Wednesday, yet another set of black SUVs drove Rae, Wulf, and their security guys from the airport outside the city of Hannover, Germany into a thick forest.
Rae watched out the SUV’s window, her nose a scant inch from the cool glass, at the emerald and malachite and jade shades of green, green, and more green.
In the Sonoran desert where Rae had grown up, gray and brown tinted the plants. Some desert leaves were silver or beige to blend in with the sand and dust and resist the burning sun.
In Germany, the foliage burst in a riot of fertility. The greenness sucked up the rich sunlight and bred more trees, more plants, more soft green grass.
“It’s so green,” she said to Wulf, who was sitting beside her in the back seat, tapping on a tablet. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’m glad you find it so.” He held the tablet with one hand and typed on the screen with the other, his hand fanning across the on-screen keyboard while glowing numbers flickered and fell like rain.
Rae resumed watching the enormous trees fly by outside the window of the SUV. At least this SUV was a modest Volkswagen Touareg. The engine growled through the car and shivered her bones. Rae had never even suspected that Porsche and Mercedes made SUVs, which they had ridden in the Southwest, LA, and Paris, but she was learning scads about the world just being around Wulf. Most of it was dismaying, but some of it was as beautiful as a German forest in the late spring.
Rae had not thought of Europe as having forests. Over the centuries, first the Romans and then the Europeans must have razed the land during their wars and then paved them over, but this was a Red-Riding-Hood forest. Hansel and Gretel could get lost among the thick, old trees.
“How far are we going?” she asked Wulf.
“About twelve miles. If you want your mobile to work, we have German SIM cards.”
She handed her phone to Dieter in the front passenger seat, who was breaking cell phones apart and needling tiny chips into the innards again. His notebook was turned to a pocket page labeled Deutschland.
Dieter smiled at her, and she leaned over the back of the seat to watch him perform microsurgery on her phone. “Will it have another new phone number?”
“Ja,” Dieter said.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wulf watching her, then returned to his tablet, engrossed in the numbers.
If she watched what Wulf was doing with numbers, she might learn enough statistics to pass Dr. Gonder’s infamous statistics class, but she knew that was a lost cause. She had stopped attending the statistics lectures to concentrate on her other classes and take her lumps. Her other grades were straight A’s.
Dieter clicked her phone closed and handed it back to her.
“Danke,” she said and scooted back.
Dieter grinned at her and glanced at Wulf, but his expression was more quiet amusement, as always.
“Bitte,” Dieter said and resumed unscrewing the back of another cell phone.
She slid back in the seat and texted another quick message to Georgie, her brother, and her cousins Hester and Craigh so they’d have today’s phone number. If she maintained some sort of connection with them, maybe they could buy her some time.
The forest outside the windows dropped away from the road as the SUV climbed a hill. Stone walls held back the exuberant trees and grass.
“Oh, look!” Rae said to Wulf. “There’s a castle up there.”
Interlocked treetops rolled together like emerald storm clouds of leaves and billowed upward. A castle soared above them on a hilltop. The gray stone was sculpted into battlements and spires and towers and crenelations.
Wulf leaned across the seat to peer out her window. “Indeed.”
“It looks a thousand years old!”
“It’s less than two centuries old, built during England’s Victorian Period, just before your Civil War. It is Neo-Gothic, so it resembles twelfth-century architecture,” he said.
“So, practically new, then.”
“Quite.”
“Wow. I’d love to go through it.”
“That’s fortuitous.”
“Why?”
“My father lives there.” His tone was as dry as a desert riverbed cracked with drought.
“What!” She should have noticed Dieter snickering in the front seat.
Wulf said, “Schloss Marienburg is the summer residence of the House of Welf, of which the House of Hannover is a cadet branch, but we own it. As my father styles himself the King of Hannover, he lives in the castle.”
The SUV stopped for a yellow-barred roadblock while Rae tried to think of anything to say. The middle-aged policewoman checked their identification and squinted through the tinted window, trying to see in.
Wulf lowered the window. “Guten Morgen, Fräulein.”
The cool air that rushed into the SUV even smelled green.
The policewoman’s jaw hung a little open, and she touched the door frame where the window had retracted. A trace of moisture floated on her lower eyelids.
