Page 53 of Happily Ever After

The Prince’s Winter Ball

Flicka von Hannover

I could not believe

he disguised himself as a priest.

Are you freaking kidding me?

Despite the recent death and funeral of Prince Rainier IV just the day before, the Prince’s Winter Ball would proceed as planned. The theme was always black-and-white, but funereal black looked like it would predominate this year.

The Prince’sWinter Ball was one of the highlights of Monaco’s winter social season, a glittering confabulation of celebrities, royalty, and billionaires that sent the paparazzi reeling, snapping some of the most dazzling pictures of the year. Where else did rock stars hobnob with princesses, and movie stars nosh with noblemen? The Prince’s Winter Ball was more metropolitan than the Met Gala and more exclusivethan even Flicka’s Shooting Star Cotillion.

Stylists and designers had been preparing the clothes for months.

Pierre Grimaldi’s coronation would be scheduled a few days after the ball, after the Council of Nobles met to confirm him as the next sovereign Prince of Monaco.

All day, the sky had been abuzz with helicopters ferrying guests to the helipad. The transports touched down on the longrunways cantilevered over the water from a sheer cliff, disgorged their occupants, and swarmed into the air again to pick up more glitterati at the airport in Nice, France. Guests stayed in the Monte Carlo casino hotel, with friends, or at rented houses until the ball began that evening at the Prince’s Palace.

Flicka remained in the Princess Grace suite, dressing and primping with her staff,until absolutely the last minute. Her hairdresser and stylist had fits when she’d gone in to lie down for a while before the ball, wearing her black, beaded evening gown with her hair carefully coiffed into a bun of ringlets at the back of her head.

She was just so inexplicably tired.

While she was in her bedroom, she pinned Dieter Schwarz’s alpine mountaineering pin to the seam inside her skirt.

For luck.

For presence of mind.

For love.

She also wore her wedding ring from that beautiful afternoon in Gibraltar when she’d married Dieter. She hadn’t taken it off in Monaco. Pierre had noticed it, his dark eyes tracking it when Flicka had been talking with her hands, but he hadn’t said anything.

Probably because she might have told Pierre to stuff his wedding ring up his ass.

Half anhour later, after she’d napped, her staff repaired the damage to her hair and steamed the wrinkles out of her dress, and she was ready to go.

Her staff radioed each other and Pierre’s people as Flicka and her entourage approached the ballroom, where the dancing would be held before and after the supper.

Pierre met her at the door to the ballroom, as planned, for their entrance. He was wearinga white-tie tuxedo and the highest princely Monegasque honor, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Saint-Charles. A red and white ribbon crossed under his white tie, and the diamond-encrusted, eight-pointed star of the order blazed on the left side of his chest.

His staff was holding radios, doubtlessly talking to her staff so she and Pierre wouldn’t have to converse more than necessary.

Hesmiled and offered her his elbow. “The entrance and one waltz, then the reception line, and then you can retreat to the head table.”

The reception line meant that Pierre and his minions would determine whom she could talk to, and they would be listening so they could intervene if she said anything wrong, which meant that Georgie, Christine, and any of her other friends who might be at the ballwould be kept far away from her.

The doors crept open.

Flicka sucked in her stomach.

Beside her, Pierre smiled his debonair and charming smile, looking like the cosmopolitan, elegant nobleman he was. He stepped forward, and Flicka walked with him.

They entered the ballroom and paused at the top of the stairway for photos. Flicka turned on her megawatt smile, as the gossip columns called it,and beamed at the crowd. They were here for Monaco. She wasn’t angry at Monaco.

Camera flashes sparkled around them and became a wave of white light that receded to flickers again. She smiled through it all, though her eyes watered from the multitude of flashing pinpricks. Blue and green afterimages floated over the ballroom like technicolor snow.

A man in red and blue livery shouted, “PrincePierre and PrincessFriederikeof Monaco!” because they were actually in Monaco. Anywhere else, they would have been introduced as “Prince Pierre and PrincessFriederikeof Hannover” because her royal title outranked his princely title. Her royal title was one of the reasons Pierre’s uncle had been so avid about Pierre marrying her.