Page 122 of Happily Ever After

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. Dieterliked 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 stockbrokeraccounts 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 financialdeals 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 Alinawas 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 twojets 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 runningover 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 itback 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 thethick 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 inParis, 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, myDurchlauchtig,how would you likea job?”