Max and the Prince Read Free Page A

hide away and no one in the age of Twitter and Facebook
would put two and two together?”
    “Prince is a title, that’s all. My family doesn’t have the money
one would think was attached to it. I’m maybe eightieth in line to the throne
in the UK through my father’s side, but we’re not rich—in fact you could say
we’re property rich but cash poor.”
    Max couldn’t get any of that to make sense. Why was someone
blackmailing a family with no money, and—wait, none of that answered his
original question. “So why do you need a bodyguard?”
    Lucien bit his lip. “I don’t think I do.” He held up a hand
to stop Max from responding. “The letters,” he said. He passed over another
envelope, and this time Max pulled out everything. Nine separate letters in
individual plastic wrappers with the stamp of Cardiff police on three of them
and a familiar country name on the other six. So that’s where Prince Lucien
comes from . Envelopes were attached to each, but none had gone through a
postal service as such. All hand delivered, then.
    “They’re in order,” he said. “The first six were sent to my
home before I moved here and when the police looked at them the first five were
all linked by tone. Crude and sexual, whoever wrote these was after one thing,
and they signed off OS . The sixth one is different. The first five had
my parents demanding I had a 24/7 bodyguard, and there was no way they would have
let me leave the country on my own. Look… you’ll see.”
    Max read the first one, a letter of admiration and respect,
albeit a short one. Nothing much that would ping his radar, apart from the fact
the letter had been signed off with mine forever before the simple
initials OS . It appeared all five of the letters ended the same way.
    The second was a little more insistent, suggesting Lucien
maybe hadn’t received the first, then apologizing for being a nuisance.
Although there was no return address on the first, so how the hell Lucien could
have replied even if he’d wanted to wasn’t clear.
    “That’s just irrational,” Max murmured, more to himself than
Lucien.
    “It’s like he wanted a reply,” Lucien said. “I don’t get it
either.”
    The third was angry and said in no uncertain terms that
Lucien should know better and where were his manners. Still irrational. The
fourth was where it got interesting. Abruptly the writer was saying that Lucien
wasn’t the man he thought he was, the man that OS, whoever OS was, had fallen
in love with. The letter writer said there were photos and he would hate to see
them released to the press if Lucien didn’t respond to the letters admitting he
was in love with OS.
    “That’s where I am thinking, respond to what? Is there
something in those letters I should be seeing to know who to respond to?”
    Max shook his head. “I don’t see anything. But somehow the
writer thinks you should know him. Did OS seem familiar to you? Oliver, Oscar,
something?”
    “Nothing at the time, I promise you.”
    “And the blackmail photos, I assume he means the ones I just
saw.” He turned to the next letter and confirmed his own statement. Crudely
stapled to the fifth missive was a black and white print of the blurred image
Max had just looked at with the words You think I couldn’t give you this?
All you needed to do was ask. written in block capitals. I will have
you.
    Lucien pointed at the writing. “We had checks done on printing
and the tone of the words. All of the letters are a supposed match but because
there is no part of it that is handwritten in cursive or script, we can’t get
any more from them. The authorities couldn’t find anyone with the initials OS
who had a direct link to me, but do you know how many people in my country have
those letters in their name?”
    Max glanced at Lucien, who was gesturing wildly to
underscore the question.
    “I can imagine,” he said.
    The sixth letter was different. The paper quality better,
and the words used less