The woman raised her chin. “Guten Morgen, Herr von Hannover.” She snapped the passports back into the driver’s hand and stepped back, allowing them to pass. The yellow bar flipped up.
Rae looked askance, and Wulf shrugged. “I have rarely been here since I was fifteen. After my mother died, there was little attraction.”
The road curved through the trees, ascending.
Gravity pulled Rae into the upholstery. “So that’s why we went shopping yesterday? Because your dad lives in a castle?”
“You’re a beautiful woman, Rae. You should have proper clothes for the occasion.”
They had had fashion shows yesterday in private rooms within the Chanel and Dior stores, where waify models strutted in clothes that would look entirely different on Rae. Flicka had picked out three outfits for Rae. Wulf had suggested that Rae wear the pearl-gray sheath dress with a matching long jacket today, so she had.
After the shows and back at the hotel, Wulf had handed her the three teal boxes that she had returned to him at The Devilhouse. The rips where she had torn into them were still visible.
She protested, “Wulf, I don’t need these.”
“Consider them a loan, if you like.” He laid his hand over hers on top of the boxes, so she put the jewelry in her luggage. She wore the diamond drop earrings and bracelet with the triple row of diamonds, and they hung on her ears and arm.
In the SUV, Rae had a quiet attack of nerves about meeting Wulf’s father. This was going to be almost as bad as her own father giving Wulf the third degree and then marching him out into the desert, holding a gun.
The trees parted and gave way to a stone bridge that led into the castle. The antique block walls on either side were topped with very modern razor wire.
“What did you do for vacations?” Rae asked.
“Pardon me?” He looked up from his tablet.
“You said you haven’t been back much since you were fifteen years old. Didn’t you have summer or Christmas vacations from school?”
More lip-biting. She needed to play poker with him, even if it was strip poker.
Especially if it was strip poker.
He said, “You mustn’t tell Flicka that I told you this.”
“Of course not.” Good Lord, Wulf was gossiping. Rae leaned toward him.
Wulf sighed and laid the computer behind him on the seat. “Mother coddled Flicka a bit more than she had Constantin and me, so they were quite attached. Her illness was hardest on Flicka. Our mother had just died, the day before the term started at Le Rosey. My father shipped Flicka off on schedule. At Le Rosey, she sneaked out of her dormitory every night for a month to sleep in my room. The dorm mothers were devil-fox wild. Hers, because one of the youngest children was missing from bed and the building every night. Mine, because there was a female in the gentlemen’s dorm after curfew, even though she was my six-year-old sister. We finally got a dispensation to take a house in Rolle and a hotel in Gstaad for the winter term, even though I was fifteen.”
Rae’s jaw dropped open. “You lived by yourselves? When you were fifteen?”
“I hired Ms. Keller, a driver, and a few others to look after us.”
That meant Ms. Keller had been with Wulf since he was a teenager caring for a traumatized child.
He continued, “That was how she met Pierre. He was my roommate that year, and he gave her his bed and slept on the floor that month. I tried to sleep on the floor, but there were some problems with scar tissue. When he saw that I couldn’t lift my arm to take notes in class, he insisted.”
“You didn’t go see your father at all? Either of you?”
“There was no need.” A small smile crossed his face. “Can you imagine, a fifteen-year-old idiot with means and the freedom of a house? It might have been a disaster, except that Flicka sobbed herself to sleep every night for a year.”
“Oh, Wulf.” Rae inched closer to him and held his hand.
“After I graduated, I stayed in Rolle and Gstaad with her for two more years until my conscription, when I was twenty. I took classes at the University of Lausanne, which is in the same canton.”
“So you put your education second to your family,” Rae said.
“There is a substantial difference between caring for a grieving child who has no one else and a sect that demands ignorance and destructive conformity.”
His words cut Rae, and she started to pull her fingers away from his hand.
Wulf’s eyebrows pinched in the middle. “I apologize. I will not denigrate your family, but it is upsetting that they would require such a choice from you.”
He sighed again and gathered himself. “It has turned out for the best. The amusing part is that Flicka wanted the same arrangement when she turned fifteen, and I told her to get back to the Virgins’ Dormitory until she graduated. Hypocrisy comes naturally to Hannoverian princes.”
