Page 29 of Once Upon A Time

He wasn’t watching the clouds outside the windows or the closed door, however, like he always did.

His dove gray eyes were trained on her, locked on her face. Between them, Wulf married the woman he was so in love with.

Flicka’s serene smile never faltered. She was too much of a princess for that.

But hiseyes—

She had thought of his eyes as just gray when she was a kid, but her perception had changed the year she’d turned eighteen.

They were too dark to be silvery.

They were the gray of dangerous storm clouds building on the horizon, ready to sweep down and overturn your life.

Every time he had touched her, her whole world had turned upside down. Everything she had thought was important in her life—music, revolution—had fallen away when his fingers had grazed her skin.

She had been twenty when he’d made love to her the first time.

Her very first time.

And it had been completely her idea.

And after that, she’d never gotten over him.

If she had been so uncultured to not remain still and serene at her brother’s wedding, she would have shaken that thought out of her head.

Instead, like a chain of thoughts, it was replaced with moments from their year-long affair. She could feel the patchwork of it: a touch from the night she’d attended Christine Grimaldi’s recital, a glance from his gray eyes on a day after she’d aced a performance at college, the way he moved in her one late night when she’d attended a charity benefit with a date but gone home with Dieter.

Every moment of their year together was at her fingertips.

He had insisted that they keep their relationship an absolute secret. No one knew at the time, and no one must ever know.

So Flicka went to charity and social events with other men.

Her dates picked her up in their cars driven by their chauffeurs, danced with her, talked with her, and drove her home for a comparatively chaste kiss.

Dieter squired her inside Kensington Palace without a twitch of emotion for her or them, even though he had been shadowing her all night from the walls, the balconies, and the front seats of the cars.

Once inside, his hands found her.

One time, she had been out with some duke or another to some event benefitting the impoverished children of somewhere, and the duke had been driven off in his limo into the night.

As soon as the door had shut on the Kensington Palace apartment that they shared for her protection, he had shoved her against the wall.

He whispered in her ear, “Out there, who are you?”

“PrinzessinFriederike Augusta,” she whispered, trying not to smile too much.

“And in here?” he asked. “In my bed,whoseare you?”

“Yours,” Flicka whispered.

He picked her up in his arms, easily carrying her to his bedroom, his eyes never looking away from hers. They were dark gray smoke rising from a forest fire.

The only time he let down his guard was to make love to her. Every other minute of the day, his eyes restlessly scanned the area for dangers to her.

But when Dieter held her, helookedat her.

His eyes never left hers, locking her in his intense, storm cloud gaze, as he stripped the gown that had cost thousands off her body and then shucked the custom tuxedo that they’d had cut to accommodate his wide shoulders, tight waist, and the guns under his arms.