After their entrance, Rae held it together as Wulf made the rounds of the room, greeting everyone he met.
Everyone seemed pleased, if surprised, to see him. He shook everyone’s hands, kissed the ladies’ knuckles, knew everyone’s name, and asked each of them about something.
Rae watched him work the huge, royalty-filled ballroom.
“Bon jour, Madame.” Wulf greeted a portly woman swathed in red satin and continued in French. Rae followed along without too much trouble. “How are you?”
The woman beamed up at Wulf and offered her limp hand for kissing, though her smile seemed maternal. “Wulfram Augustus, it is good to see you. Your sister looked beautiful this afternoon.”
Wulf brushed his lips over her gloved knuckles. “I will tell her you said so. Is Victor here? No? I’m sorry to hear that. Rae, may I present Madame Marie-Louise Emmanuelle, the Duchess of Aquitaine. Marie-Louise, this is my very good friend, Miss Reagan Stone. And is your Brazilian rain forest charity flourishing as always?”
After the French duchess, Wulf called in English to a man, “Edward! Smashing to see you.” He shook his hand with a hearty handshake. “How’s Ophelia? Lovely. May I present my very good friend, Miss Rae Stone. Rae, this is Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and his lovely wife, Anne. He’s a writer, but it’s a great secret.” The guy laughed. Wulf continued, “And so everyone knows it. Edward, we should catch up. I’ll be in Helvetica this summer.”
Edward moved past, and Wulf looked toward a bony guy who could have passed for Ichabod Crane. “Philip! I haven’t seen you since Kent!”
Philip’s delighted confusion at seeing Wulf came out as a cackle. “Wulfram! You made it! You look tanned. Your hermitage is agreeing with you?”
“How is your knee, Phillip? Rae, may I present Lord Philip Darcy, the Baron Darcy de Knayth.” She gave him her hand, intending to shake as always, but Lord Darcy also kissed her knuckles.
Rae saw Dieter a few paces away, hovering, and smiled at his friendly face.
He winked at her.
She pointed to her own arm, asking how he was.
His stoic nod and grimace suggested that he had never cussed and spat at the wound. His right arm did appear bulky with a bandage under his black suit.
Beside her, Wulf said, “Rae, may I present Johan, Count of Lagergren. Johan, may I present my very good friend, Miss Rae Stone.”
The guy who looked like romance novel Swedish ski instructor said something that Rae did not understand.
“En français,” Wulf said.
“Enchante, madam.” Johan’s smarmy French was accented, and he kissed her hand a little too long.
“Enchante, monsieur,” Rae was glad she was wearing these ridiculous opera gloves that Flicka had insisted on. She might have caught something from him. Plus, the gloves were keeping her knuckles from getting chapped from all the kissy greetings.
“Johan, your wife is watching you,” Wulf said.
Johan dropped her hand and checked his six, but no one was there.
“Nicolai!” Wulf had found someone else to talk to.
And so on.
For hundreds of people.
Wulf finally slowed. He took her hand. “That should be most of them.” He still nodded at people, but they were able to walk through the crowd without being accosted by long-lost friends and relatives.
Wulf tucked her arm in the crook of his elbow. “Sorry about all that. Ancient obligations.”
“It’s fine. Did we get everyone?”
“The most important ones, I think.”
Wulf’s hiding out in the Southwest seemed more logical. Rae considered crawling under one of the white tablecloths and cowering until she got her equilibrium back.
Near the ballroom floor, amid the milling royals and nobles, a tuxedo-clad waiter offered Rae and Wulf glasses from a tray crowded with champagne flutes.
Rae accepted one, but Wulf held out his hand to her. She could hear his deep voice over the rumbling conversation and string music, “Shall we dance?”
She took his hand but leaned in. She whispered through her teeth, “I can’t waltz.”
“Rubbish,” he said. “We waltzed the night we met.”
“Not like these guys.”
“I’ll lead properly this time.” He took the untouched glass out of her hand and set it on the empty tray of another waiter going by.
Wulf led her onto the floor. She assumed the position, her left hand resting on his thick shoulder, the shoulder with the crimson sash, the Japanese tattoo, and the terrible gunshot scar, and her other hand clasping his warm hand. They waltzed among the hundreds of other couples, all moving counter-clockwise around the ballroom.
Rae did her best, and Wulf led the heck out of the dance. He didn’t fling her around, which would have been bad because Rae would have stepped on that ball gown skirt and torn it off of herself, but his body was muscularly rigid as he steered her around the floor. It was like his arms clamped her in a cage.
He smiled down at her, a kind smile that meant she wasn’t screwing it up too badly.
Mostly, he watched over her head to make sure they didn’t crash into anyone else, like a bizarro game of bumper cars where the object was to avoid the other jewel-encrusted cars.
