Prince: Royal Romantic Suspense (Billionaires in Disguise: Maxence Book 5) by Blair Babylon

Author:Blair Babylon [Babylon, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950220267
Publisher: Malachite Publishing LLC
Published: 2021-03-08T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Prayer II

Maxence

Maxence pressed his palms together, his shoulders and pectoral muscles straining.

Sweat dripped off his eyebrow in the shadowy closet.

He spent hours praying the Major Hours of the Liturgy every day.

Every Sunday and other days of holy obligation when he was at home in Monaco, Maxence and his security staff strolled from the palace to the Cathedral of Our Lady Immaculate, which was over a century old and held the bodies of Maxence’s ancestors, parents, and older brother. The ten-minute walk through the medieval town of Monaco-Ville on the headlands high above the harbor allowed Maxence a few moments to reflect before they entered the Cathedral and Maxence sat with the congregation outside of the altar rail. He did not attempt to assist during the Mass as he would have outside of Monaco. In this tiny city-state conquered by his ancestors, Maxence was just another soldier, not a priest.

No matter how he longed to stand above the altar and take the consecrated host from the priest.

They could tell him that he wasn’t a cleric when he was in Monaco, but they couldn’t take prayer away from him.

But that afternoon was different.

He’d dug into the back of his closet and found his duffel bag from Nepal. The musty, sweaty shirt he’d been wearing when Quentin Sault found him was crumpled into a ball in the bottom corner, and he’d put it on. The white square had been in a pocket of his toiletries bag, and he’d wedged it into the clerical collar, scraping his Adam’s apple in the process.

The shirt stank of grime and labor. The stench of an unwashed man had ripened into something genuinely foul.

He hated the smell of his unwashed body and his own filth, but wearing the shirt was the last time he’d felt close to the Divine.

So he endured it, his soul crying out to God in the small, dim closet.

Light from a small overhead lamp bathed the crucifix. The closed door behind him muffled any sound or vibration.

His consciousness shrank to the confines of the closet.

Maxence reached out his hand and slammed the switch above his head where he kneeled.

The light above the crucifix extinguished, and the darkness that snapped through the tiny, enclosed closet was absolute.

The inside of Maxence’s head screamed.

His skin crawled under the reek of the shirt.

The blackness and the tiny space, filled with his own breath and his stench, pressed on his flesh, smashing him.

I give you my pain.

I give you my fear.

I will endure anything if you show me the way.

Give me a sign, or give me certainty, or give me the strength to put my feet on the right path.

When Maxence couldn’t stand it anymore, he slapped the light switch to turn the light back on.

He was lying on his side on the rough carpeting, staring up at the silent wooden carving.

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