Rae hesitated. That was plausible, in his twisted, Wulfie way, where major life traumas were dismissed with “Honestly, I’m fine,” and you can neglect to mention just what your last name means.
Yet, something still didn’t add up.
Wulf rested his chin on the top of her head. “I couldn’t stand living through another sunset without being married to you. If today, on yet another sunny morning, when yet other gunman stepped out of the crowd, if this time the bullet had found my heart, I wanted you to be my wife. I wanted to look in your eyes, and I wanted you to know that I love you more than anything else in the world.”
The certainty in his voice made her heart tremble. She said, “That’s not going to happen.”
But it had. Again.
“Are you upset?” he asked.
“No, but we could have waited. My mother will assure you that I have no sense, so there wasn’t much of a danger of me coming to my senses and throwing you over.”
“My opinion of you must be higher.” He kissed the top of her head, right in the middle, where she fought her vicious cowlick every morning. “I was merely waiting to find someplace beautiful and to procure a proper ring.”
“I couldn’t believe we just walked into the guy’s office and it was all ready for us.”
Wulf chuckled. “It might have been more involved than that.”
“Oh?”
“I published the banns the afternoon you ran from the SUV. I’ve had lawyers over here since last week, sorting out the paperwork. I copied your medical release from the Devilhouse and mine and brought them with us. I finally had to pull rank to circumvent the residency requirement. Essentially, I asserted that I own France, so I could marry there any time I wanted.”
“That was awfully presumptuous of you, to do all that and just assume that I’d say yes. I hadn’t even agreed to go to France with you.”
“It was egomaniacal arrogance, a common trait of Hannoverians, you’ll find.”
She snuggled into his chest. “Yeah. I’ve noticed.”
“I was praying that the tabloids didn’t discover the banns. They found Flicka’s three hours after they were published.”
“You did all that for me.”
He rubbed her lower back. God, his huge hands felt good, rubbing the stress out of her tendons. “Absolutely.”
“Okay, I have a feeling that you’ll be able to work your magic on this, too, but I don’t think I can plan a society wedding and take my final exams in six weeks.”
Wulf’s arms relaxed around her. “Did you notice the wicked gleam in my sister’s eye when she asked if there was to be a church wedding? Flicka will be home from her honeymoon in a week. I predict that she will arrive at our house in eight days with her scrapbooks and a professional planner in tow. That child does love to throw parties. Again, you can be as involved as you want, but you can also pick out everything in one afternoon and then merely show up, if you decide that. Quite honestly, it would make your sister-in-law wildly happy.”
Rae rested her face against him, listening to his strong heart canter in his chest. They were safe. She would sleep in his arms tonight and for the rest of her life. She tightened her arms in a firm hug around his trim waist.
Wulf’s voice was as light as the puffs of sunset-stained clouds breezing past the airplane’s windows when he asked, “On an unrelated subject, do you think there is any chance you might be with child?”
Every joint in her limbs and spine locked. “What?”
“It was just a notion. Never mind.”
“No. No. Of course not. No.”
“Oh.” Wulf’s single syllable was as neutral as Switzerland.
But she started calculating,—thirty days has September, April, June, and November,—but last month was February, which made it worse, and she came up with the number thirty-seven.
Oh, God. Thirty-seven. Nine days late.
Wonder filled her, and she thought of a baby looking up at her with crystal-blue eyes, holding his tiny body in her arms, and she caught her breath with longing for it, but it all collapsed under shock. “Oh my God!”
Wulf’s arms around her tightened, and shaking pounded through her whole body.
She held onto his waist, trying to not fall apart. His strong arms held her tight. “Oh, God, Wulf!”
“Does that mean, perhaps?” His body rose against her, like he had rocked forward on his toes.
“I can’t drop out of school now!”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t allow such a thing.”
“Allow it! You think you’ll allow me to do anything?” Despite her vehemence, she buried her face in his warm chest and hung on.