The orchestra’s music filled the air with shimmering strings, Wulf held her in his arms, and Rae relaxed.
Wulf must have felt the change in her body, because he let her go of her waist and flipped her hand. She spun, following the way he turned her arm, and ended up clasped in his arms again, safe.
Then she really relaxed and let him lead.
After a couple more minutes, she managed conversation. “You look like a sparkly vampire in that get-up. Vampires always wear black tuxedos and sashes and man-jewelry.”
Wulf chuckled. “Dracula was merely a count.”
“What is all this, anyway?” Rae traced the silk crimson sash across his chest.
He shrugged. “Frippery. The protocol is to wear the highest honor bestowed by the host country, but since this wedding is in a neutral country, most people are wearing Hannoverian or Monegasque honors. If they have neither, they wear their highest honors from their home country. Most of these orders and knighthoods and such, they gave each other during official state visits or their parents bestowed when they came of age. These particular insignia—the red sash, badge, and neck badge—are for the Hannoverian Order of St. George, thus the man slaying the dragon.”
“Did your dad give you that when you were eighteen?”
“No. I was eight.”
An eight-year-old blond child kneeling before a king wielding a sword filled her mind. Considering Wulf’s dad, she wouldn’t have been surprised if he had nicked Wulf. “So young?”
Wulf’s implacable expression alarmed her because she could feel that he was being very British about something. “The video of the Constantin’s murder showed quite clearly that I leapt and tried to cover him, even though I had already been shot. It impressed my father, that I had attempted to save the life of the heir, so he bestowed it as an order of merit when he named me the heir. The ceremony was televised.”
So everyone saw it, everyone in this room, perhaps most people in Europe.
She cradled his cheek with her hand. Wulf’s chin drifted toward her palm, but his blue eyes never broke eye contact with her.
The orchestra segued into another waltz, one with a little more tempo, and Wulf led her through it.
“You really are quite famous here,” Rae said.
“Notorious, perhaps.” Wulf spun them in a tight circle.
Rae tried to phrase this as subtly as she could, despite that she was more used to forthrightness than subtlety. “Why didn’t anyone figure you out, back home?”
Wulf glanced down back into her eyes for a second, but he watched the other dancers around them. “Financial and legal barriers.”
Georgie and Lizzy had mentioned layers of corporations and holding companies. “Okay, but you’re a celebrity.”
Wulf continued, “Hardly. Had you ever heard of any of the claimants for the extinct kingdoms and duchies of Europe?”
Like she didn’t have anything better to do, like study in college. “No.”
“Would you know any of the twenty-two dukes of the British Isles by sight?”
“Well, your cousin over there.” She glanced at Prince-slash-Duke William, who was handing Duchess Kate a glass of champagne.
Wulf said, “I was excluding those who also hold royal titles.”
“Oh. Then, no.” She stepped around his feet as he spun her in another twirl.
“Precisely. The American West rather unimpressed with such things.” He leaned, and his voice dropped. “It was a rather simple charade to uphold, until I told you my name. At that point, I realized how gossamer it at all was. One name could destroy it.”
“I still can’t believe you told me.”
“It was an impulsive move. Everyone around us at that party was so ensconced in role-playing, being the sub, being the Dom, and yet you saw through all of it. You were magnificent. With you, I wasn’t a vampire or a werewolf or a prince or The Dom. I wanted someone to know me as Wulf, just Wulf.” He shook his head at himself. “Utterly impulsive, quite rash. Perhaps there was a subconscious wish to divest myself and leave. Perhaps I wanted to be found out.”
Rae grinned at him. “Now you’re talking my language. Tell me more about your Jungian archetypes and subconscious desires.”
His slight smile and the flicker of one of his eyebrows bore hints of devilishness.
When she was breathless from the dancing, they went back to the tables. Wulf somehow knew where they were supposed to sit. Indeed, her name was embossed on the card on her plate. Someone had properly tagged and bagged her, anyway. She slipped the card into her purse as a souvenir of her night with the princes and princesses.
Wulf flipped his tuxedo tails behind him as he sat.
An Asian man wearing a tuxedo and an Order of St. George crimson sash and eight-pointed star identical to Wulf’s flopped in the chair beside him. “I’ll be damned. You did show up. I have lost a thousand Euros on you.”
His accent was also impeccably British.
Wulf said, “You know that I am bad luck, and thus liable to turn up anywhere.” They shook hands with a strength that suggested a brusque hug. Wulf leaned back and introduced Rae across the table. “Rae, this is Kuni Kuniyoshi, who prefers to be called Yoshi,” and he introduced her.
“Hello. Pleased to meet you.” She shook hands with him. When Yoshi bent over the table, his left arm didn’t move properly.
