Happily Ever After (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 5)

by Blair Babylon

“Flicka?” He staggered like Dieter had decked him.

  “They’re so beautiful together. She saved Alina’s life in Geneva, and Alina loves her so much. Flicka takes care of Alina so well, teaching her and playing with her. They’re inseparable. I thought I couldn’t love Flicka any more, but when she loved Alina, I was lost in every way to her. I do love her. I have always loved her.”

  Wulf braced his arms on the kitchen counter, still breathing hard. “It’s so hard to believe. I can’t fathom it.”

  From the doorway, Flicka’s voice said, “You have to believe it, Wulfie.”

  Dieter turned, his words a raw, naked wound in his heart.

  Flicka was standing in the doorway from the rest of the house, holding Alina on her hip. The toddler was clinging to Flicka and laying her blond head on her shoulder. “I married Dieter, and I’m going to spend my life with him.”

  “He’s not Dieter Schwarz.” Wulf’s voice sounded thin, sad. “He’s Raphael Mirabaud.”

  “He’s not Raphael Mirabaud,” Flicka said, walking across the kitchen and handing Alina to Dieter.

  He took his baby and cradled her to his chest, hugging her because he hadn’t seen his child since they’d been in France. Alina clutched his neck, whispering, “Daddy.”

  Flicka said, “This is my husband, Dieter Schwarz.”

  Dieter reached out to her and pulled her under his arm, nuzzling her hair and pressing his forehead against her.

  Wulfram watched them for a long time before he extended his hand to shake. Wulf said, “It’s good to have you back, Dieter, and welcome to the family.”

  Dieter released Flicka’s waist and clasped Wulfram’s hand, relieved. “It’s good to be home.”

  “I wish you’d walked me down the aisle, Wulfie,” Flicka said. “I wish you could have been there.”

  Wulfram shrugged, and a twinkle lit his bright blue eyes. “It’s not too late.”

  One Year, Five Royal Weddings

  Dieter Schwarz

  Sometimes,

  the answer is staring you right in the face

  all along.

  Dieter and Flicka had managed to rent a house in the Apache Tears Ranch development that was only half a mile from Wulfram’s mansion. With the gates and fences surrounding every plot and the streets, however, the route between them wasn’t walkable. Dieter liked the security but detested the view of walls and iron. He missed the snow-capped Alps on the horizon.

  He moved his and Alina’s possessions into their new house over one weekend with help from the Rogues and paid them, as is traditional, in beer and pizza.

  Yet one man wasn’t there, and it left a void in Dieter’s life.

  Dieter’s inheritance showed up in his wealth management and stockbroker accounts less than a week later, a long string of numerals punctuated with commas. He had not expected it nearly so soon.

  As Wulf had suggested, much of the wealth transferred from the Mirabaud estate to Dieter was in the form of stocks and bonds from the banks and financial institutions that had purchased Geneva Trust’s assets. Without even contacting Océane, Dieter could see the trail of financial deals that had occurred upon the liquidation of Geneva Trust. There were many, and they were complicated.

  With the cash in his account and the stock in his name to be used as collateral, Dieter Schwarz began the unenviable task of expanding Rogue Security from a small, boutique protection services agency into a mammoth organization with nearly unlimited operations.

  One afternoon while Alina was away at her pre-school for a few hours, Dieter fretted over the possible purchases, hiring options, and financial vehicles, trying to come to decisions. The permutations of possibilities expanded every time he spoke to a subject matter expert, which meant his prior commanding officers and other people he knew in the clandestine services. Should he specialize in land operations? Should he buy two jets for long-range, large-scale operations, or would several helicopters be more flexible? He’d always liked underwater maneuvers. When he’d been planning the red herring operation to assault the Prince’s Palace from a yacht, just thinking about the possibility of a scuba-based assault had been a blast. Maybe boats? Maybe tanks.

  He scrawled notes on a legal pad, red and blue and green ink running over the neon yellow paper.

  Names.

  Numbers.

  Costs and prices.