He stroked her hair. “That’s not what I meant. English is my third language, and I misspoke.”
She clung to his waist with all her strength. “I should hope so!”
“I meant that you must finish college and graduate school, or medical school, or whatever you choose. The plan hasn’t changed. You’ll finish the rest of this semester in six weeks, and then we’ll decide where to live. I have standing offers for visiting professorships at Oxford, Chicago, and Princeton. Tell me where you want to finish your education, where you want to go to graduate school or medical school, and I’ll make it happen. After that, we’ll decide where to put the pilot clinic for A Ray of Light.”
A tsunami of crazy crashed over her head, and she was drowning in panic. “Every time my mom had a baby, one of my brothers, it nearly killed her. The diapers and the laundry and the cooking and the cleaning and the feeding and the insanity of it all. She missed church because she couldn’t get it all done. My mother missed church!”
“You won’t be doing all that,” he said.
“Babies need all those things. You have to sterilize the bottles and wash the diapers and cook the baby food and sew the baby clothes and iron the onesies and all the other stuff that I don’t even know how to do!” She couldn’t do all that and go to class and study for tests and write a thesis and meet with professors and do her counseling internship. Panic echoed in her head.
“But you don’t have to do all that,” Wulf said.
“Of course, I would, if that’s right, if I am. Who else would do all that stuff?”
“My staff,” Wulf said. “We would add a few people to help.”
“Oh, no. Not a nanny. I couldn’t do that.” Flicka had told her about when Wulf and Constantin’s favorite nanny had vanished on them. They had concluded that they were all alone in the whole world except for each other, and they were right.
“I would never presume to tell you what to do, but someone else could buy and wash the clothes, make the baby food, purchase the diapers, and all that. You could do the important things with any hypothetical child. Besides, wasn’t there some research that showed that, in a stable environment, children with more caregivers are generally better adjusted?”
The flipping in her chest slowed. “Yeah, allomothers. But you said you had nannies, and it wasn’t good for you.”
He shrugged. “Our nannies were routinely discharged without warning or a chance to say goodbye. Constantin and I saw our mother perhaps once a week, and our father less than that. We were shipped off to boarding school when we were five. It was badly managed.”
“I don’t want to do that to a kid. I won’t.”
“Of course not.” He settled her closer into his chest, nestling her in his arms.
The insanity at the thought of doing all that still washed through her, shaking her arms and knees. “But I can’t! It’s impossible to finish school when you have a child!”
Wulf said, “I did.”
Rae stretched her arms around his neck, still shaking. “What do you mean?”
Wulf said, “I finished high school and did most of my undergraduate while raising Flicka. I was fifteen. She was six.”
Rae gasped, breathing in for the first time. She pulled back and looked up at him. “How did you do it?”
He disengaged and drew h
er down to sit on the bed with him. “I imagine it would be rather easier with two parents and not being a teenager oneself.”
Her heart ran roughshod in her chest. “Tell me how you did it.”
“You do what is important and delegate the rest. Flicka wanted to take her lunch from home to the dining room at Le Rosey every day and wanted me, and only me, to make her a turkey or ham sandwich. She was driven back to our house at four, and if I wasn’t home by five, she kicked the nannies. We ate supper at six, so I had a staff to cook for us. We did our homework together after supper. I would drill her on her spelling words. She would quiz me on Russian vocabulary and got quite a head start on Russian.”
Disbelief dropped her jaw. “You needed to be quizzed on memorizing vocabulary words?”
He shrugged. “It was important to her.” His hand trailed down Rae’s spine, like he was thinking. “You haven’t mentioned all that to anyone, have you?”
His memory? “Of course not, Wulf. I wouldn’t.”
“Good. I am regarded with far too much curiosity as it is.” He paused. “Only you and Flicka know the extent of it. Yoshi and Dieter suspect.”
She nodded against the warmth of his shoulder. “Finish telling me about Flicka.”
