Any answer that Flicka would have made would have been devastatingly sarcastic, so she refrained.
Pierre said, “In the meantime, let us be businesslike. You agreed to the terms of the contract, and so we shall begin immediately. I should like you to become pregnant with an heir for Monaco as soon as possible.”
Horror. “I understand.”
“When we are confident you are carrying an heir, when the pregnancy has progressed beyond the third month or so, we will be able to relax restrictions on your movements and communication. Until then, you should remain in the palace, and we’ll give you a schedule. You can have a phone and access to your email and social media at that time. We’ll have someone approve your posts and emails before they go through, of course.”
So she couldn’t scream for help.
“That is acceptable.” Even though it was not acceptable in any way.
He paused, staring at the paper, and frowned. “The Winter Ball is next week. We should open the ball with one dance. I will be the soul of propriety, and I apologize in advance for any distress. However, we must perform that function.”
Pierre was trying hard not to piss her off. To some extent, they were both forced into this situation. “I will manage.”
His jaw firmed as he stared at the paper. “You will submit to a medical examination at your earliest convenience, with understanding that you have been through a great deal in the past few days and may need some time. All procedures will be done medically, as we agreed.”
“Agreed, and thank you.”
At least he wasn’t going to be some nefarious supervillain who gloated that he changed the terms and then raped her—
—again.
It still felt like impending rape. Her body was going to be breached, and Pierre’s genetic material would be inserted. She would be forced to carry and give birth to a child born of this procedure who was half-Pierre Grimaldi, her rapist.
Mentally, she slammed the doors on that thought.
Her Lieblingwächter would rescue her and Alina soon. He had told her so. She believed him. She believed in him. He had said that even if he couldn’t, even if something had happened to him, that he had sent someone to rescue her.
She just had to believe.
Pierre said, “You posted some inflammatory statements to social media last night, during the situation.”
She folded her hands together. “They were the truth.”
“I wasn’t disputing them. However, since then, they’ve gone viral. The hashtags ‘Where is Flicka’ and ‘Rescue the princess’ are trending on every major site. We should get a handle on this. My PR department requests pictures of us together and your social media login information.”
She flipped her head up and stared at him. “You want my passwords?”
“Well, of course. The palace’s PR department handles all our social media. They’ll post the pictures with some sentiments about how you’re glad to be back in Monaco and safe. Nothing outlandish. I don’t know why you’d even want to handle your own social media. It’s so tedious.”
Flicka wanted to hide her phone behind her back and keep it away from him. “I like interacting with people on there.”
“I can’t imagine why, but the PR department will take over that task for you.”
“I don’t want them to.”
“They’ll need to take over, and until we’re settled here, I’ll have to ask you to hand over your phone and other electronics. The royal family presents a united front on social media.”
“But I’ve always handled my own media.”
Pierre lowered his eyes and stared at the papers he held. “We really must insist.”
Damn, Pierre sounded just like a Swiss banker who’d turned to crime, insisting that she give up her phone so she couldn’t contact the outside world to tell them that she was being held against her will.
Pierre asked, “Shall we begin?”
Flicka stood and smoothed the wrinkles from her dress. The black fabric clung to her hips where she’d put on a few pounds because supper was the only interesting thing in the Mirabaud household. She would need to watch her carbohydrates closely, lest her trainer Mariah lose her mind when she saw Flicka’s thighs and butt.
When Mariah lost her mind, Flicka bore the brunt of the extra burpees and planks. So many burpees and planks.
Pierre came around his desk.
Flicka reluctantly dug around in her purse that had been sitting on the floor and held out her cell phone.
He asked, “Would you mind taking the selfie? Yours turn out better.”
“All right.” She held the phone out and to the side with her left hand, noting where the sunlight glared in the windows on their faces.
Pierre held up his hands. “Tell me what is acceptable.”
Relief softened her shoulders. “Stand beside me here. Lean around a little, and it’ll look like we’re hanging on each other.”
Pierre did as he was told and kept his hands on his legs.
Flicka grinned and snapped the shot, making sure that she looked jubilant and glad to be home. Being passive-aggressive about this would only make things worse.
She checked the picture to make sure that she had framed it so that the alpine mountaineering pin she wore wasn’t particularly visible, and she held the phone out for Pierre to see.
He peered at it, then smiled. “Perfect. I’m sure they’ll caption it with something like how glad you are to be home in Monaco with your husband.”
She nodded. Yes, of course, they would.
He glanced at his feet. “I read your posts from last night. Did you believe they were going to kill you?”
“Absolutely,” Flicka said.
He frowned, and one of his eyes twitched. “I am very glad you got away. If anything had happened to you, I would have been distraught.”
He didn’t need to have said that. “Thank you.”
“I should like to hug you, but I understand if that isn’t acceptable.”
“It’s not, Pierre.” She handed him the phone. “I need to check on Alina.”
“One more thing,” Pierre said.
Oh, that was always a bad sign. “Yes?”
“Max said that he told you about my uncle’s health.”