  Dates: deliverables, projected, and insanely impossible.

  Countries, regulations, and lawyers’ phone numbers.

  Longitude and latitude.

  Profanity concerning his state of affairs.

  Math.

  A green Post-It floated to the floor, sticking to a yellow one and escaping with it.

  His legal pad was ripping across the top from flipping it back and forth.

  Numbers covered one page, and he had no idea what they meant.

  At a desk across from his in their small home office, Flicka had set up her wedding planning operation. After Wulfram had suggested yet another wedding, she’d balked, but he’d insisted upon it. She’d retrieved her sample binder from Rae and was flipping through it, inserting her fingernails at various places in the thick book and flopping wads of papers to find exactly what she needed. With a practiced swipe of her fingers over her cell phone screen, she dialed phone numbers from memory.

  Flicka hung up her phone and grinned in a moment of triumph. “Well, that’s it.”

  “What’s it?” he asked, chewing on a pencil that was already crumpled with bite marks.

  “The wedding. I planned all of it for next week. Flowers, catering, and guests; menu, venue, and clothes. The details are written up in a double-entry ledger, and the entire wedding came in on time and under budget. You have a fitting tomorrow at ten for your suit.”

  “The whole thing?” Dieter asked, stunned.

  “Of course,” Flicka said, her emerald green eyes snapping with glee. “I’ve planned and executed five royal weddings in less than a year: me in Paris, Wulfie’s civil ceremony and reception in Paris, Wulfie’s religious wedding in Montreux, us in Gibraltar, and us, here. That’s got to be some sort of record.”

  His answer, right there, was staring him in the face.

  Flicka mused, “Maybe I’ll open up a wedding planning business now that I’m not a princess anymore. I always thought that, someday, maybe I’d take a stab at something like that. I should do something. I don’t want to be useless. And I should do something to bring in some money. Being a bartender felt great. I brought home money, and people depended on me. I felt more powerful than I ever did as a princess, doing princess things.”

  Dieter set his pen on the chaos of paper and Post-Its covering his desk. “Flicka, my Durchlauchtig, how would you like a job?”

  Prince Dieter

  Dieter Schwarz

  “Never forget that no military leader has ever become great

  without audacity.”

  ~~Carl von Clausewitz

  Flicka hounded Dieter about his “quarrel” with Wulfram, as she called it.

  It wasn’t just a quarrel. Dieter had broken every hard line that Wulfram possessed.

  He respected Wulfram too much to call it a silly bro quarrel.

  Flicka huffed at him over breakfast. “You know you want to make up. Go talk to him.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Dieter said, staring into the black recesses of his coffee. “I can’t force it. Everyone sets boundaries of what they’re willing to accept from other people, or they should. I crossed Wulf’s limits. I lied to him about the very essence of who I am.”

  “You are not Raphael Mirabaud,” she told him.

  “I should have given him the opportunity to determine who I was to him, and I should have informed him because that life of mine has current security ramifications for him and for you. And then there’s you.”

  “What the hell about me, Dieter?”

  “I seduced his little sister and married her.”

  “If I remember correctly, buddy, you wouldn
’t make a move. You just skulked around behind me when I went out, chasing away every date I had.”

  “None of them deserved you. All of them were only after one thing. And Wulfram tacitly agreed with my operational strategy.”

  “Tacitly, how?”

  “He told me not to let the randy bastards lay a finger on you. All young men are lust-addled idiots with no morals.”

  “Guilty conscience, much? And then you stalked me in our apartment at Kensington Palace.”

  He frowned. “I did not.”

  “You were always standing just a little too close to me when I turned around. Your fingers brushed my shoulder when you were helping me on with my coat.”

  Surely, he hadn’t. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know I was doing it.”

  “I loved every minute of it. Every woman should have a hot, ripped man trying to keep his hands off of her and utterly failing.”

  “But you were too young.”

  “You were the soul of propriety until I was nineteen or so. Then I started walking around the house in my underwear, trying to get you to notice me. Even that took a while.”

