“I’m pulling myself together. I’m not even that hungry.”
He breathed on her neck, where her tee shirt met her shoulder. She inhaled just slightly, and she darted quick glances at him while she munched her sandwich.
Good, he had her full attention.
He checked to make sure that Yvonne was preparing his sandwich at the opposite counter with her back toward them, and he ran his teeth over Rae’s neck.
Rae arched her neck, and she hummed.
It was unseemly to molest his wife in the kitchen in full view of the staff.
His hand stole to her lower back, and he kept his lips just a fraction of an inch from her neck near her ear. He whispered, “More time for us here.”
Rae cleared her throat and watched her plate. She was breathing faster.
He backed up just as Yvonne turned, holding his lunch plate.
While he ate, he found opportunities to touch Rae, to caress her, to keep her mind on his leg, his hands, and his mouth, rather than thinking about the afternoon.
He ate quickly, and once they were done, he nodded to his chef and took Rae by the hand to lead her upstairs.
One of the housekeepers was sloshing water into the enormous ferns in the main receiving room, and another was pushing a hissing steamer over the marble floors by the tall windows overlooking the pool. Everything was back to normal.
Wulf saw Rae notice them as she walked past, and guilt stole over her sweet, dark eyes. She still thought that she should join in when she saw maintenance being performed, no matter how many times Wulf reminded her about his people’s jobs. The staff loved her for it, so he didn’t say too much. They knew that he wouldn’t lay off any of them, no matter if his wife did sometimes pitch in.
They reached the grand staircase rising to the upper floor, and as Wulf stepped on the first riser, his right knee felt unaccountably weak.
Odd.
Rae said, “I’m starting to shake it off. I mean, it was terrible, and I kind of hate the world right now, but I’m okay.”
“You need to lie down for a few minutes,” Wulf said.
“I’m really okay if you need to go do something else. I’ve got a lot of research to do. My profs loaded me up at those meetings this morning, which feels like a lifetime ago,” she sighed.
“I insist,” Wulf said.
“You—you insist?” Rae followed him, her footsteps pattering on the marble staircase. “Is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine.” He led her up the stairs, each step a little more difficult than the last, until they reached the landing.
He walked along the balcony, still holding Rae’s soft, little hand in his, while the tremors in his legs climbed to his chest.
“Wulf?” he heard her whisper from beside him. “You’re shaking like mad. Are you all right?”
Something must be wrong with the air conditioning. A cold wind was blowing through his business suit and rushing down the back of his collar, chilling his spine and the deep scars on his back.
“Wulf?”
A thick ring of black smoke surrounded the door to their bedroom, and it tightened, swirling inward. He pushed through it, shoving open the door, his hand jittering on the wood, and stumbled inside.
Wulf bounced off one of the bookcases that lined three of the walls, floor to ceiling. The rainbow of books, meticulously shelved by color, smeared in his vision.
“Wulf!” Rae called, somewhere far away from him.
He whispered, “Honestly, I’m fine,” and reached for her, desperate to touch her hair or her skin.
Instead of Switzerland
Rae grabbed for Wulf as he collapsed in front of her, his legs folding as he dropped. She managed to get an arm around him and slow his fall, mainly because he was reaching for her. His arm dragged on her waist. “Wulf!”
“Honestly, I’m fine,” he mumbled.
“You’re not!” She unwound his arms from around her waist, but he kept reaching for her. His fingers clutched her wrist and her arm. She asked, “Does your chest hurt? Can you see? Can you breathe?”
He grabbed her shoulder and dragged her down, grappling her until she was lying against him, her head pressed to his chest. Under her ear, his heart beat steadily but fast, so very fast.
She looked up at him. His eyes were squeezed shut. Lines of pain radiated from the corners. She said, “You’ve got to tell me if you’re okay.”
He nodded. His jaw bulged at the sides, and he kept his chin tucked to his chest.
“Promise me that your chest doesn’t hurt.”
He nodded, but his arms tightened around her.
Rae twisted in his arms, reaching up to him, and brushed her lips across his in what she had meant to be a tender kiss. Surely he needed tenderness right now, a gentle touch.
Wulf’s arms locked around her, and his kiss burned across her mouth. He swiveled and pushed her down on the thick carpet, scrambling over her body.
Oh. It didn’t take a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out that Wulf had exactly one way that he allowed himself to express emotion. Rae crawled backward on the floor under him and kicked the door closed.
Wulf reared up and pulled his suit jacket off his arms, flinging it away. He swarmed over her, pinning her down with his body. His collar was already open and he hadn’t worn a tie that day, so he wrenched his shirts off over his head, a wince creasing his forehead when he pulled on the scarred side of his back too much.
The desperation in his dark blue eyes startled her, and he grabbed her again, kissing her hard and driving his tongue into her mouth. One of his hands was tangled in her hair, and he unbuttoned her blouse with the other.
When he broke off the kiss and bent his head to rake his teeth over her neck, she said, “Wulf, don’t you think we should talk—”
He covered her mouth with his hand, while he chewed his way down her open shirt and pushed her bra aside with his chin.
