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.”