Page 79 of Happily Ever After

Country French

Flicka von Hannover

Found one.

Flicka sat straight and upright in a cozy armchair, watching Dieter Schwarz sleep. Sunlight streamed in the wide living room windows of the little French farmhouse, touched his golden hair, and slowly brightened the room.

The sun was almost directly above the house and the bare trees outside, but the light was moving acrossthe sky and toward the western horizon. This living room faced west, so the sunbeams reached farther into the brightening room with every passing minute.

The couch they’d slept on, spooned tightly together, was dark blue with cheery yellow pillows, and the rest of the furniture was lightly worn and rustic. The overall effect was a tasteful, sweet country French, which should not have surprisedFlicka at all, considering that they were actually in a French farmhouse, out in the countryside.

She had awakened a few hours before. Not even being pregnant could make Flicka von Hannover sleep more than eight hours.

Her abdomen still lay flat under her evening gown, and she smoothed the beaded silk. Soon, if everything went right, her body would swell as their child grew.

It still felt unbelievable.

Dieter stirred and rubbed his strong hand up the side of his face. “What time is it?”

“About one o’clock,” she said. A grandfather clock stood silently in a corner.

He grunted. “I didn’t sleep much the last few nights. I guess I made up for it.”

She smiled at him, amused at his rationalizing. “It’s not like you slept through the whole day.”

Dieter yawned and stretched, his black tee shirtstretching tightly over the round muscles of his arms and chest. “It’s probably better that I got some sleep, anyway. We can drive through the night, tonight. How long have you been up?”

“A little while, but I napped in the car while you were driving last night.”

He pushed himself up to sitting and yawned. “Yeah, you do that same thing that Wulf does, where you don’t sleep much.”

If anyonemight have noticed, Dieter had been around them both enough to do so. “It’s a Hannover family trait, like hemophilia. My father is a short sleeper too.”

“Does everyone in your family have insomnia like that?”

Flicka’s cousins included many night owls and early risers. “A lot of us. It seems to be an autosomal, dominant genetic trait.”

His smile at her was lop-sided and sleepy. “And you’ve studiedthe genetics of not-going-to-sleep, have you?”

“When history blames your family’s genes for the downfall of most of the royal house of Europe and the murder of the Romanovs, you tend to pay attention in sophomore biology class. Royal hemophilia is a recessive, sex-linked trait. I memorized that. It’s kind of important. I looked very, very carefully at those family pedigrees of Queen Victoriaand her many children, and I figured out that because Wulfie and I are descended from Victoria’s uncle King George the Third who did not have hemophilia and from one of her healthy sons, that means I can’t be a carrier of the disease. All our other links to Victoria are through healthy males, too, so no bad genes from them, either.”

He reached over the arm of the couch and grabbed her hand, pullingher to standing and wheeling her around to sit beside him. “And just how many times does your family tree loop back to Queen Victoria?”

At least three times. Maybe more. “I’m not sure.”

Her family tree looked like a couple of octopuses, fighting each other.

Dieter said, “Wulf should have been tested for that before he and Rae started having kids.”

“Oh, he can’t be a carrier. Royal hemophilialies on the X chromosome, so if a male has the gene, he has the hemophilia disease because he doesn’t have a second X chromosome like a girl does. Wulfie doesn’t have the disease or the gene. My father doesn’t have the disease, so I can’t be a carrier, either.”

Dieter gathered her close under his arm and kissed her temple. His fingers stroked over her tummy. “So, there’s no chance this littleperson in here could have hemophilia?”

She watched his fingers meander over her stomach and the black silk of her dress. “Not royal hemophilia, anyway.”

“Could they have that not-sleeping thing?”

Flicka had stopped taking naps when she was nine months old, and she hadn’t slept more than five hours a night since she was a year and half. Imagine an eighteen-month-old who refuses to go to bedfor longer than a few hours and then isawake,horriblyawake,all the time.