Rae smiled at him, tentatively, and the twinkle in his eye told her that he had meant to be funny.
The SUV drove around a bend, and the castle slid out of the forest.
They drove over a bridge that looked like it used to be a drawbridge because a moat was dug out beneath it. They stopped under a stone-fashioned porte-cochere.
A moat, like for invading armies.
A real, stone porte-cochere like for horse-drawn carriages, not like the aluminum sunshade at her dorm.
Rae had to have slipped out of her usual time-space continuum and into some sort of fairy tale parallel universe.
A man wearing a house livery uniform like their driver opened the SUV’s door on her side. She stepped out into the paved courtyard of the castle and stood in her new shoes that had cost as much as her used car.
That sealed the deal. She was lost in the multiverse somewhere.
The sun sailed into the sky, warming the amber stones. Spires rose around her like the castles of every handsome prince in every little girl’s treasury of fairy tales. This was a castle built for romance and love and happily-ever-afters. “Why wouldn’t Flicka want to have her wedding here?”
“Memories,” Wulf said. He strode through a great set of double doors.
Rae followed, her heels clicking on the pavers.
A man wearing a gray suit trotted to keep up with them. “Your father is in his study.”
“Danke, Herr Arbeitman.” Wulf handed him a list and said something else in German.
The corridors stretched long and labyrinthine. Every time Rae thought they might have reached an end, the hallway turned and there were more windows that overlooked more forest or the tiled courtyard.
What kind of money and folly did it take the tile the yard, anyway? They might as well carpet the forest.
The furniture—gilt and gold chairs and tables grouped into conversation pits—reminded Rae more of a hotel than a home. It smelled like old wood and the formaldehyde tang of brand-new fabric.
Wulf strode ahead of her, not looking at the extravagant furniture or the portraits of people who must have been related to him. The people in the oil paintings wore ball gowns, sharp uniforms, suits, lace, satin, velvet, and jewelry, lots of jewelry, pins and brooches and sashes and man-neck-things and rings and thick necklaces and medals and bracelets and tiaras. No wonder Wulf thought nothing of sending her these lavish gifts.
Rae increased her stride to keep up with Wulf even though she was worried that her sharp heels might poke holes in the woven carpeting. He hadn’t slowed a whit.
Wulf had been to Rae’s family’s ranch in Pirtleville last week. Shame rose in her stomach at what he must have thought of that dirt ranch and tiny house, and yet she was ashamed of being ashamed because there was no shame in working the land and raising cattle, so she refused to feel ashamed, and then she didn’t know what to feel.
Wulf stopped outside a double door and waited for her to catch up. He leaned down and whispered, “We will be announced. Do not curtsy or bow. If he offers to shake your hand, take it. Sit when I do in a chair beside me.”
“All right.” Seriously, if she was going to live the life of Eliza Doolittle, she needed someone to teach her manners and diction and elu—elah—electrocution. Otherwise, her rough manners might shock these blue-bloods. A panicked giggle died in her throat.
Someone cleared his throat behind her, and Rae turned, startled. Dieter stood at parade rest, his hands clasped, calm as ever. She hadn’t even heard him walking behind them on the thick carpet. She nodded to him, glad for a friendly face. He winked at her.
Wulf opened the doors. A man beside the door glanced at them and announced, “Prince Wulfram Augustus and friends.”
Inside, the gilded furniture outshone the pictures that Rae had seen on the internet of the Sun King’s Palace at Versailles. If it had been solid gold and stuffed with mink fur, she wouldn’t have been surprised.
An older man sat in the most ornate gold chair. Yes, it brought to mind a throne. Rae’s astonishment with the riches was beginning to fade into exasperation.
The man’s chiseled features bore evidence of sun damage in wrinkles and spots. His golden hair was shading to silver.
Yet, the golden apple that was Wulf hadn’t fallen far from that blue-eyed, golden Hannoverian tree. Wulf was still going to be handsome in thirty years or so.
A gray sling holding his father’s arm matched his gray suit. A black cast around his thumb just peeked past the sling.
Wulf stopped short, so Rae did, too. He bowed his head, more a nod, really. “Hello, Father.”
His father said something in German. Rae caught, Guten Morgen, which meant Good morning, but the rest was incomprehensible.