  “I remember you doing that. It seemed like I stared at the walls and out of the windows for years, trying to avert my eyes and not stare at you like a hungry wolf.”

  “You did anyway, and I loved every minute of it. Dieter, we were meant to be. You don’t need to feel guilty about it, and Wulfie needs to get the hell over it. He doesn’t own my damn body, and he doesn’t get to choose whom I marry or don’t. When he thinks about it, he’ll realize that you were the only man for me.”

  A few days later, Flicka needed something over at her brother’s house or needed to talk to Rae, or maybe her rising pregnancy hormones needed to see her baby niece, and she convinced Dieter to drive her over there because, despite her repeated protestations that she was expanding her life skills because she wasn’t a princess anymore, she was still shy about driving after dark.

  The sun wasn’t even down yet at five-thirty, just after Alina had eaten her supper, but purple and gold streaked the sky as the sun neared the mountaintops. Alina sang something she had learned at pre-school in the back seat.

  When they arrived, Rae let them in the front door and whisked Flicka and Alina upstairs to do something or see something. Dieter did his best to keep up, but he understood that not everything had to be a damned committee meeting, either.

  Wulfram stood in the foyer under the enormous chandelier that reflected fire in the polished marble floor. “It’s cool today.”

  “For the desert,” Dieter replied.

  “It doesn’t get truly cold, here.”

  “Not like Switzerland.”

  They both studied the floor.

  Wulf asked, “Do you want a drink?”

  “God, yes.”

  Dieter followed Wulf back to a library in the rear of the house where they’d used to have a drink together at the end of long days.

  One of Wulfram’s housekeepers followed them, carrying a tray.

  Dieter looked back at the silent, inscrutable housekeeper. “Did you order food?”

  Wulf glanced back and frowned. “No.”

  The woman followed them into the library and placed the tray between them on a table.

  Wulfram asked her in German, the language they always used together, “Rosamunde, what’s this?”

  Rosamunde had been Wulfram’s housekeeper for many years and was now his Head of Staff. She had greeted Dieter at the door the very first time he’d visited Wulfram in Rolle, Switzerland, and she’d been Wulf’s father’s head housekeeper at Schloss Marienburg before Wulf stole her away to work for him.

  The thin, wiry woman with iron-gray hair whisked the cloth away from the tray, revealing two bowls of creamy, pale yellow soup, each with toasted croutons and a sprig of fresh parsley floating in them.

  Rosamunde announced, “Milchsuppe.”

  Milk soup.

  Dieter sat back in his chair. “I should have known this was a trap.”

  A small crease appeared between Wulfram’s pale eyebrows, which was as close to scowling as he ever got. “This is unnecessary.”

  She said, “You think you’re Swiss, Wulfram, instead of German. Eat the milchsuppe with your old, Swiss friend, Dieter Schwarz.”

  Rosamunde flounced out of the library.

  Milchsuppe is the most quintessential of Swiss dishes, perhaps even more so than fondue, raclette or muesli. It is a symbol of alpine culture, the founding of the Swiss Confederation, and comfort food.

  In its simplest form, milchsuppe is nothing more than milk simmered with bread, though most cooks now add Sbrinz, a flavorful Parmesan-type cheese that makes it rich and savory.

  Like the country of Switzerland, the soup is a melding of the ingredients that were at hand in June, 1529, and a culinary symbol of Swiss history that is a blend of warfare that melted into diplomacy and reconciliation, and finally neutrality.

  Two armies composed of tall, handsome, blond, Swiss warriors met on a battlefield on what is now known as the Milchsuppestein, or ‘the milk soup pasture.’ Milchsuppestein marked the no-mans-land, the wartime front between northern states, called cantons in Switzerland, like Zürich that adhered to the new Protestant faith as led by a firebrand Martin Luther-like reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, and the southern states of the Old Swiss Confederacy like Zug that remained faithful to the Catholic Church and Rome. Diplomatic relations between the two sides had failed, and the armies marched to meet each other on the battlefield, covered with plate and scale armor and armed with the traditional Swiss weapon of choice, pikes.