Wulf asked Yoshi, “Did you bring someone?”
“Alone, I’m afraid.” He crossed his arms across his chest, closing himself off.
Wulf said, “Flicka didn’t mention you were attending. I would have thought she would have used your presence as additional pressure on me.”
“Other way. She emailed me a few days ago to announce that you had appeared in puff of brimstone.”
Ice water congealed in Rae’s throat, and she coughed. Surely Yoshi didn’t know about The Devilhouse.
Wulf stroked Rae’s back, but that one cough had cleared her throat.
Yoshi continued, “I had to fly commercial. There’s a shocking shortage of Gulfstreams this week. It’s better that I saw her marry the Rat Bastard with my own eyes.”
Wulf clapped Yoshi on the shoulder but didn’t say anything more.
Rae swiveled her cold water glass between her hands, watching them. Watching Wulf with his friends and family revealed new layers of him, and it caught Rae like a deer in headlights every time.
Yoshi flagged down a waiter and took three highball glasses off the tray. He set one in front of Wulf and one in front of Rae, and Yoshi began to relax as he drank and as the two men spoke of inconsequential things for a few moments.
Rae lifted the whiskey to her mouth, and the astringent fumes warmed her nose.
Wulf reached over and stole Rae’s highball glass from her fingers.
“Hey!” She reached for it back.
“I am quite sure that Yoshi is about to say something that will require me to drink several of these.” Wulf swirled the ice in the glass of whiskey.
Yoshi turned to Rae. His evil grin was infectious, and Rae found herself smiling back.
Yoshi asked, “So what do you want to know about The Quiet One, here?”
Rae glanced at Wulf, but he seemed perfectly at ease. She said, “I’m just fascinated that you call Pierre the Rat Bastard, too. I thought Wulf just didn’t like him marrying his sister.”
“We all had school nicknames. I was Yo-Yo.”
“No one called you that,” Wulf said.
Yoshi gestured to Wulf but spoke to Rae. “He didn’t call me that. The Rat Bastard called me that to my face. I am Asian, I played the cello, and my name is similar. It is so obvious as to be trite.”
Rae asked, “Why do y’all call him The Rat Bastard?”
“Just look at him!”
“You mean because he’s a pretty boy?”
“Because every woman who sees him, hands him her panties.”
“My goodness, that’s graphic.” Rae glanced at Wulf to see his reaction of this assessment of the man who was marrying his sister.
Wulf glanced up at Yoshi. His question was sharp. “Do you think he will cheat on her?”
Yoshi looked back to Wulf. All the joking had fallen out of his expression. “God, I hope not. What will you do?”
“What are the odds?”
Yoshi sighed. “People are getting five to one for this year. Three to one, for a two-year spread. Will you shoot him from a hilltop?”
Wulf jiggled the ice in his drink. “I would be more concerned about Flicka.”
Yoshi stared at his lap, thinking, then turned back to Rae. “Pierre earned that nickname, several times over. On the other hand, Wulfram here,” Yoshi pointed with his hand in front of his chest as if he were being cagey, “had several nicknames. We called him The Quiet One, for the most part, but that was his nickname from first standard.”
That nickname must have been from before Constantin was killed, because it implied if there was a Quiet One, there was also a Loud One. It was a twin nickname.
Wulf’s expression had not changed one whit, but his gaze slid over to Rae.
Yoshi said, “Later, we called him Prince Brilliant because he started taking maths at the university when he was eleven.”
Wulf muttered into his glass, “We could have conversed all night without mentioning that.”
“Eleven?” Rae asked Wulf.
Wulf drained one highball glass and picked up the other one.
Yoshi leaned in. “You didn’t know?”
“He’s modest,” Rae told Yoshi.
“Yes, modest. Some people might say, deceitful. His other nickname was The Lone Wolf—”
“Yoshi.” Wulf’s tone had turned threatening.
Yoshi grinned harder. “—because we all thought that he was the last virgin in our class.”
“Oh?” Rae rested her elbows on the table.
Wulf swirled his drink, melting the ice. “Yoshi, you realize that Rae is my date.”
Yoshi ignored Wulf’s protests and grinned at Rae. “But we got it all wrong. We thought he was chaste, but he was merely discreet. We used to take the mickey out of him about it, but he never said a word.”
“Yoshi, there is only so far—”
“We should have known that, if he were a virgin, he wouldn’t have laughed with us quite so much. He’s told you that he lived off campus in upper school?”
“Yeah, I knew he lived off campus.” Rae glanced at Wulf, who studied his drink.
Wulf’s lips were pressed in a thin line. “Reagan, shall we dance?”
“In a minute. Go ahead, Yoshi.”
