Wulf asked, “Is this a situation where we need to make a decision?”
“Is that something you’ve considered anyway?” Dr. Chen asked.
“No,” Rae and Wulf both said, her soprano and his bass voice in unison. Wulf continued, “But if the pregnancy is endangering her—”
“Then not yet,” Dr. Chen said. “At this point, watchful waiting is enough.”
Wulf nodded, slowly, and somehow, he didn’t even blink.
Rae asked the doctor, “So what do we do about it?”
“Sorry about this,” she said, grimacing, “but it’s bed rest. Complete bed rest. Mostly on your left side as you get bigger. And you’ll need a C-section at the end. Delivery is too risky, far too risky.”
Oh, crap. “What about college?”
The doctor looked guilty and shrugged. “I’m sorry. You need to lay down and stay there, all the time. When I did three months of bed rest with my first one while I was in medical school, I did an independent study project toward a master’s. You can try to do something like that. Now the possible good news.”
“Yeah?” Rae was really ready for some good news.
“I’ve seen a lot of cases of this. Some of them are seriously lying right on the cervix.” She slapped her hands together like a thunderclap. “Yours isn’t too bad. The implantation is farther up the uterine wall than some that I’ve seen. Maybe, possibly, this could rectify itself.”
Rae blew air out in relief. “Tell me how to do that.”
“It’s not something you can do. As the uterus enlarges, it swells up like a hot air balloon inflating off the ground. It is possible that the placenta could lift off the cervix. If that happens, we can reduce or eliminate the bed rest, but be prepared. It’s going to be at least a month of this, and it could be the entire pregnancy.”
“Yeah?” Rae looked back and forth between Wulf and the doctor.
“Yes, in addition to the bed rest, it’s all the usual precautions,” the doctor said, standing up and adjusting her lab coat. “No tub baths. No exertion. No exercise. No sexual intercourse.”
Rae asked, “I beg your pardon?”
One of Wulf’s blond eyebrows pressed downward.
Dr. Chen continued, “Nothing that will disturb your cervix in any way. Seriously. You could die. And no car trips over half an hour.”
“But we’re leaving to go to Switzerland tomorrow!” To get married, but Rae didn’t tell the doctor that.
Rae’s sister-in-law, Flicka, had been planning Rae’s religious wedding for months, ever since Flicka had gotten back from her own honeymoon. The decorations were already going up at a hotel ballroom in Montreux for the reception. Rae’s dress, which was much more tailored than she had ever dreamed that she would like, had been fitted three times and was already in Switzerland with Flicka. Private jets were being fueled the world over. Swiss florists were importing planeloads of flowers to decorate the church and the reception.
Dr. Chen shook her head. “Sorry. You’re not going anywhere. Definitely no plane flights.”
Oh, no. Despair filled Rae’s chest and closed her throat. She swallowed hard around it.
After the doctor and tech left, Rae turned to Wulf. “I am so sorry.”
His hands firmed around hers. “I can’t imagine what for.”
“For everything. For not being able to do this right. For messing up the wedding. Because now we can’t even you-know. For everything.”
“This isn’t your fault,” he insisted.
“How am I going to tell Flicka?” Rae wondered, horrified at the thought. Tears started to leak out her eyes.
Wulf closed his eyes and whispered, “I’ll tell Flicka. I don’t care. I don’t care about any of it. I can’t lose you. I have to keep you safe and I don’t know how.”
Rae tugged her hands out of his and slid her hands up his arms. “You won’t lose me.”
He leaned over her, holding her gently. “I think we should try again in a few months or years.”
The image of the baby with crystalline blue eyes and a blond, fuzzy head rose in her mind.
“No,” Rae said, and she slid one arm over her stomach. “No. I want this baby so much.”
He sighed, his breath hot against her shoulder. “I want some other doctors to see you.” He backed up, and his deep blue eyes hardened. “I’ll make sure they examine your scans tomorrow. I want to know exactly what the risk is before we make any final decisions. And we may make decisions. Several decisions.”