Maxence had told Flicka that Prince Rainier—the current, reigning Prince of Monaco—had had a massive stroke and was in a persistent vegetative state, meaning he was brain-dead. “Max said he came home to say goodbye to the Prince.”
Pierre nodded. “Now that you’ve returned, we will remove my uncle from life support. We’ll notify everyone now, and we’ll have the funeral as soon as possible after he passes, within a day or two.”
Usually, state funerals required at least a week of preparation. Pierre seemed unnaturally eager to bury his uncle.
He said, “I’m afraid that I must ask you to attend the funeral at my side and to perform any duties relating to my coronation.”
“Of course, Pierre,” Flicka said. “I assumed that would be part of it.”
He half-bowed from the waist and kept his eyes on the floor. “Flicka, I may have been trying to flatter you when I said you were the most gracious woman I’ve ever met, but I do mean it, and I thank you.”
A man walked into the office, through the open door.
Flicka barely glanced at him, other than to ascertain that he wore the generously cut suit of a bodyguard concealing guns.
Even she didn’t really look at bodyguards sometimes.
He spoke to Quentin Sault. “Sir, you are needed in the operations room.”
The man spoke Monegasque Italian with a perfect accent, so Flicka wasn’t sure why she scrutinized him more closely.
Maybe it was his dark red hair curling above his blue eyes, though his haircut was much more military than the last time she’d seen Aiden Grier, the ginger Scot who worked for Rogue Security.
She’d seen him only the one time in Geneva, just before they’d boarded the train to Paris,
when he’d walked from the SUV that Magnus Jensen had been driving to the other one, but Flicka never forgot a face, either. He’d been the one who had “served” Pierre with the divorce documents as she and Raphael had watched via webcam from Las Vegas, but his accent then had been a thick Scottish burr.
Flicka looked away from Aiden because she didn’t know whose side he was on. His accent sounded like he was a native-born Monegasque, and maybe he was.
Maybe Pierre hadn’t had a spy in the Welfenlegion.
Maybe the spy had infiltrated Rogue Security, instead.
Choose
Flicka von Hannover
Because she was worth it.
Flicka hurried back to the guest suite.
As she came through the door, Alina threw herself at Flicka’s legs, nearly knocking her off her pumps. Flicka grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself with one hand and gathered the toddler against her side with the other. “It’s okay. I’m back. Mommy’s back.”
“Don’t go away. Don’t go away,” Alina sobbed against Flicka’s leg.
The nanny trotted over to retrieve Alina, but Flicka waved her off and told her to leave the suite.
She reached down and lifted the toddler, snuggling the child on her hip. “It’s okay now. Everything’s okay.”
Alina sobbed against her shoulder. “I want Daddy.”
“I know, baby,” Flicka crooned to her and walked into the bedroom. “I do, too. I wish Daddy were here.”
“It was night. Daddy wasn’t home.”
“He’ll come soon,” Flicka said, hoping she wasn’t wrong. She set Alina on her wide bed and laid down next to her. “Daddy will come soon. Maybe tomorrow.”
They laid there for a few minutes until Alina finished calming down.
Alina picked Flicka’s hand off the pillow, though she still sniffled. “Pink.”
Flicka looked down at her hands.
The pink fingernail polish she had applied at the Mirabaud estate was beginning to chip. She should call in a manicurist. Perhaps Alina would like a professional mani-pedi instead of smiling her awestruck little grin while Flicka dabbed polish on her fingernails and toenails.
Last night, as soon as they had arrived at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco—after a race to the Geneva airport, a short flight on one of Pierre’s smaller jets to Nice in France, a noisy helicopter flight to the helipad in Monaco, and one more limousine ride to the palace in the wee hours of the morning—Alina had been whisked away by nursemaids.
Flicka had declined to ask why nannies were immediately available at the palace.
She had demanded the child’s return to the Secret Service men, loudly, and then by calling Pierre and Quentin on the cell phone they had passed to her in the park a week before. She had threatened every threat she had, including a worldwide media blitz.
An hour later, a sobbing, inconsolable Alina was returned to Flicka in her bedroom for the night, which was one of the large guest suites downstairs and away from the royal family’s lodgings. It had taken only minutes for Flicka to calm the toddler down enough for the child to pass out from exhaustion in her arms. She’d tucked the child into her bed and collapsed beside her in the last few hours of darkness before dawn.
Lying on the bed now, Flicka’s body still hurt, her neck and back wrenched from her desperate struggling with the Russian bratva man who had held her back the night before while another man had taken Alina toward that terrible man, Piotr Ilyin.
She’d never really wanted to hold a gun on a man before, not even Pierre, really.
But if Piotr Ilyin had been standing there, she would have grabbed one of the pistols that Pierre’s Secret Service personnel toted on their hips and shot the shit out of Ilyin. She didn’t know how Ilyin had planned to kill Alina, but her death would have been an example to his other men, meant to frighten them into abject obedience lest it happen to their children, which meant it would have been terrible and prolonged.
Flicka’s homicidal and bloodthirsty ancestors would have arisen in her soul, and she would have shot Ilyin and kept shooting him, and at some later point, allowed him to die.
But it hadn’t happened, she reminded herself. She’d gotten herself and Alina out.