  The diplomats continued their bickering, at odds with their faiths and deficient in their ability to compromise, but the armies themselves had fewer qualms about negotiations. The infantrymen were hungry after their long march to the battlefield where the war was to be held, but neither army had sufficient provisions for a siege while the politicians flapped their gums. The army from Zürich had packed plenty of bread and salt, while those from Zug had brought milk from its rich dairy farms.

  Thus, over a soup pot on the battlefield, milchsuppe was created, and it fed the hungry armies, who had more in common with wanting their supper than they differed. Peasants conscripted into the armies swapped maces and pikes for dagger-cut bread and warm soup, and they brokered their own peace.

  “War is the domain of physical exertion and suffering,” Carl von Clausewitz said.

  Soup is better.

  In Switzerland, milchsuppe embodies what it means to be Swiss: to negotiate, to reconcile, and to lay down one’s arms and claim neutrality.

  And it was staring Dieter and Wulfram in the face, steaming gently in china bowls.

  Dieter looked up at Wulfram, who was staring back at him.

  As Dieter watched, Wulf’s shoulders lowered, perhaps in resignation, and he sighed one long, measured exhale.

  Dieter gingerly leaned over the bowl and sniffed. The warm aroma of mild cheese and cream mixed with bread fried in butter. “It smells good.”

  Wulfram tasted it. “They made it well. It shouldn’t go to waste.”

  “I could eat.”

  They ate the milchsuppe and considered the soldiers who had preferred warm soup to war.

  When they finished, Dieter leaned back in his chair, full. “That was tasty.”

  “Would you like that drink?”

  “Otherwise, you got me in here under false pretenses.”

  Wulf stood and poured them both an inch or so of whiskey.

  Dieter sipped, and the liquor spread over his tongue in a soothing wave of warmth. “Nice. What is this?”

  “Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve.”

  Perhaps the most expensive bourbon whiskey in the world, which had been aged twenty-five years and cost over three hundred dollars a shot, if you could find it.

  If this was another of Wulfram’s signals, it was a favorable sign.

  Dieter said, “It’s nice.”

  Wulfram sat
in a leather-upholstered chair and crossed his long legs.

  Dieter sat opposite him and placed the crystal glass on a small table between the chairs. The inlaid wood was designed like a compass.

  Wulfram didn’t say anything, just sipped the drink.

  Not talking wasn’t curing anything between them.

  Dieter cast about for neutral topics: the weather, cars, maybe weapons. They’d already talked about the liquor.

  And yet, Clausewitz did say that it is better to act quickly and err than to hesitate until the time of action is past.

  Time for strategy and audacity.

  Dieter said, “Flicka says she isn’t a princess anymore.”

  Wulfram snorted. “I heard the rumor that she thinks she isn’t.”

  “She keeps saying it. I hired her as a logistics coordinator for Rogue Security.”

  Wulfram inclined his head to the side and studied his whiskey, nodding slightly. “She’ll be good at that.”

  “Well, she wants to do something. She renounced her title and her inheritance in front of your father and Pierre,” Dieter said. “Loudly.”

  “She didn’t renounce it in front of me,” Wulfram said, his tone dry, “and I’ve been the head of the House of Hannover for years.”

  “Your father seemed to believe her.”

  “My father believes he rules part of Germany through the divine right of kings.”

  “But, if she’s still a princess—” Dieter mused, turning the glass of whiskey between his palms.

  “She is,” Wulfram stated, his voice hard and certain.

  “—and she and Pierre had this huge argument over courtesy titles versus royal titles—”

  “Yes,” Wulfram said, his dark blue eyes narrowing. “Women are accorded courtesy titles when they marry a member of the royal family, though usually the husband’s first name is incorporated into the title. However, as members of the royal family are often granted a royal dukedom or other high, noble title when they marry, the royal dukedom outranks the courtesy title. Thus, while Kate Middleton holds the courtesy title of Princess William, her higher and more correct title is Kate, Duchess of Cambridge.”