Page 75 of Once Upon A Time

Georgie’s laugh jumped through the phone’s speaker and echoed around the car. She asked, “Dieter Schwarz, the guy I met in Paris?”

“Gray eyes? Freakishly stacked? Abs like the rippled sands of Arabia?” Flicka asked, needling Dieter some more.

Luca took one hand off the steering wheel to slap at Dieter, who was smiling less.

“Yeah,” Georgie said through the phone. “That guy’s not gay.”

Dang.Flicka had been hoping to tease Dieter longer.

Luca said, “Ask her again, just to make sure.”

Dieter backhanded him on the arm and glared at Flicka some more, a snarl twisting his sensual mouth.

Flicka asked Georgie, allowing incredulity to raise her voice, “You know that from meeting himfor five minutes?”

“Oh, it didn’t take that long. I have the world’s most highly developed gaydar. That guy is as straight as a laser beam. He is the very definition of the shortest distance between two points. To get any straighter, he would have to be able to burrow through the space-time continuum.”

Dieter chuckled and turned back to look out the front window. His blond hair cut a sharp line above his collar.

Luca laughed as he drove.

Flicka argued, trying to keep it going, “Then Dieter has an unnatural attachment to Wulfram in some other way.”

“That might be, but it’s a bromance, not something sublimated. Plus, he’s married,” Georgie said.

A glass knife stabbed Flicka’s heart. “Like that ever meant anything. Besides, I think something’s going wrong with that. He’s living at Wulf and Rae’s house.” Dieter looked back at her again, his face perfectly composed, expressing nothing. Flicka may have traipsed over the line, there. “At least now I have something to tease Wulfie with.”

“Wulfie?” Georgie asked, coughing over the phone.

“He’s my brother, honey. What did you think I called him when I was six? Anyway, be in Montreux on Saturday by noon or I’ll send Dieter after you.”

“I really don’t think I can,” Georgie said again.

“Yes, youcanattend your best friend’s wedding. She needs you. Get your ass there, missy.”

“Now, now. Is that how a princess speaks?”

“A princess speaks however the situation requires. I will see you on Saturday, or else.”

Flicka hung up.

Dieter didn’t say a word.

Neither did she.

Luca didn’t even look at them all the way to the hotel.

Flicka tapped the next number to call into her phone.

Rescuing the Napkins

Flicka von Hannover

I hadn’t laughed like that

for two years.

Flicka resolved that it would be undignified for a royal princess to throw a cellular phone through the plate glass window of a hotel suite.