Wulf said, “May I present Ms. Reagan Stone, a very good friend. She speaks French and English and prefers to be called Rae.” Wulf drew a deep breath. “Rae, may I present His Royal Highness Phillipp Augustus, the Hereditary Prince of Hannover and Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.”
Having been told not to curtsey, Rae smiled and inclined her head at him. She repressed the urge to wave.
Phillipp Augustus nodded. Rae might have described that nod as curt, but she didn’t judge such things.
Wulf walked over to the chair across from his father. Rae followed and sat down in the rather firm chair next to him, as instructed.
The men exchanged pleasantries. Rae tried not to move. Luckily, her church’s three-hour services had prepared her well for sitting stone-still, hands and ankles crossed, back not touching the chair, and looking like she didn’t have a thought in her head.
Wulf’s father cast his stony gaze on Rae. “So what do you think of Hannover?”
Oh, Lord. He’d spoken to her. “It’s beautiful. The drive up here was gorgeous.”
“You should see it during the summer. We have a marksmen’s tournament. Wulfram has performed passably well the last few years.”
Wulf didn’t react at all.
Considering his dead-eye aim from that Southwestern ridge, Rae would have laid twenty bucks that Wulf had done better than passably well. “That’s great.”
The conversation faltered. Rae looked between the two men, but they didn’t say anything. She glanced back at Dieter, but he was doing his best impression of a piece of the wall.
“If you don’t mind me asking, is your arm all right?” Rae asked.
“It’s healing.” Wulf’s father frowned. “I crashed a Formula One car in the Australian Grand Prix a month ago and broke my arm. No one else was hurt.”
Before Rae remembered to be sophisticated, she went roughneck on the pretender to the kingly throne of Hannover. “Nice! Did it destroy the car?”
“Utterly.” His father smiled with one side of his mouth.
“Did you walk away?”
“I waved to the crowd with my other arm as I walked off the track.”
“Righteous,” Rae said. “I’ll bet that would have killed an ordinary man.”
“It’s all in how you control the impact.”
Rae said, “My brother ran into a saguaro once with a pick-up, and it came down on the cab, smash!” She karate-chopped into her hand to show the impact. “Those things weigh tons. Smashed the cab right through the middle.”
“Yes! That’s exactly of what I speak! The light pole came down right through the middle, smash!” He karate-chopped with his good arm on his knee. “It missed my head by a centimeter.”
Philipp Augustus scooted to the edge of his throne and explained to Rae the mechanics of the car and the particulars of the crash.
Between Rae and her two brothers who were old enough to drive, they had totaled five vehicles so far, so she commiserated for and admired the crash in equal quantities.
After a few minutes, Wulf rose and walked toward the door.
Rae signaled him, trying to put “Please for all that is holy don’t leave me alone with your Father the King” in one tiny, beckoning hand gesture.
Wulf said, “This Friday is options expiration day, so I need to adjust my positions. I’ll return shortly.” He smiled at her and then leaned down, whispering something to his father.
His father laughed and went back to describing to Rae the angle at which he had wrapped his horrendously overpriced race car around the light pole.
Wulf nodded to Dieter as he left the room. Dieter nodded back and resumed his immobile parade rest.
When they finished with the deconstruction of the accident, Rae asked him, “What did Wulf say to you?”
“Oh, he warned me that I’m not to flirt with you. He said he shot the last two fellows who were too forward. Amusing.”
“Oh.” She could still see Wulf staring into the darkness at the Marsden Hotel, too haunted to sleep.
“There’s not an imperious bone in his body. Now his sister, Flicka. If she were a boy, she would have made an excellent king. Too bad about Salic Law.”
Rae could feel that her whole face had drawn up like someone pulled an incredulous string between her eyebrows. “He’s quite impressive, you know.”
“Nonsense,” Prince Phillipp scoffed. “Wulfram can barely lead a waltz.”
“I’ve always found him quite, well, dominating.”
“He’s not really kingship material. It’s a good thing he has a minor talent with numbers.”
“He finished a doctorate at the London School of Economics in three years.” Shock made Rae tremble.
“Pish. Tricks and figures. He sails only passably, and he hasn’t played polo for years. I don’t know how we’ll get him married if he doesn’t excel at a sport.”
