Billionaire Ever After

by Blair Babylon

  Dieter could have given Wulf some competition on this slope. Dieter’s personal security agency was in its infancy, but Wulf had hired him to provide an additional layer of protection for his wedding next week. It would be especially convenient to have a man who could return fire standing at the altar with Wulf during the wedding.

  The glistening snow stretched like a blank page far below them, all the way from their lofty plateau to a small valley where the bases of several hills met. Skiers glided over the snow at the bottom, dark shadows on the bright white, waiting for the helicopter or the trolley to ferry them back to the hotel.

  Behind Wulf, the lifting helicopter sprayed them with fine powder as he stepped into his bindings, peppering the back of his jacket with the cold granules. The fluttering air from its rotors beat on his ears like the calming roar of ocean waves.

  Friedhelm dug into the snow with his poles and set an aggressive course down the mountain, intending to beat Wulf and the rest of them down the hill and thus secure the base.

  Wulf sucked in a deep breath of the frigid air, chilling his throat, and adjusted his goggles before pushing off and careening down the double black-diamond slope. He skied hard, braking and turning just before rocks and drop-offs that marred the smooth sheets of snow. Hurtling downhill drove all thought from his mind, and he reacted to the blowing snow and his skis slipping on the ice, skiing hard.

  For ten blessed minutes, Wulf raced his men without numbers or images intruding upon his mind, and they arrived at the bottom ruddy-cheeked and laughing.

  They skied over to the helipad to await their next flight to another peak, when Wulf heard a woman call his name across the glittering snow.

  As he recognized her voice, quick memories rode over the surface of his mind: Josephine’s dark eyelashes sweeping down over her pale green eyes as she curtseyed to him the first time they met, when he was nine and she was eight. She had been a transfer student to Le Rosey because her mother had kept her home a few extra years. Wulf had danced with Josephine at the middle school cotillions thirty-seven times, and in all those times, she almost never managed to raise her shy eyes to his. They had dated briefly in high school. She was a hereditary Grand Duchess, and Wulf’s father had approved of her except for the fact that Wulf was far too young, one of the few points on which Wulf and his father had ever agreed.

  Wulf had been her first, a fact that neither had divulged to anyone he knew of.

  And now she was on a ski slope in Argentina, calling to him, just after he had seen Marie-Therese Grimaldi in the chalet’s lobby a few hours ago.

  The odds of this being a coincidence were astronomical. He had calculated them.

  He turned, maneuvering his skis, and found her slim form skiing over to him. She was wearing pale blue, a color that she knew turned her eyes a deeper shade of green. She had often worn dresses of that color when they had dated.

  “Salut!’ She said brightly and lifted her ski goggles up to her head, leaving faint red imprints on her cheeks. The pale blue ski suit did indeed brighten her eyes.

  “Hello, Josephine.” Wulf heard his security detail crunch over the snow, shifting to encompass her as they watched. He said, “Imagine meeting you here.”

  “Yes! Imagine that! How are you these days?”

  Wulf composed himself. “Quite well. I am married.”

  Shock crossed her slim features. “I—I thought you were engaged.”

  That was a fascinating reaction, and Wulf leaned in to watch her more closely. “We married in Paris a few months ago, the day after Flicka’s wedding.”

  “Oh.” Josephine glanced over at the ski hill she had come down, mentally retracing tracks. “I’m sorry that I didn’t see the invitation.”

  “It was only the civil ceremony. The religious wedding is next week. Surely you received that invitation.”

  “Yes, but—” She bit her lower lip, still looking away from him. Her lower eyelids glistened, and her voice raised to her soprano register. “I was led to believe that you had not yet legally married and were going to call it off before the ceremony.”

  Yes, here was the crux of the matter. “Who led you to believe that, Josephine?”

  She glanced back at him. Sugar snow had settled on her dark eyelashes. “Your father called me and told me as much. He said that you would be here, alone, to reconsider your options and that it would be an excellent opportunity to rekindle our friendship.”

