Page 123 of Happily Ever After

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 huffedat 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 arenotRaphael Mirabaud,” she told him.

“Ishould 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 neededto 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.