Page 13 of Happily Ever After

Walkabout

Flicka von Hannover

Damn it, I was supposed to be good at this.

Flicka held Alina’s hands and strolled the corridors of the Prince’s Palace in Monaco. Much of the building had been renovated since the medieval days when it had been built, and the hallways were as modern as any English or German castle that had been brought up to code.

Alina’s baby fingerswere soft as she toddled along beside Flicka’s leg, stuffing a cookie into her mouth with her other hand.

The child ate a lot of cookies, but Flicka figured that Alina was a tad young to be watching her carbs and they could break that cookie habit sometime when they weren’t in mortal danger.

Men wearing black suits—suit jackets that were boxy under the arms and cut longer on the sides—followedthem. Every now and then, Flicka could hear one of them mutter into a radio.

She swung Alina up to her hip and walked faster through the palace. Alina dropped cookie crumbs down Flicka’s shirt that lodged in her bra.

As a teenager, she’d stayed here during school and college vacations with her friend Christine Grimaldi, who was Pierre’s first cousin. These corridors were familiar to her, inthat way where she should be able to find her way out if she just remembered hard enough. Compared to Kensington Palace orSchloss Marienburg,the Prince’s Palace of Monaco wasn’t even that big.

Every time she turned a corner, the white hallways looked wrong. The staff stared at her suspiciously as she trotted, carrying Alina.

Ahead, the hallway brightened as if sunlight was finding its wayin down there.

She must be close to an exit.

If she could get out of the palace, she could lose herself in the crowds that thronged the headlands of Monaco. She could run across Monaco if she needed to in twenty minutes or so, even carrying Alina.

Just as she neared what must be a door or nearly a doorway to the outside, one of the Secret Service agents took her elbow. “Your Highness, if youwould follow me back to your suite, please.”

“No, I just wanted to go this way,” she said, pointing toward the sunlight and freedom.

“You aren’t supposed to stray into this area of the palace,” he said. “It’s for your own protection. You must have gotten lost.”