Page 9 of Happily Ever After

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Flicka von Hannover

Because she was worth it.

Flicka hurried back to the guest suite.

As she came through the door, Alina threw herself at Flicka’s legs, nearly knocking her off her pumps. Flicka grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself with one hand and gathered the toddler against her side with the other. “It’s okay. I’m back. Mommy’s back.”

“Don’t goaway. Don’t go away,” Alina sobbed against Flicka’s leg.

The nanny trotted over to retrieve Alina, but Flicka waved her off and told her to leave the suite.

She reached down and lifted the toddler, snuggling the child on her hip. “It’s okay now. Everything’s okay.”

Alina sobbed against her shoulder. “I want Daddy.”

“I know, baby,” Flicka crooned to her and walked into the bedroom. “I do, too.I wish Daddy were here.”

“It was night. Daddy wasn’t home.”

“He’ll come soon,” Flicka said, hoping she wasn’t wrong. She set Alina on her wide bed and laid down next to her. “Daddy will come soon. Maybe tomorrow.”

They laid there for a few minutes until Alina finished calming down.

Alina picked Flicka’s hand off the pillow, though she still sniffled. “Pink.”

Flicka looked down at her hands.

The pink fingernail polish she had applied at the Mirabaud estate was beginning to chip. She should call in a manicurist. Perhaps Alina would like a professional mani-pedi instead of smiling her awestruck little grin while Flicka dabbed polish on her fingernails and toenails.

Last night, as soon as they had arrived at the Prince’s Palace in Monaco—after a race to the Geneva airport, a shortflight on one of Pierre’s smaller jets to Nice in France, a noisy helicopter flight to the helipad in Monaco, and one more limousine ride to the palace in the wee hours of the morning—Alina had been whisked away by nursemaids.

Flicka had declined to ask why nannies were immediately available at the palace.

She had demanded the child’s return to the Secret Service men, loudly, and then by callingPierre and Quentin on the cell phone they had passed to her in the park a week before. She had threatened every threat she had, including a worldwide media blitz.

An hour later, a sobbing, inconsolable Alina was returned to Flicka in her bedroom for the night, which was one of the large guest suites downstairs and away from the royal family’s lodgings. It had taken only minutes for Flicka tocalm the toddler down enough for the child to pass out from exhaustion in her arms. She’d tucked the child into her bed and collapsed beside her in the last few hours of darkness before dawn.

Lying on the bed now, Flicka’s body still hurt, her neck and back wrenched from her desperate struggling with the Russianbratvaman who had held her back the night before while another man had taken Alinatoward that terrible man, Piotr Ilyin.

She’d never really wanted to hold a gun on a man before, not even Pierre, really.

But if Piotr Ilyin had been standing there, she would have grabbed one of the pistols that Pierre’s Secret Service personnel toted on their hips and shot the shit out of Ilyin. She didn’t know how Ilyin had planned to kill Alina, but her death would have been an example tohis other men, meant to frighten them into abject obedience lest it happen to their children, which meant it would have been terrible and prolonged.

Flicka’s homicidal and bloodthirsty ancestors would have arisen in her soul, and she would have shot Ilyin and kept shooting him, and at some later point, allowed him to die.

But it hadn’t happened, she reminded herself. She’d gotten herself andAlina out.

And now she had to survive until Raphael came for them.

“When is Daddy coming?” Alina asked, her green eyes still watery.

“Soon,” she told Alina. “Daddy said he would come and get us, though he might have to send someone else. We have to be okay until he comes. No matter what, we have to stick together, and we have to be okay. I’m your mommy, so I have to be okay for you. You’remy baby, and you have to be okay for me. Right?”

Alina nodded, her eyes still shining with tears.

Flicka touched Raphael’s alpine mountaineering ribbon pinned on the shoulder of her dress. “We’ll be okay. It’s worth trying to survive.You’reworth it. You are worth everything to me. No matter what happens, I’ll always be here for you.”