Rae knew that she should be protesting about now, that what would be most psychologically healthy for Wulf would be to express his emotions and talk about what had happened that afternoon, how it had affected him, but his hot mouth found her breast and he sucked on her, drawing her up and running his tongue over the peak.
Passion caught her, and she arched against him, whimpering.
His hands became rougher, grabbing her skin and shoving her clothes away. He unzipped her jeans and yanked them, managing to get them off one of her legs while he clawed at his own pants, kicking them off and prying her legs apart with one of his knees.
She reached for him, trying to bring him up to kiss her again, but he trilled his tongue against her clit, sending zings ricocheting through her until she was shaking and crying out with need. Wulf climbed up her, his strong fingers almost bruising the skin on her ribs and shoulders. He fit his body between her legs and his mouth on hers, kissing her again, and he pressed himself inside her. His shoulders were still shaking in her arms, and he stroked into her, filling her and releasing.
She moaned against his mouth.
Wulf buried his face in her shoulder, panting, and lunged into her. She pushed her hips up, grinding her clit against him as he drove himself into her.
She was spiraling tighter with each thrust, holding onto him as he pounded cries from her. Rae held on around his neck, her body a taut arc under his as he shoved himself up and into her. Her body clenched, and the hard stab of his cock into her rubbed inside her and on her. A deep tension strained until she fell over the edge.
Pulsing waves rocked her, and she clung to Wulf as blood roared in her ears and his body shuddered in her arms. His muscles rippled down his back, and his breath blew harsh near her ear.
Rae gasped and held him tightly, her head still spinning.
Wulf held himself off her body with his forearms and breathed on her neck below her ear. “You can’t leave your security,” he choked out. “I thought you were kidnapped.” She could hardly hear his harsh whisper. “I thought you might already be
dead.”
She stroked his back, the side without the terrible scar, trying to reassure him. “I’ll tell my mother what they did, and she’ll make sure that they never try anything like that again.”
He wrapped his arms around her, and his arms strained as they tightened. “I am begging you. Stay with your security.”
“I won’t leave them. I promise I won’t.”
His voice lowered. When Rae managed to squirm so that she could see his face, his eyes were squeezed shut.
He whispered, “I thought I had lost you. I thought you were gone.”
She wound his arms around his neck and pressed herself to him, holding on. She wanted to say something flippant, something to make him laugh like he couldn’t get rid of her that easily or she was too stubborn to be killed, but he was far beyond that.
She said, “I’ll never leave them again.”
“Flicka used to run from her security when she was a teenager,” he whispered. “She thought it was a game until one man got her into a car. Her security got her out just before he drove off.”
Rae gasped, “Oh my God.”
His teeth were clenched so tight that his cut jaw bulged on the sides. “I can’t lose you.”
Ultimatum
Later that evening while Rae slept, Wulf sat in his office again, alone, staring at the blank monitors and holding his cell phone to his ear. It was late in the evening in Germany, about midnight.
Unaccustomed flutters still inhabited his chest. His face heated, but he kept his voice calm, low. He asked, “Did you think that I would make idle threats?”
“Don’t you threaten me,” Wulf’s father, His Serene Highness, The Hereditary Prince of Hannover, Philipp Augustus, said.
Wulf tended to use all of his father’s titles in his own head out of habit because one of the servants had always presented him and his twin brother to their father using all their titles when they were children, standing together, unmoving, and waiting for it to be over.
Wulf said, “The trucks will arrive in two days to remove you to Kaiserhaus in the city. You’ll have a minimal staff. Your allowance from the trusts will be cut by two-thirds.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” his father sputtered.
Wulf was too angry to be gratified. “I absolutely will.”
“Constantin would never have done this to me.”
The thick mass of scar tissue on Wulf’s back kept him from leaning back in the office chair today. “Constantin is dead.”
“He would have made a much better prince.”
This was an old tactic, one that Wulf didn’t much care for. “You met Constantin a total of thirty-one times, all before he was nine years old.”
“And yet, I know that he would have been a good prince and a good king. He had a regal personality, an authoritarian presence.”
Wulf was finished with that line of conversation. He lowered his voice. “If you ever interfere in our lives again, before the wedding or thereafter, I will make far more draconian cuts. Is this perfectly clear?”
“I understand.” And yet he sounded dismissive, like he didn’t believe all this would happen.
“Stay out of our lives. Do not contact me nor anyone about Rae. How did you know where her family was, and how did you know that we would be skiing last week?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Wulf could hear his father’s sneer all the way across the Atlantic ocean.
It didn’t matter.
Wulf said, “If you act on any other information, no matter how you obtain it, there will be more repercussions.”
“The rest of the family won’t allow that to happen.”
A few years ago, that might have been true, but they had seen the operating budget for the castle Schloss Marienburg, and most realized that a change in its status would mean a significant increase in their dividends from the family trusts. “Go ahead. Try me on this.”
“They’ll vote you out as head of the house.”
“Make your run. We’ll see how far you get.”
“You can’t marry that common woman! I won’t grant you the status of a dynastic marriage!”
