largest, most dangerous boulders jabbed through the snow.

They didn’t leave too early in the morning because they wanted to give the sun a chance to warm the air, and the delay of an hour spent idling over sweet, milky chai made the four-hour ride more tolerable.