Page 42 of Prince

At the back of the office where the door was, Maxence was saying goodbye to—Dree checked her notes—his great-uncle Louis Grimaldi and his cousin Marie-Therese.

Her mind was a buzzing mass ofwant.

When Dree glanced over her shoulder to peek at them, Marie-Therese was hugging Maxence again, her hand pressed against the back of his suit jacket wandering lower, ending up near the small of his back.

Maxence stepped backward and, with a firm motion, set Marie-Therese away from him.

Dree straightened to face the desk.

Hmm.It looked like Marie-Therese was from the branch of the royal family that didn’t have a problem with inbreeding.

Max told Quentin Sault to follow them out and wait outside. It was a good thing Max remembered to send Sault away before they did something dirty because she forgot that security guy stood back there for hours at a time.

The door clicked shut.

And then Dree heard another click.

Had helockedit?

Maxence strolled back to the desk. His eyes held the darkness of desires she did not dare mention. “Come here,pet.”

Dree laid the computer tablet on the desk and walked around to where he was standing.

From his extravagant height, Maxence gazed down at her, smiling, with his head tilted rakishly to the side. It was only when she was standing right next to him that Dree remembered he was so astonishingly tall, six-feet-four with broad shoulders that seemed to fill the whole room.

His voice dropped an octave to a sexy rumble, “On the desk, face-down.”

Dree hated how naïve she was, but she couldn’t help that she’d grown up on a sheep farm instead of a hippie commune. “I’m not sure what you want.”

His gaze softened a little, and he stroked along her jawline from her ear to her chin with his thumb. “Sometimes I forget that the siren who announced to the Buddha bar that she was going to screw every guy in the place can be quite the ingénue.”

“Uh, yeah.”

Max sat down in the manager’s chair and leaned back, his long legs wide. “Sit.”

Dree knew how to do that, and she knew what happened the last time she’d sat on his lap.

She placed her butt right on his thigh, ready for anything.

Maxence’s arm behind her curved around her hip, steadying her. “Have you heard of the concept of the safe word?”

She shook her head.

He drew a line with one finger over her bare shoulder and down to her elbow, tickling. “The idea is that if I go too far, or things get too rough, you say a particular word, and I will stop.Everythingstops.”

All her attention was riveted on his one finger on the bare skin of her arm. “Are you going to go too far?”

“At some point, what I want will be too far for you. At that point, you say the safe word, and I will stop. I have to stop.”

Sounded like magic. “Okay, what’s the word?”

“You choose the word. It should be something you’ll remember even in the heat of the moment, and yet something unique enough that you won’t accidentally say it. You could also choose two words if you wanted, one as a failsafe in case you want everything to stop, and another one which means to slow down or not to go any farther, to allow you to adjust.”

Dree wasn’t scared.She wasn’t.

She was.

She asked, “What are you going to do to me that I need toadjustto?”