Page 10 of Prince

The white guy beside her, yet another military guy wearing black fatigues and armed to the teeth, turned back. One of his light brown eyebrows rose above the rim of his mirrored sunglasses. “You okay?”

“Yeah, this place smellsgreat.”

He looked out the door, then back at her. “You mean the sea breeze?”

“Is that what it is?”

“It’s a little fresher than the regular ocean, I guess.”

“That’s whatthe oceansmells like? Which ocean is it?”

His head tilted. “The Mediterranean Sea isn’t an ocean, but it’s pretty big. It’s cleaner than a lot of areas of the Pacific or Atlantic, so maybe that’s what you’re smelling.”

“I’m from the middle of the desert in America. I’ve never smelled the ocean before.”

He grinned at her. “Welcome to Monaco. Make sure you spend some time on the beach. It’s great.”

Dree followed the guy as she stooped to exit the helicopter. He held out his hand to steady her as she hopped down onto the asphalt, and she retrieved her backpack with everything she owned in the world inside.

“I’m Louis Bernard,” he said.

She stuck out her hand to shake. “Dree Clark. Pleased to meetcha.”

Late afternoon sunshine slanted over an electric-blue sea that stretched southeast to the horizon and threw silver speckles on the wavelets. Wind gusted over the water and patted her face, fluttering her unzipped puffy coat at her sides and ruffling her hair.

The long tarmac of the heliport was painted with red and white bullseyes. Royal blue helicopters clung to the targets like bottle-blue dragonflies gingerly resting on a sidewalk.

Thick red and white stripes marked their tail fins.

She looked over at the heliport building, where Maxence was walking.

A banner composed of a red rectangle atop a white one snapped on the flagpole in the sea breeze.

The helicopters, the small building, and some of the trucks outside were marked with a shield filled in with a red and white diamond-checkerboard pattern, which Dree had seen before.

She’d seen it when Maxence had been sponge-bathing in their tent and when he’d rolled up his sleeves to his elbows in that Paris hotel and bared his thick forearms.

The tattoo on his right arm, the one with a ring of three shields, had thatexactpattern on the shield pointing down toward Max’s wrist.

Thatwas the last thing, the thing that finallyconvincedher he was Prince Maxence of Monaco. His body was literally marked with Monaco’s insignia.

No,Monacowas marked withhisinsignia.

Maxence really was a royal prince who’d been slumming in Paris and then had been on a charity tour of Nepal. That wasn’t a joke. His ancestors had ruled lands and commanded armies to fight wars.

Her family were sheep farmers, infantry cannon fodder, and peasants.

A part of Dree’s mind was very busy insisting that people were people, and that royal people were no better than other people who were the salt of the earth, the ones who grew the food and milked the sheep that kept the world fed.

Whether Maxence wasbetteror not, he and Dree were very different, as he stood in his tailored, stylish suit on the soil of the country he might rule someday, while she wore grimy jeans and a ski jacket from a church’s poor barrel.

A group of people emerged from the building and approached Maxence. The new group looked like a bunch of business folks because they were all wearing suits or, for some of the women, professional-looking black dresses.

One bald, rotund man with a bouncy gait looked like a pink balloon in a beige suit as he bobbed across the asphalt. He approached Max with his hand extended.

Maxence shook the man’s hand and inclined his head while the man spoke.

Dree couldn’t stop staring at Max. He did look at home here, alighting from a helicopter, withhisherald on it, while dark limousines stood waiting in the traffic circle on the other side of the fence.