“I want this baby,” Rae repeated.
“There are other decisions to be made,” Wulf said, and his voice dropped to a commanding tone, “like where the very best doctors are, like what the most state-of-the-art treatments are, like how I can best keep you safe.”
Dieter and Wulf
The toddler wailed in the back seat, and Dieter checked his rearview mirror, watching her, while he drove.
The fifteen-month-old was more angry at being restrained than she was distressed, the opposite of Dieter’s frame of mind, but his anger grew with every passing minute.
Outside Dieter’s black SUV, crowds of cars swung through the five lanes as he drove over the sun-scalded freeway. Even the cacti on the sides of the freeway were shriveling from the heat pounding on the tan concrete and crushed granite on the ground.
His fists tightened on the steering wheel, and he thumbed a button and spoke. “Call Durchlaucht.”
His car rang around him, startling the toddler. She wailed louder, her shrill cry jangling his nerves.
Wulfram von Hannover, his previous employer, answered the phone. “Yes, Dieter?”
The words tumbled out of Dieter’s mouth, leaving a bitter taste on his tongue. “She left me, Wulfram. I don’t know what to do.”
“Who did?” Wulfram’s voice came from the stereo speakers as if the man were all around him.
Dieter lapsed into Alemannic. “Gretchen. I went home. Her clothes were gone. The bank accounts were cleaned out, the personal ones and the business ones. All is gone. It was millions. She is gone.”
“Where’s Alina?” Wulfram asked.
The toddler screamed at the sound of her name, her angry squeals climbing. “Gretchen left her with a neighbor and told me where to find her. Can you imagine the heartlessness of it? Gretchen left a note stuck to our television, telling me where my child was, with a neighbor. We don’t even know Lupe that well. Is Hans at work today?”
The silence on the other end of the line told Dieter far more than he wanted to know.
He slammed his fist on the steering wheel. “It was Hans, wasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure,” Wulfram said. “He submitted his resignation this afternoon, effective immediately. I was otherwise involved and just took the letter. He said it was a private matter and asked that it be handled quietly.”
“That private matter was my wife!”
“Come to the house, Dieter. We’ll take care of you and Alina.”
“I don’t need to come there, Wulfram. I can stand on my own two feet.”
“Of course, you can. Just come here. We’ll have a drink or two. Frau Keller can help you with Alina for a short time. Let us help you.”
“That money was for the security agency. It was millions. Without it, I can’t even pay my people this week. I can’t pay on the loan you gave me.”
“There are laws, Dieter. She is entitled to little of it. We will get it back. In the meantime, I will help you with whatever you need. Where are you now?”
The boiling desert sun was still above the horizon, but it was growing as it neared the mountains, its fire threatening to roll over the dry desert and engulf everything. “On the freeway, heading toward the airport.”
“Where are you going to go?”
“I don’t know. After them?” The sun glared off the back windshield of the car in front of Dieter, a sudden white-hot flare of light. The highway and traffic snarls blurred, and he scrubbed his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Do you know where she and Hans went?” Wulfram asked.
“They’re probably heading to the airport. They would probably fly somewhere to get away, so that I can’t find them. I don’t know where they are!”
“No matter where they went, you can’t go after them seeking vengeance with a toddler in the back seat. Take the next exit. Come to the house.”
“You don’t think he would hurt her, do you? You don’t think it was about the money for him, and now he’ll hurt her.”
Wulfram sighed. “I’m sorry, Dieter. From the little that Hans said, it didn’t seem to be about the money for him. I need you to come to the house, now.”
“All right. I’m taking the exit.”
“Good. I’ll stay on the line so I can buzz you into the development. We’ll handle this quietly.”
“Can Rae help with Alina?” he asked. He liked Rae. She was kind and gentle in a way that even made him feel quiet. He could trust her.
“There’s been a problem. She’s on bed rest, and she must not be disturbed.”
Shock zapped him. “Is she all right?”