  A wealth of information in just two sentences. “Do you know that Marie-Therese Grimaldi is here, also?”

  “Marie-Therese? Didn’t you and she used to—” New horror dawned in her green eyes.

  The helicopter approached the makeshift helipad, a bright red bulls-eye painted on the snow, and the chill from the propeller wash cut through Wulf’s winter gear. Snow sprayed through the air around them.

  He took the opportunity to look away rather than answer her. “Have you seen anyone else from school or the usual places here?”

  Josephine covered her mouth. “Oh, God, Wulfram. I’m so sorry. It didn’t occur to me. Is your wife here?”

  “She’s in the chalet, resting. I plan to join her for supper later. Would you care to accompany us?” This was charity in the extreme on Wulf’s part, but they had been close at one time.

  “Oh, no. I don’t think so,” Josephine said, her fingers crawling along the edges of her ski poles.

  “Lovely to see you, Josephine. I hope you’ll stay in touch.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t look at him.

  Wulf touched her elbow. “If anyone asks about this incident, refer them to me. I will vouchsafe that you were misled rather expertly.”

  She nodded and settled her goggles over her eyes again. “I really am sorry.”

  Wulf left her and motioned to his men, and they boarded the helicopter for their next ski run.

  That should forestall any further unfortunate misunderstandings. Josephine would seek out Marie-Therese and warn her before she made a foolish move.

  Wulf drew a deep breath as the nose of the helicopter lifted off, rocking him back in his seat, and Hans glanced at him sideways. With luck, Rae would never learn of this debacle. She shouldn’t be upset, not at this delicate time and not about something so trivial.

  However, any further such attempts by his father must be prevented. That elitist, prejudiced old man had tried to disrupt Flicka’s wedding, and Wulf would make it clear that he would brook no such interference.

  Chapter 4

  Rae

  Rae was sprawled on the couch in their suite and reading a sweet little romance novel on her phone because the college semester was over-over-over and it was summer vacation.

  Sort of.

  The gauze curtains over the plate glass windows cut the worst of the snow glare, and the afternoon sun had drifted over the top of the chalet. When the sun set that night, those glittering alabaster hills might glow orange and red like the ice had caught fire.

  Three of Wulf’s security staff—Matthias, Julien, and Romain, each one more Swissly ripped than the last—lounged on the couches, looking alert at the slightest threat and occasionally checking in by text with Wulf’s security detail who were on the mountain with him.

  Wulf should not leave her alone with three such stunning examples of Alpine manhood. She would never cheat on Wulf, not in a million years, but pregnancy hormones cavorted in her blood and details about the men—the way their biceps and pectoral muscles strained their suit jackets, the way they stretched their midsections and rubbed their rippled abdominals under their shirts—popped out when she glanced at them from the corners of her eyes. Impressions of the three of them piling on her kept distracting her from her book.

  Man, Wulf had better get back soon. These hormones were making her ornery.

  She was eating fruit and pastries from the room service cart, trying to distract herself, when a sharp knock rattled the door. She glanced over at Matthias and nearly stood, but he had already crossed the room to an
swer it. Julien and Romain rose to their feet and fluffed their suit jackets, readying themselves in case they needed to reach for their holsters.

  Even though Rae had grown up near the crime-ridden Mexican border, so many men with guns on constant alert was disconcerting.

  “Je m’excuse,” said a woman’s voice outside the door. “Is Madame von Hannover in?”

  Their civil wedding had been only a couple months before, and sudden, and a surprise for everyone including Rae, and she still wasn’t entirely used to being Mrs. von Hannover, or Madame von Hannover, or Frau von Hannover, or any of those other Missus-type names. She called out as she walked toward the door, “Yeah! I’m here!”

  Matthias stepped back to let Rae pass, but the tension in his body didn’t diminish.

  Just outside the suite door, three young women stood with their hands folded and looking downcast. All three wore regally slim trousers and sweaters, as that is what one wears apres-ski, and their reserved expressions made them seem untouchable.