“Elizabeth already did. She is the one with the authority, and we have been legally married for months. Our children will bear your titles, and if, God forbid, we are ever restored, they will sit on your throne. Enough of this nonsense. You always have been irrelevant in my life. Now, make yourself as absent in our lives as you were when I was a child.”
Wulf thumbed his phone and hung up.
This time, he whipped the phone at the wall.
It shattered in a bright spray of glass in the dim recessed lights.
Darkness
From the shadows of the German forest, back where the trees were at their thickest, a woman’s voice whispered Wulf’s name. He turned, peering through the darkness.
Wulf opened his eyes in the night. Glowing blue numbers on the clock read two-fifty.
“Wulf?” Rae asked.
He stretched and turned over, kicking the tight sheets off his leg. “Yes? You need?”
Her shaky inhale startled him needle-sharp awake.
Her voice was choked. “I’m bleeding.”
He wrapped his arms around her, holding her as his heart trembled. “We’ll go to hospital now. Come to the car. Carefully. We don’t need a fall to make this worse.” He held her light fingers in his and whispered, “I love you. Know that: I love you.”
Rae and Wulf: At the Hospital
Billionaires in Disguise: Rae
(An Epilogue to the Epilogue “Kidnapped”)
Epilogue #6
By: Blair Babylon
Published by Malachite Publishing LLC
Copyright 2015 by Malachite Publishing LLC
Hospital
Rae lay on her back on the medical table in the dark hospital room, barely breathing so that the rise and fall of her stomach wouldn’t mess up the ultrasound scan. The computer’s fan whirred softly, and the technician hummed to herself as she slid the transducer through the cold goo on Rae’s abdomen with one hand and typed with the other.
The technician, a woman with large, dark eyes who had introduced herself as Madra, stared at the computer monitor. The glow lit Madra’s face, gliding over her dark skin. “I’m not supposed to say anything because the radiologist interprets the scans, but I see a heartbeat.”
“That’s good?” Rae asked, just to make sure that seeing it wasn’t somehow the bad part.
“That’s very good.” Madra went back to tapping keys on the keyboard.
Rae looked over at Wulf, sitting beside the table and holding her left hand, and his fingers tightened slightly around hers. In the dim light of the monitor glow in the dark room, his dark blue eyes had turned almost black, and pale blue highlights glinted in his blond hair.
“Want to hear it?” Magda asked.
“Um, yes?” Rae said.
The radiologist moused over something on her computer and clicked, and a rapid oscillation filled the air, like listening to the vibrating heartbeat of a mouse pulse in the room.
Wulf’s lips parted, and he blinked at the sound. He looked up, gazing around himself at the quick whoosh filling the air.
Just those slight movements were, for Wulf, an enormous reaction. She squeezed his fingers, listening to their baby’s heartbeat all around them while she prayed that it wasn’t for the last time.
The radiologist tapped something, and the sound fled. She checked her phone. “Okay, I’m done. Here comes the doctor.”
The door opened, and tall, willowy woman walked in, swishing her white doctor’s coat. “Hello, I’m Dr. Chen,” she said.
Madra looked up. “Nii-how.”
Dr. Chen blinked, and her mouth shifted to the side. “Nii-how, Madra.” She glanced at Rae. “Madra is teaching me Mandarin. Now, I assume that you heard that we have a heartbeat.”
Rae nodded.
“Let’s see what else we have here.” Madra vacated the s
eat, and Dr. Chen sat and took over scanning Rae’s stomach. The small transducer smeared the cool gel around her skin. “Yep, it’s low.”
Madra nodded. “I tagged that in some of the scans.”
“You’re right. Good catch.” She turned to Rae, still buzzing her tummy with the ultrasound probe. “This is why I came in. Madra found that the pregnancy is very low in the uterus. The placenta is partially covering the cervix.”
Beside her, Wulf shifted in his chair, and his grip on her hand tightened.
Rae resisted the urge to wrap her arms over her stomach. “And that means?”
The doctor lifted the transducer off Rae’s stomach, wiped it off, then used a fresh wipe to scrape the watery gel off Rae’s abdomen. “Placenta previa is a very serious condition. It can be caused by a lot of things or nothing, just the random chance on where the embryo implants when you first get pregnant. Sometimes, it just happens. I want to stress this part, this can be serious. If we can get you to term or close, there’s no danger to the baby. However, you could have complications. This is highly associated with very dangerous hemorrhage.” Dr. Chen glanced at a different box on the computer. “We got the bleeding stopped now, right?”
Rae nodded vigorously, almost jiggling her brain around in her head, and dragged her pajama pants up to her waist.
Dr. Chen stared hard at her, emphasizing what she said. “If you start bleeding again, any at all, get in here right away. I can’t stress this enough. It can be very dangerous to your life and health. You could bleed out and die very quickly. Got it?”
Rae nodded and glanced over at Wulf. Again, his cool expression looked like he was serious, but he seemed to be listening to the information, and that was all.
His hands told a different story. He had wrapped both his hands around hers, completely encasing her fingers in his large, strong hands, shielding her hand because that was all he could do right then.
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