Yoshi said, “It was years later that the girls finally began confessing that Prince Brilliant had his car wait for them near the gate. He would take his dates to his house, feed them dinner, then take them upstairs.”
That sounded astonishingly familiar. Rae’s jaw dropped open.
Wulf tipped the rest of his drink into his mouth and set the glass on the table with a bit more authority than was customary.
Yoshi didn’t flinch. “The girls used to giggle about it in their dorm, but not one of them told the rest of us lads. He swore them all to secrecy, telling them that if anyone knew about it, the trick would no longer work.”
Rae snapped her mouth shut. Layers and layers.
Yoshi continued, “In their defense, none of the girls wanted to lose their virginity in a dorm’s single bed with a rubber band on the door knob.”
Yeah, Rae could understand that.
She looked around the enormous lobby at all the scores of beautiful princesses and heiresses in their gorgeous designer ball gowns, glittering with jewelry, and back to Wulf, who was staring into his drink.
Scores of them. More than fifty of them. Perhaps hundreds.
Wulf cleared his throat. “I believe that legend has been exaggerated in the intervening years.”
“We could take a survey.” Yoshi twisted in his seat, looking around the clamoring ball room. His left arm, again, seemed stiff. “Most of our class is here, and the next few classes, too.”
“Rae, for the love of God, will you consent to dance again?”
She settled her fingers in his hand, and he lifted her out of the chair by her fingertips.
On the dance floor, the band was playing a soft, slow song, not a formal waltz. He folded her into his arms. “You must know that Yoshi’s numbers have been grossly inflated. I was certainly not the gateway to womanhood at Le Rosey.”
“So how many were there?” Unease was a worm in her heart.
“Fewer than Yoshi would believe. Four, I think, over three years. He made it sound harmless.” His subtle expression, mostly flickers between his eyebrows, bordered between irritation and outrage.
Rae watched him, fascinated. “You’re distressed about this.”
“I almost got one girl killed. She was Saudi. I was too callow and careless to know what could happen to her.”
Rae’s breath left her. “Is she okay?”
“She was married off quite suddenly, but she is fine. Even happy, from what I heard through mutual friends. She has children. Quite a lot of them.”
“So you’re okay?”
“Certainly.” He glanced down at her and smiled. “I was seventeen. It was a long time ago.”
“Good.” She snuggled into his arms. She had known about the girls in The Devilhouse, but everyone knew those weren’t relationships, not with the man with the shiny shell.
Getting jealous now was stupid. Rae was going to be just another woman in Wulf’s past within a few hours.
She breathed hard. Live for the moment. Live like tonight will never end.
Tears burned in her eyes. Was the depression phase of grief starting so soon? She hadn’t even noticed the bargaining phase, and she had kind of thought the anger phase was going to take some more work.
Well, the phases of grief didn’t have to occur in the standard order. This whole week in Paris was a form of bargaining for just a little more time.
“I was hoping Yoshi would bring someone,” Wulf said.
“Oh?” If Rae made encouraging sounds, he might tell her more.
Wulf set her back a little and ducked his head to whisper near Rae’s shoulder. “The pressure on him to marry a court lady and sire a son is enormous. There’s a line-of-succession crisis in Japan. He’s third in line for the imperial throne now. The Crown Prince has only a daughter. The second-in-line has only daughters. He’s third in line through his grandfather. It’s that damned Salic Law again, though they call it something else.”
The pressure on Wulf must be enormous, too.
“Yoshi almost took himself out of the running by flirting with Flicka for a while, but she was already enamored with Pierre.”
“The Rat Bastard,” Rae finished for him.
“Ah, you’ve met him.” Wulf grinned at her. “And there he is.”
The lights dimmed, and a follow spot picked out the couple at the bottom of the stairs.
Rae glanced over to where Flicka stood with her groom in the photographers’ glare. Pierre Grimaldi’s fine features and lean stature suggested that they would make beautiful children.
The air around them sparkled.
Rae said, “Wow.”
“Oh, God. Not you, too.”
“What? No. I mean, he’s okay.” Rae moved her hand up his arm, and Wulf glanced down at her. The Louvre had darkened for the bridal couple’s entrance, but Rae could see Wulf’s blond hair and strong jawline. She held tight to her nerves, because this was all over tomorrow, but she had to say something at least once. “He’s not my type.”
Wulf’s hands circled her waist, and he drew her body against his.
“You must have rarified taste.” Wulf leaned in, coming closer.
The darkness in the ballroom should cover them, and everyone was paying attention to the bride and groom’s grand entrance, but nerves fluttered in her belly. The dense crowd jostled around them, all turning toward the staircase for the grand introduction.
“I love you, too,” she breathed.
Wulf’s lips brushed hers, barely touching her, and she closed her eyes just as a silver flash roared out of the darkness at them.