  Rae waved. “Howdy, y’all!”

  The woman in the middle shook her black curls, but her black eyes didn’t flash with merriment anymore. Indeed, her quick glance at Rae and the hunch in her shoulders suggested that Marie-Therese Grimaldi was entirely uncomfortable with the current circumstances.

  One of the other two women was also familiar, and when she looked up, Rae recognized her pale green eyes and dark eyelashes. She began to bend in a curtsey, but Marie-Therese grabbed her arm before she could dip very far.

  Marie-Therese said, “Madame von Hannover, may we come in?”

  “Um, sure?” Rae opened the door farther and watched the security guys out of the corner of her eye. They seemed normally alert, not that weird hyper-alert that they supposedly didn’t show, but Rae had already done a short psychology internship and could see when their adrenaline spiked.

  Matthias was watching the three women walk inside the door with more calm interest than a reaction to a real menace.

  Rae led them to the sitting area, where her plate of donut crumbs and a half-bare vine of red grapes gave away that she had been munching, and the three women settled like doves alighting on a rose-covered bush on the far couch by the windows. Rae nonchalantly brushed some donut sugar off her lower lip.

  They all looked at each other, and Marie-Therese was evidently nominated to speak again. “Madame von Hannover, we are not sure if you remember us from Flicka’s wedding.”

  “Call me Rae, and I remember you two were Flicka’s bridesmaids. You,” she held out her hand to the blond woman on the right, “I’m not sure that we’ve met.”

  “Yes, you’re right, of course, and we’re sorry to intrude. I am Marie-Therese Grimaldi.”

  So Rae had that one right.

  Marie-Therese gestured to the green-eyed woman, “This is Josephine Alexandrovna,” and to the blonde, “and this is Kira Augusta Prinzessin von Prussia.”

  Rae knew what all that meant. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. “Nice to see you again, Josephine. A pleasure to meet you,” Rae inhaled to buy time, “Your Highness.”

  The blond woman waved a slim, pale hand as if clearing away smoke. “It’s a deposed title. It’s practically just a name. Please call me Kira.”

  Yeah, practically just a name, but not actually just a name. “Nice to meet you, Kira,” Rae corrected herself. “So, ladies, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  All three women bowed their heads in unison, like they’d been caught with all their hands in the cookie jar.

  Oh, this ought to be good.

  Marie-Therese said, “We would like to apologize. We were misled, and we—not all together but each one of us separately—were doing something rather reprehensible.”

  The fact that nothing particularly bad seemed to have happened reassured Rae. Something must have backfired badly for them to show up begging preemptive forgiveness like this. “Good Lord. What was it?”

  All three shrank further. Josephine shrank the most, and Princess Kira shriveled the least. Indeed, Kira looked not particularly shrinky at all.

  Marie-Therese said, “We don’t want to minimize our own roles. We made the decision to come here.”

  “I was wondering about you when I saw you in the lobby,” Rae said.

  “Yes, that.” Marie-Therese cleared her throat. “We were led to believe that you and Wulfram would not be marrying next week, that he was calling off the engagement, and that he would be looking for a relationship soon.”

  Shock slapped Rae like a wave of hot water in her face, and she reviewed the last few weeks with Wulf.

  He had been conducting twice-daily phone calls to his sister to check on the wedding planning because Rae had been busy surviving finals and growing lungs and kidneys, and his attention to detail didn’t seem like someone who was planning to bolt.

  Last week, he had gone with Rae to a prenatal doctor’s appointment where he heard the baby’s heart beat on the ultrasound and had smiled and nodded his approval until they got back to the SUVs, and then he had held her all the way home, murmuring to her, until they were alone in their bedroom, when he had made love to her so very gently and wiped his eyes.

  But of course, just that morning, he had quite convinced her that he hadn’t been looking at Marie-Therese.

  Wulf was not a normal man. He could see deep within people and show them what they most needed to see, and his shiny shell didn’t leak any emotion that he didn’t allow to show.