“You know he won a bronze medal in the Olympics, right?”
“Yes, but it was not in a sport suitable for our position, such an equestrian event.”
“And he does financial things really well. He taught economics at the University of Chicago, which is the best place for that in the world.” She should listen to Wulf more, and learn more, because he was a freaking wizard.
“Yes, but the people he is forced to associate with are horrid. What House are you connected with, anyway?”
“I’m not.”
“Not?” His profound frown jutted out his jaw. “Nonsense. Wulf knows better than to present a common girl. We still have standards in the House of Hannover. I would disapprove of a commoner.”
His pronunciation of the word disapprove sounded like he was casting a curse. Rae recoiled.
“Not that I particularly approve of that Monegasque fellow that Friederike insists that she will marry, if she goes through with it. There’s a difference between a princely family and a royal family, and this marriage elevates those Grimaldis to a status they don’t deserve. They are descended from Italian soldiers, not kings.”
Rae said, “Wulf is going to help me open clinics for autistic kids.”
Wulf’s father frowned. “Good Lord, you don’t work, do you?”
Oh, that was it. She was not shrill, and her voice was firm. “Of course, I do. Or I will, when I’m done with college, because work makes life sweet.”
“You sound like Wulfram.”
“And you should be so lucky as have me for a daughter-in-law. My parents disapprove of Wulf.”
She left the Hereditary Prince holding a fox hunting magazine and glaring at her back. Dieter held the door for her and followed her a few steps back as she stalked through the palace.
She had never had illusions that this was any kind of a permanent arrangement. Wulf was, as she had known from the beginning, a man who liked women, lots of women, women in the plural, and evidently, he had never brought a single, solitary woman home to meet his family or even his house staff.
She wasn’t an exception. She was just a slip-up, a commoner who would be disapproved of.
Rae paused, leaning her arm against a gilded column. Dieter stopped behind her and stood just far enough away that she didn’t feel the need to talk to him.
She should go home.
She should go home while she still could, because if she stayed in Europe with Wulf, she would lose her family, too.
She asked a roving staff person—a burly guy wearing the black and gold livery—where Prince Wulfram Augustus had gone and followed him through the maze of gilded hallways with Dieter trailing her.
No wonder Wulf could navigate the twisty office corridors of The Devilhouse. Maybe he’d built it to replicate this asylum.
She found Wulf squinting at two laptops, a tablet, and his phone, all propped up in an enormous dining room that looked like something out of a, well, a medieval castle where princes dined with kings and their fifty knights and all their associated ladies and they all threw the bones to their wolfhounds, except that the spotless carpet looked like dogs had never scratched it. The emerald velvet upholstered thrones—because they were so much more than dining chairs—looked like no one had eaten chicken off the bone in here, either.
Or doves. Or turkeys. Or pheasants. Or swans. Rae didn’t know what kind of poultry royalty ate, but it was probably something weird. Rae could picture Wulf’s dad tearing a leg off a roasted swan and eating it.
“Wulf!”
Wulf straightened and stretched his arms. “It appeared you were getting on well with my father.”
Rae ran to him despite her high heels, down the long line of ornate chairs, past the oil portraits of his haughty ancestors, under the cathedral ceiling. She grabbed him around the neck. “I need to go home. Back to America. Now.”
He dragged her off of his neck and stared at her. Wulf’s blue eyes had turned fierce. “What did he say to you?”
She held onto his wrists and refused to let stupid eyes drip again. “Nothing. Nothing that isn’t painfully obvious.”
Behind her, the dining room door thunked closed.
He held her shoulders. “I swear to God that this time I will commit regicide. What did he say to you?”
No more stupid crying. She turned it into anger and stared back at him. “I just want to go home.”
“Whatever he said, it isn’t true. He’s a venal man clinging to customs that were extinct generations before he was born. I should not have brought you here. I should have sent you to the spa or shopping with my sister, but I didn’t want you to be concerned that I wouldn’t take you to meet my father.”
“I understand. I understand that you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t. I understand that he said what everyone else thinks and what you know is true. I’ve always known that this thing between us isn’t permanent, that it’s just for fun, that this is just one last booty-moon in Paris.”