“So far. And we hope for the best.”
“My God, Wulfram. Was this due to yesterday, at the hotel? Was this why I got the terse email from your sister about the wedding being delayed?” The whole world was in chaos.
“Unfortunately, yes, at least for the second part. About Alina, I’ll ask a favor of Frau Keller for tonight, and we’ll hire a nanny tomorrow. I had planned on adding staff for when our child is born, so you don’t mind if I use Alina as a guinea pig for a few months, do you?”
“You’re joking at a time like this, Durchlaucht?”
“I have arctic ice instead of blue blood, ja? You’ve told me this too many times. Have you taken the exit yet?”
Dieter turned the wheel and coasted down the freeway ramp to the stoplight. “Yes.”
“And you’re on your way to our house?”
Scots Road, which led toward the Apache Tears Ranch development, pointed a dark line between the tan shops and buildings toward the blue and fiery mountains. “Yes, Durchlaucht.”
“Good. Keep driving. Drive safely. Talk to me about what you need for the next few days.”
“I need to go after Gretchen!” They had had their fights and their differences, but Dieter’s chest was collapsing into shattered bones and pulverized meat. He had thought that they had formed a family, a home together for their child, and now the very sky seemed to be ripping itself apart.
Wulfram said, “You’ll need to stay with us for a few days, at least. Perhaps longer. Yoshi is here, too, so the dining table will be crowded.”
Dieter snorted. Wulfram’s dining room seated forty comfortably.
“Where are you now?” Wulfram asked.
“Heading north on Scots Road. About to turn onto Range.”
“ETA?”
Dieter glanced at the navigation app running on his phone. “Six thirty-three.”
“Hold for one moment.” A rustling filled Dieter’s black SUV, and the mumbling was muffled by a hand over the other phone. “All right. We’ll have the necessities here soon. Tell me what you need for the agency for the next week.”
Dieter sighed, and his hands loosened on the steering wheel.
Reason finally coalesced in his head.
He reached over to the passenger seat, pulling a baby bottle of juice that his neighbor Lupe had given him out of the diaper bag and dangled it into the back seat. Tiny hands grabbed it out of his fingers, and noisy sucking replaced the wails. “It’s mostly money, Durchlaucht. I need to pay my staff this Friday, plus the mortgage on the office and the warehouse.”
“I’ll take care of that. Anything else?”
“I don’t know what will become of my daughter without a mother. Gretchen’s note said that she wanted nothing more to do with either of us, that she needed to be free to live her own life.”
“We’ll contact a lawyer tomorrow to establish separation and sole custody, and I know some things about raising a child without a mother. It’s difficult, but Flicka turned out all right.”
Dieter said, “That’s true.”
Other than some teenage shenanigans and college-age missteps, Flicka had indeed turned out all right. She ran several charities with the efficiency of a CEO and had expressed interest in getting an MBA. Though, now that Flicka had married the heir to the principality of Monaco, she probably wouldn’t be able to do that. Or continue with her music.
Over the SUV’s speakers, Wulfram said, “We’ll make it all right, Dieter. Where are you now?”
A long, iron gate crossed the road. Dieter parked the SUV in front of it and flipped his wallet open. A guard ambled out of the air-conditioned shack toward his vehicle. “I’m at the development’s gate. I’ll be inside in a few minutes.”
As soon as Dieter rolled his darkly tinted window down, the guard grinned at him and flicked his hand at the gate, retreating quickly into the guard shack. Heat rained down all around them, blowing into the SUV through the open window, and it was far too hot to stand on the asphalt for any length of time. Dieter had entered and exited this gate every day, several times a day, for years. The guard’s name was Gary, and he had two sons who played soccer.
Wulfram said as clearly as if he were sitting in the passenger seat, “Friedhelm will meet you at our gate to escort you up the driveway. What else do you need tonight?”
“Just someplace to rest, Durchlaucht.”
“You have that.”
Dieter turned the SUV around a corner. A second gate slid smoothly away from the road. Another black SUV idled, waiting for him.
