Page 53 of Once Upon A Time

The chatter of the upper classes drove Flicka insane—the carping and tattling and backstabbing and shade—and she didn’t want any of that to mar Wulfie’s wedding.

At the other desk, Rae was walled-in by stacks of textbooks and was furiously typing a paper on something or other to do with psychology. Her keyboard clattered under her flying fingertips.

The door to their study room opened, and Wulfram strode in. He announced, “I’m going out for the afternoon. I’ll be on my mobile.”

Dieter entered behind him and took up a post by the door, watching.

Always watching.

Dieter’s storm-cloud gray eyes surveyed the windows, looking outside for anything amiss, and inventoried the room.

When Dieter came back, if anything in the room had been moved—books, furniture, whatever—his gray eyes would alight on it and evaluate it for reason and threat level, Flicka knew. Essentially, he took a mental picture of everywhere he was and ran it through a program in his mind that picked out problematic areas and changes.

Right now, he was staring out the window, checking the perimeter wall and landscaping below for signs of an intruder.

His gaze wandered to Flicka.

She was still looking at him.

Their eyes met.

It was just a moment of the two of them looking at each other, acknowledging that the other had also been looking, like a touch with their gaze.

Dieter returned to surveilling the windows.

Flicka looked back at her computer screen and its maddening color and china choices.

Wulf kissed Rae on the top of her head. She leaned back and wrapped her arms sinuously around him without taking her eyes off of her computer.

Wulf made the rounds to Flicka and kissed her on the top of her head, too. She leaned her scalp toward him to make it easier but otherwise glared at the colors and china settings on her screen.

Wulf and Dieter exited, leaving Rae and Flicka to stare at their screens.

Rae was staring out of the windows. “Those two, right?”

“What?” Flicka said.

“They’re freakishly alike, right? It’s like having two lions stalking around the house shoulder-to-shoulder all the time, like an enormous blond beast with two heads.”

Flicka sat back in her chair and sipped her wine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re nothing alike.”

“They’re both six-four, blond, Swiss men with an athletic, muscular build, testosterone-built bone structure on their square jaws, carrying guns, and a little paranoid.”

Flicka mused, watching the sunlight catch ruby highlights in her wine. “Superficially, perhaps, but Wulf is German, not Swiss.”

Rae frowned. “He has a Swiss passport.”

Flicka shook her head. “He’s German from birth, and he’s the hereditary prince of a German kingdom. He can carry a Swiss passport all he wants to, but he loves Switzerland so much that he would like to conquer it and rule every inch, because he is a German warrior prince.”

Rae had turned to Flicka and was sitting with her chin in her hands. Her dark eyes sparkled.“Really?”

Flicka nodded and drank a deep swallow from her glass. Sweet berry flavors rode on top of the rich wine, a good vintage and a good year. Wulf had excellent taste in wine and kept a nice cellar.

Rae asked, “What else?”

Fine.If Rae wanted the whole comparison, Flicka could recite it. It had gone around in her head so many times that she couldn’t count. She hadn’t ever been able to spew it out because Wulfram was so private that he would have been insulted, and Dieter would have chastised her for a lapse in operational security by divulging too much information.

Flicka said, “Wulfram is cold on the outside and sweet on the inside. Dieter is salty on the outside and hot, inside.”