  Rae took a deep breath. If she believed anything, she believed that Wulf loved her.

  “It isn’t an engagement,” Rae said, holding up her left hand. The central stone of her ring set, a blue garnet, flashed dark blue and scarlet in the sunlight, and the diamonds around it threw prismatic sparkles on the walls. Below the engagement ring, a plain platinum band circled her finger. “We’ve been married for months.”

  The women shrank more. Kira still wasn’t as shrunken as the other two. Maybe she had less to be sorry for.

  Marie-Therese said, “We didn’t know that. Indeed, we were told quite the opposite of that.”

  Rae thought of herself as a nice woman, a decent woman, a kind and forgiving woman, and Westerners are nice people in general, but Rae felt the need to twist this particular knife just a little. After all, these three women had been trying to steal her husband.

  Rae raised one eyebrow and looked straight at them. “And I’m pregnant.”

  Marie-Therese and Josephine bobbed backward like she had slapped them.

  Kira glanced up and to the side.

  Josephine said to Marie-Therese, “I told you that we shouldn’t come up here and bother her. I told you that we should just never talk about it again and it would blow over.”

  Marie-Therese said to Josephine, “We had to apologize. It would have gotten back to her eventually anyway, and then people would know. They’ll talk about it.”

  Josephine turned to Rae. “We’re really, really sorry. It’s a misunderstanding. I was the only one who talked to Wulfram, and practically the first words out of his mouth were that you two were already married and that he was definitely not calling off the religious wedding. We’re really sorry. We didn’t know that you were pregnant. We didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “I’m not upset,” Rae said, lying only a little. “But I want to know who put you guys up to this.”

  Kira drawled, “I don’t think we should say.”

  Josephine jumped in, “Phillipp von Hannover, Wulfram’s father.”

  Rae rolled her eyes. “Oh. Yeah. Shocking.”

  Marie-Therese nodded. Kira just kept looking at the vase of dozens of white roses on the dining room table.

  Josephine added, “We are exceedingly sorry, and we won’t do it again.”

  Even Kira nodded that time.

  “All right,” Rae said, smoothing down her slacks in a classic gesture of self-pacification that embarrassed her in how cliché it was. “If you’re really sorry, prove it.”
>
  Marie-Therese said, “I beg your pardon.”

  Josephine said, “How on Earth could we do that?”

  Kira raised an eyebrow.

  “Let’s start with why he chose you three,” Rae said.

  Kira blew a quick breath. “I rather imagine because we were available.”

  Josephine said, “Because I dated Wulfram in high school.”

  Marie-Therese said, “Same, but briefly, and I’m surprised that Phillipp called me because I’m Catholic and related to Pierre,” Flicka’s husband, “and you know what Phillipp thought of him.”

  Rae nodded. “And Kira? Did you date him?”

  “Not as such,” she said, still staring away from Rae. “At certain formal events when we were young, like my coming out in Paris, our parents arranged for Wulfram to escort me. A few centuries ago, that would have meant something.”

  Ah, Prinzessin Kira was the one of the few women of whom Wulf’s father approved. “Did it mean something to you?”

  Kira delicately shrugged one shoulder. “It doesn’t matter now, does it?”

  Rae fought to remember that Wulf had chosen her, had married her, and had gone to great lengths to reassure her of this.

  She took another deep breath. “If you’re really sorry, if you really won’t do this again, then here’s what we’re going to do.”

  While she explained it to them, Kira and Marie-Therese fidgeted, flashing worried glances at each other, but Josephine began to smile with an impish grin.

  Chapter 5

  Rae

  Rae leaned back in her chair as the descending sun reflected off the snow and watched the three other women, the princesses. They all sat straight, not touching their spines to the backs of their chairs, wrists and ankles crossed.

  The four of them had drawn up dining room chairs to sit knees-to-knees, and Josephine held her cell phone in her palm in the center of the group and looked at Rae with her huge, pale green eyes. She spoke aloud across the phone in English, for Rae’s sake, “Hello? Your Serene Highness?”