“Oh, Reagan. That’s not true, either.”
“Yeah, it is. It’s truer than truth. It all shocked the heck out of me at first, but I’m fine now. I hadn’t realized how much this little dalliance meant to me, but it can’t be anything more and I’m fine with that. I need to go home and salvage things with my family.”
Wulf said, “If you say your safe word, I will have them fuel the plane and we can fly straight back from here, but I’m asking you to stay.”
Rae’s hands crept from his wrists to his broad shoulders and she braced herself against him. Her voice would not shake. “I can’t stay. This is all futile and it’s breaking my heart and I am screwing everything up with my family and everything is wrong.”
Wulf’s voice was quiet, but distress tightened his throat until it sounded choked. “Your Majesty.”
His safe word echoed in her crazy head. “—What?”
“Your Majesty. I’m using my safe word. We have lost control, and this must end. Everything stops here. We will leave this place. We’ll go to the plane. We’ll fly back to Paris. We will discuss what went so terribly wrong. When we get to Paris, if you still want to go home, we’ll file the flight plan from there. We can have someone pick up your things at the hotel. You wouldn’t want to leave those volumes of Shakespearean poems, I hope.”
“No. I love those books. I don’t want to leave them.”
“Good, and I must say goodbye to my sister.” Wulf slammed the lids of the laptops and stacked them on his briefcase. A stack of wooden boxes towered behind his briefcase. “We can leave immediately.”
Common sense reasserted itself in her head. She fought for something sensible to say. “Did you get what you came here for?”
“I found everything here that I had expected to.” He thumb-tapped the screen of his phone.
Okay, she had been sensible once. She could do it again. “Don’t you need to do your option thingees?”
The dining room doors opened, and Dieter and three other men walked toward them.
Wulf gestured to the boxes. He said, “I’m done. The rest of them are so far out of the money that they will expire worthless tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.” She wondered how much money he had lost.
“That’s the side that makes money.”
He must be shooting the arrow of time again, or whatever he had called it. “I wish you could teach me about all that.”
Wulf smiled at her, though his smile seemed tired. “Let’s head back to Paris first.”
After the plane took off, Rae let Wulf lead her back to the bedroom at the rear of the plane.
The security guys probably thought they were going back there to make the beast with two backs. Fine. Let them think that. It was better than the truth.
Wulf closed the door behind them with a firm push. He turned. “What did he say to you?”
Rae sat on the side of the bed. That fancy gray shift dress wouldn’t let her sit cross-legged. She pried off her shoes with her toes. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does, but you obviously don’t want to reiterate it. All right.” He shook his head and sat beside her. “Let me say this: I need this week with you.”
Rae’s breath caught in her chest. Wulf’s shiny shell was showing some cracks, perhaps, or maybe he was mirroring her need to stay. “You do?”
“Yes, I need this week with you. I’m asking you to stay.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him. “Why on Earth would you need me?”
His blue eyes were as wary as Rae had ever seen them. “I need a friend, this week.”
“You have lots of friends. Your security staff is one big fraternity.”
“Not like you.”
Surely he didn’t mean someone in his bed. Wulf was never crass.
Rae paused and studied her hands with their first manicure, sweet pink polish, clasped in her lap on her gray silk skirt. The diamond bangle caught the sunlight and threw spangles over the whole airplane bedroom. “How like me?”
He took her hand and held it between his. “Someone who knows me.”
She squashed her impulse to say, I don’t think I do know you, because that would be cruel, but that little bit about someone who knew him was not enough. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
His fingers tightened around her hand. It didn’t hurt, yet. “I don’t want to let you go.”
Rae drew in a great gulp of air. “I don’t want to let you go, either, but it’s abundantly clear that we’re going to have to do just that.”
He scooted closer and took her into his arms. “Give me this week.”
She nodded. At the most, she was Wulf’s friend, and he had brought her to his sister’s wedding for comfort. That thought warmed her. If she could be his friend who comforted him, that was enough for her, for now, for this moment.
Like Georgie said, like Rae had decided, this was one last booty-moon where she could enjoy being with Wulf, live for the moment, and then go home and live the rest of her life.
She wasn’t going to think about the rest of her life just yet.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll stay.”