Page 80 of Happily Ever After

She didn’t want Dieter to run, screaming, out of the French farmhouse. There would be plenty of time, later, to discuss how they would deal with an insomniac Hannover toddler. “Nope. Hardly any chance.”

“Should Rae know she may have just given birth to a baby that will never sleep?”

“Somebody should probably mentionit to her, but I’m not getting into that with Wulfie.”

“I’m still having trouble believing it, that you’re pregnant with our child.”

His fingers tickled through her silk dress. “Me, too.”

He nuzzled her hair with his nose, a silly caress but one he’d done when they’d been together in London. “I still can’t quite believe this is all real, that we’re married, and we’re going to have a child.This is the other life I never dared dream about, the one I had no right to dream about.”

She said, “I didn’t dream about it. It felt like a part of me had gone dark.”

He sighed, and his arms tightened around her. “I’m sorry I left. I’ll apologize for the rest of our lives. We could have had these years together, and I screwed it up.”

“You did what you thought was the best, the thing that shouldkeep me safe.” She snuggled more deeply into his arms, closer to his chest. “You did the Dieter Schwarz thing. It may have been hard, it may have been painful, but it was the honorable thing to do.”

He mumbled, “I missed you every day.”

“Me, too. I missed you so much, all those years and while I was in Monaco. But I don’t want to go back to Monaco, so right now, I think we should get in thecar and keep driving north.”

Dieter said, “I wonder if these people left a tube of toothpaste, so I could use my finger to brush my teeth.”

Flicka stood and stretched hard, her body creaking from sleeping on a sliver of the couch and then sitting without moving for too long. “Sure, we can take a look around. I feel bad about staying here even a minute longer than we need to, so let’s get movingas soon as we can.Holy cow, what’s that?”

Dieter sprang to his feet, fists held low and in front of him. He growled, “What?”

On the corner of a small table shoved against a wall, a thin, black cord led from the outlet to a tiny silver rectangle.

Flicka asked, “Is that a cell phone?”

Dieter stood. “We shouldn’t use it. We should continue on.”

“It probably won’t be of any use to us. They areall protected with passwords or thumbprints or retinal scans or something, these days, anyway. I kind of regret that I didn’t take all those computer classes at school instead of languages and music. There was this guy, Arthur, who probably could have plugged that phone into a jack in the back of his skull to hack it or something. He was a freaky computer genius. I can barely dial a phone number.”

“I’ve got a guy like that too. Too bad one of those guys isn’t here.”

“I could ask it nicely to open up,” she said, “or negotiate with it.”

“I could threaten it with a gun and see if that does something.”

Flicka chuckled. “Let’s take a look at it.”

Dieter said, “Wait. Before we even pick up that thing, we need to consider operational security. Monaco has reciprocal treaties with France, likeextradition treaties. Pierre could have notified their police or intelligence services to be on the lookout for you. I think we have to assume he did.”

Flicka wanted to stomp on Pierre’s head. “And tell them what? That I escaped?”

“That you were kidnapped.”

“Well, I’ll tell them that I wasn’t.”

Dieter shrugged. “That might not matter. If the head of a foreign state with special treaties saysyou were kidnapped, then maybe as far as the police are concerned, you were kidnapped.”

“Well, I’m not going to call the police. I’ll call someone else, someone who can help us get away from Pierre.”

Dieter frowned at the phone. “I’m not sure what tech France’s intelligence services have or how much they would be willing to use, though if Pierre pressed hard, they might do everything withintheir capabilities. It’s possible they have voice recognition software scanning the lines, both cellular and landline, and sampling telephone communications. If you make a phone call, we might have to assume that the French police might quickly pinpoint our location.”

They’d have to use it and run. “So calling Wulfie wouldn’t work. He’s probably at home in the US right now. He couldn’t help us.He couldn’t get back to France fast enough.”