As Dieter followed the other SUV up the long driveway to Wulfram’s house, the air conditioners seemed to blow colder air, cooling his face.
He and Wulfram had had each other’s backs ever since that long night in the Swiss Army barracks. Dieter had had his first disastrous love affair, and Wulfram had listened to him talk that night, all night, rather than leave him when he might have done something very foolish. They had agreed that Dieter had terrible taste in women, for he had been drawn to Ira’s wildness and abandon, and they had agreed that Dieter fell in love too fast and too hard, leaving nothing of himself behind.
This evening already felt like a horrible replay of that night.
The liquor would probably be better than that rotgut Finnish vodka that Dieter had smuggled into the Swiss barracks so many years ago.
Dieter and Wulfram shared a long friendship, over twelve years now. They had stared down rifles at the same targets and seen those targets aiming back at them. After they had mustered out of the Swiss Army together, Dieter had headed Wulf’s security detail for a decade, and Dieter had been excruciatingly aware that he had held Wulf’s life in his hands every day. Wulfram had been Dieter’s best man when he had married Gretchen two years ago. In order to save Rae’s life, they had killed two men, sniped them from a high hill using those Swiss Army skills, and they had gotten drunk a few nights later and dealt with those demons together, too. Dieter had stood up with Wulfram when he had legally married Rae in Paris a few months ago and would be best man at his religious wedding when it happened, if it happened.
Nothing could break their deep bond.
Well, almost nothing.
~~~~~~~
Montreux
Billionaires in Disguise: Rae and Wulf
Epilogue #7
(This is the last one, I swear.)
By: Blair Babylon
Concorde
Rae Stone-von Hannover
Thursday morning, Wulf, Rae, and their black-suited security men stood inside the private terminal of the airport, the one that Rae was slowly getting used to. Southwestern sunlight poured on the tarmac outside the windows, flashing silver flares off the planes outside on the runway.
Rae slid her hand into Wulf’s fingers, and he traced her knuckles with his thumb.
Behind them, the security guys that always surrounded Wulf, and now Rae
, had broken into teams.
There were always threats.
One group of security men still stood around Rae and Wulf in the terminal, vigilant. She had been kidnapped a month before, and the guys had been on extra-paranoid high alert ever since. Rae had been abducted by her own family for a bizarre exorcism ritual to make her forget Wulf or something, and the whole fiasco had been orchestrated by Wulf’s aristocratic and manipulative father, who had somehow, somehow learned about Rae’s family and how to contact them.
And before that, last June, somehow, somehow, Wulf’s father had known that Wulf and Rae would be skiing in Argentina, and he had manipulated Wulf’s ex-girlfriends to go there and try to tempt Wulf away from her.
Wulf’s father kept finding ways to interfere despite their legion of security teams, which were Wulf’s private paramilitary force. Indeed, Wulf called them the Welfenlegion, an inside joke. Though they were highly trained and exquisitely alert, when they went off duty, the group that had been mostly recruited from Wulf’s days in the Swiss Guard became more like a fraternity.
Another group of Wulf’s security men was sitting in chairs with Wulf’s head of his household staff, Frau Rosamunde Keller. The older woman, her hair tied in a messy gray bun, was lecturing them and referring to a piece of paper while she spoke. That messy bun was the only thing about her that was not perfectly regimented at every moment. While the security guys were mostly friends and colleagues from Wulf’s two-year stint in the Swiss military, Rosamunde was German and had worked for Wulf’s father for over two decades before he had stolen her to run his own house when he was fifteen.
Yes, Wulf had been entirely on his own since he was only fifteen.
Rae smiled. Mrs. Keller and Wulf had a very formal, very fond relationship, and she had been gently guiding Rae so that she didn’t make country-hick gaffes in the stratospheric society that Wulf inhabited. Twice, at dinner parties, Rae had sought out Mrs. Keller for a consultation and moral support and found both.
Billionaire Ever After Page 12