“I didn’t meet Flicka until she was three months old because I was away at school. It wasn’t until our mother fell ill that I came home for that last summer. I missed everything when she was a baby. I don’t want to miss that again.”
“You have to do your stocks and things.”
“Generally, I finish adjusting my market positions by ten o’clock.”
“Babies are up all night.”
“I’m up all night.”
“You were going to teach me to ski. We were going to drink that bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon you’ve been saving. I screwed it all up.”
“Reagan, if you are with child, then you have made me happier, which I didn’t think was possible. I’ll support any decision, but I want a child with you. I want children with you. When I’m with you, I feel alive, the world feels alive, and I want little auburn-haired, brown-eyed children chasing the hounds through Schloss Marienberg someday.”
Their hands were entwined in a huge knot of fingers between them. She said, “Any kid of mine would behave better than that.”
“I’ll make sure that you have class time and study time and that we have time together. I have raised my sister while attending school. I know how to do it.” He studied her eyes. “Do you think it might be so?”
“I don’t know. I have to take a test, but I’m late.”
Wulf’s blond eyebrows pinched together, and then realization brightened his face. “Ah. I hadn’t heard that colloquialism before.”
Horrible thoughts gathered like storm clouds in her head. “That isn’t why you proposed, is it? And we got married so fast? This is the twenty-first century, Wulf. You didn’t have to.” She grabbed the rings on her hand and tugged. “I didn’t trap you. I never meant to trap you. Oh, my God! You’ve probably had women trying to do that your whole life! I’m so sorry!”
He swiveled and scooped her up in his arms, cradling her in his lap. He flicked her hand away and pressed the rings down over her knuckle.
“I deny it,” he whispered near her ear. “I will always deny it. As I said, I tried to propose two weeks ago, and I’ve been arranging things ever since. I suspected nothing until we were on the plane to France, and I was never sure. If it had mattered one whit, I would have asked you, but I could not bear to wait even one more day to marry you.”
On her left hand, the platinum-bound garnet glinted dark blue and flashed ruby red in the overhead fluorescent lights. The diamonds around the stone scattered the fading sunlight sneaking in the porthole window, throwing laser flecks on the walls of the airplane. Under the engagement ring, a second platinum band wound around her finger. “What would you have done if I had said no and that I was sure that I wasn’t pregnant?”
His hands tightened around her, holding her. “I have contracted this jet for three months, and it would have been fueled and waiting to take us to Las Vegas the moment you relented. You said that people can marry there almost immediately.”
Of course he would remember that.
“Since we married in France,” Wulf said, “the jet is at our disposal for an extended honeymoon. After we marry in a proper ceremony in Switzerland after your exams, we can go wherever you want. We’ll abuse that pretty new passport of yours until it’s as ragged as mine. Where do you want to go first?”
All those lines on the Devilhouse’s travel questionnaire swam before her eyes. “London?”
“Wonderful. We’ll stay with my cousins. There are some excellent places for music in London. We might even be there for the Glastonbury festival, if you’d like. Then where?”
Rae thought fast. “Belize.”
Wulf’s smile looked like she had fascinated him. “I’ve never been there.”
“I’ve read about it. I love to swim. I’ve heard the snorkeling there is phenomenal, and I can translate Spanish for you.”
He threw his head back and laughed, a full-throated laugh that Rae had rarely heard out of him, and all the instances were in the past couple weeks. His laugh was joyous and exuberant and infectious, and she started laughing with him.
All Rae had to do was let herself be happy, so she released all the crazy thoughts and relaxed in Wulf’s strong arms.
Wulf rolled her down on the bed and crawled on top of her, burying his face in her neck, still chuckling. His scent, cinnamon tea and musk and tangerines, puffed out of his shirt collar, and she nuzzled her face into his shirt.
He said, “You’re mine. All mine. I’ve thought of nothing else for weeks. You didn’t trap me. I trapped you. I have wrapped my life around you, and now you can’t get away from me.”