And now she had to survive until Raphael came for them.
“When is Daddy coming?” Alina asked, her green eyes still watery.
“Soon,” she told Alina. “Daddy said he would come and get us, though he might have to send someone else. We have to be okay until he comes. No matter what, we have to stick together, and we have to be okay. I’m your mommy, so I have to be okay for you. You’re my baby, and you have to be okay for me. Right?”
Alina nodded, her eyes still shining with tears.
Flicka touched Raphael’s alpine mountaineering ribbon pinned on the shoulder of her dress. “We’ll be okay. It’s worth trying to survive. You’re worth it. You are worth everything to me. No matter what happens, I’ll always be here for you.”
1297
Flicka von Hannover
I thought a phone would solve everything,
but it didn’t.
Over that day and the next, Flicka tried to figure out a way to tell people that she was being held in Monaco against her will and wanted to leave, but she had to do it subtly. If Pierre suspected that she would fly the coop the instant that she and Alina found an opening, he would lock her up so tightly that she wouldn’t ever be able to leave or tell anyone, not even after she’d birthed child after child for Monaco.
He would do it for spite, she believed, trapping her in sexual and reproductive slavery until she died. Pierre had pretty manners, but she did not fool herself into thinking that he cared about her as a human being at all. She was a walking, pedigreed uterus to him, nothing more.
Her bedroom grew dim around the edges, the ornate crown moulding and blue velvet curtains around the bed fading from her view.
Breathe, she thought.
She bent over with her head between her knees for a moment to compose herself.
Her stomach twisted in a knife-edged cramp.
Breathe.
Escaping from palace-level security was her one superpower. If anyone could sidestep Pierre’s Secret Service, Flicka Augusta von Hannover could. After all, she’d done it many times.
This time, she just had to do it while toting an almost-two-year-old.
Piece of cake.
God, she wanted cake. Chocolate cake. Or lemon. Lemon cake sounded really good.
Her vision cleared as she thought about cake, and she stood.
There was no landline phone in the guest suite. Flicka found the connection boxes on the walls just above the thick, carved base moulding, but no phones were plugged in.
Whenever someone entered the guest suite—cleaning staff, admins, the manicurist that Alina did indeed love as they had side-by-side mani-pedis, people delivering books and toys Flicka requested but could not order herself, her personal trainer Mariah who sniffed her out and dragged her to the Palace gym for an immediate and emergency conditioning session, stylists bearing clothes for her approval or not—Flicka watched where they laid their phones.
She also noted that too many of them had their password set to facial recognition or the fingerprint scanner, dammit. Even if she did manage to snag one of their phones, she wouldn’t be able to get into it.
They also tended to notice when she ambled toward where they’d left their phones lying on end tables or when her hand strayed too close to their bags. She wasn’t good at sleight-of-hand.
As a teenager, while Flicka had been practicing slipping away from her bodyguards in crowds, some of her friends had become accomplished shoplifters, nicking jewelry or baubles for the thrill of it. Flicka wasn’t nearly as good as those little kleptomaniacs. Every time her fingers strayed near their phones, her admins and staff caught her.
Yes, the admins and staff were vigilant about their phones, but not everyone was.
Some people had been raised to be carele
ss with expensive electronics, so when Pierre visited her in her suite one day to update her about his uncle’s impending death and plans for the funeral within days, Flicka was especially vigilant. She ordered tea and cookies, which neither of their trainers allowed them to touch. Alina scampered in and snagged a few cookies before bolting back to Flicka’s bedroom to wedge herself under the bed, as she always did when someone entered the suite. Her terror broke Flicka’s heart every hour.
Pierre watched the child sprint away, analyzing her blond hair, Nordic-pale skin, lithe little body despite a steady diet of cookies, and green eyes.
While Pierre stared after the retreating Alina, the afternoon sunlight dappling the chiseled planes of his face, Flicka dropped a napkin over his phone.
The napkin covered the phone for fifteen more minutes while they negotiated Flicka’s presence at various events.
Once again, as he had several times per day ever since she had arrived, Pierre asked, “And when is your appointment with the hospital?”
“In a few days,” Flicka said, touching her forehead to mime trauma to her very soul.
When Pierre left without his phone, she sneaked it under her leg and then to her bathroom.
Guessing his PIN number was easy: 1297.
That was the year when the Grimaldi family’s mercenaries and henchmen overran the Prince’s Palace and took control of Monaco. Pierre always used 1297 as his pin number or password. Knowing that had come in handy several times.
His phone opened in Flicka’s hand.
Nice.
Texts popped up, some in all-caps.
Flicka didn’t even care she was snooping as she read them.
Evidently, Pierre and his real wife, Abigai Caillemotte, were fighting about how much time Pierre was spending at the palace in Monaco instead of with her and their children in France.
Hmmm, that must suck for her.
Flicka considered texting Abigai back as Pierre to throw a little jet fuel on that fire, but she refrained. Indeed, Abigai could have every bit of Pierre if it would get him out of Flicka’s life, though she knew that wasn’t possible.
Happily Ever After (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 5) Page 3