His lips touched hers, and he brushed the most delicate of kisses over her lips.
She reached around his neck, threaded her fingers into his bright gold hair, and pulled him down, kissing him hard because she was famished for him.
His mouth opened above hers, and he tilted his head, locking his lips over her open mouth. His back bowed above her like a bull, and drove his tongue into her mouth. She pushed up against him, and he groaned against her lips. His hands wrapped in her hair and locked her head down to the bed.
His hot mouth chewed down her neck, setting her skin on fire.
At thirty thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, Rae sighed Wulf’s name, and they breathed together.
A Confession, Dieter
Dieter Schwarz
Dieter stood in the shiny commercial kitchen of Wulfram’s house, drinking coffee, while Wulfram saw Reagan Stone to a car to drive her to class at the university. Hans had drawn chauffeur and bodyguard duty today, which served him right for holding down Shloss Southwestern while Dieter and most of the rest of the Welfenlegion had been on duty twenty-four and seven over in Europe. Hans looked particularly chipper and well-rested, the bastard. No one had asked him to dodge a bullet twice in the past few days. The stitched-up crease on Dieter’s triceps still throbbed.
He had worn his sharpest black suit to talk with Wulfram. His starched collar scratched the back of his neck as he rehearsed his apology and the assurances gained from Luca Wyss only a few hours ago that Valencia and Pajari were safe if not unharmed.
The door to the garage thumped closed behind Hans and Rae Stone. With that, Dieter and Wulfram were alone in the kitchen.
Wulfram turned and strutted toward the door to the living room, a small smile disrupting his usually inscrutable expression with an odd lightness.
Dieter cleared his throat. “Herr von Hannover.”
Wulfram stopped and looked at him. His smile was already gone, and he again looked like the cold monarch and sniper that he was.
Damn, but Dieter was going to miss him. Their friendship was over a decade in the making and intense in the way that only mutual mortal risk and military camara
derie could forge.
Wulfram asked, “Yes, Schwarz?”
Dieter removed an envelope from his suit pocket. Speaking Alemannic, the Swiss dialect that they spoke together, he said, “I should like to submit my resignation, Herr von Hannover.”
Wulfram glanced at the envelope in Dieter’s hand and the blank expression that Dieter maintained on his face.
Dieter would have predicted that Wulfram would react with cold anger at evidence of such an absolute betrayal. Dieter would have.
Instead, Wulfram’s lips parted, and his breath caught in his chest. “Dieter, what have you done?”
Skiing in June
A Billionaires in Disguise: Rae and Wulf
Epilogue, #4
By: Blair Babylon
Chapter 1
Rae
When Rae and Wulf had left the Southwest desert ten hours before, the blistering summer sunset had scraped Rae’s arms through the tinted window of the SUV that had driven them to the airport.
Now, snow. Mountains blanketed with snow. Two feet of icy base and more powder last night, and the Argentinian morning sun shot beams off of it like stage lights. Crystalline snow stung Rae’s face like salt flying in the wind.
The temperature difference was nearly a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and the cold air stuck pins through Rae’s new ski jacket during the quick trot from the SUVs to the ski chalet’s lobby. She had ordered the coat online in a hurry, as Wulf had made reservations here less than a week ago. The June blizzard had dropped snow early in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter. This chalet usually didn’t open until late June or early July.
Money and privilege changed everything, even the laws of time and space. If she wanted something impossible, like to go skiing in June, Wulf arranged for them to go skiing in June. Rae felt like a desert rat that had crawled into an exclusive ski chalet on the wrong half of the world.
Sunlight glared brilliant white off the snow drifts outside the huge two-story windows, outshining the roaring fire in the fireplace and throwing thick wedges of light over the rustic wood and plush conversation groupings. Tendrils of wood smoke hung in the air and clung to her clothes as she walked.
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