Wulf stood around the corner from Rae, studying a seventeenth century print of an earl and his hound and restraining himself from running to her when he heard the torment in her voice.
Dieter, beside him, cursed under his breath.
“Something wrong?” Wulf whispered to him in Alemannic.
“She’s not leaving you this week, damn it. I am losing a week’s pay on this.”
Wulf rocked forward on his toes. Dieter had been his friend since the Swiss Guard barracks, a member of his security detail since they had mustered out together, and had taken a bullet meant for his sister just that afternoon. “Do you want to make it all back?”
“How would I do that?” Dieter’s eyebrows pricked up, along with his metaphorical ears.
“Double or nothing.” Wulf pulled a small, black box from his trouser pocket and snapped it open. The museum spotlights caught the fire in the ring’s dark blue center stone and sent sparks coursing through the white diamonds surrounding it. He tilted it, and the center stone turned red in the slanting light.
“Sheisse!” Dieter hissed.
He snapped it closed. “I retrieved it from Schloss Marienburg. The setting was my grandmother’s.”
“Tonight? Now?”
“I have been trying to figure out a way to get her alone someplace proper. I nearly dragged her to the top of the Eiffel Tower this afternoon. I didn’t think of a mobile call. Bloody brilliant.”
“Sheisse. I put down a thousand Euros two years ago that Harry would beat you to the altar.”
“You should demand good odds.”
“Are you sure? Women can be nothing but heartbreak.”
Wulf smiled. “You have ten minutes.”
“I had better get ten-to-one for this.” Dieter muttered into his lapel and waited, fidgeting, for two squirming minutes.
Wulf did not fidget, but he was in a quandary.
He had been holding the ring for two days.
He had privacy and a location, finally.
He was under no illusions that his proposal would be automatically accepted.
Ever since he had told her the squalid truth about his dynastic problems, she had been ready to bolt. He remembered each and every time that her warm brown eyes darted away from him at every mention of royalty. He considered the implications for every sentence that she had said to him about family duty over the past week, and all of them ran together in his mind like riffling a deck of cards.
He remembered the warmth of her body cuddled next to his at night and how she clung to him as if she could not bear to let him go.
He had thought, that afternoon, when she had been so desperately casting about for a role with him, that she might be readying herself to break free of that church, once and for all. Such liberations can be terrifying.
She would resist. Even though Wulf could hear her severing ties with her family as he leaned against the wall, just out of her sight, while he regarded the portrait of the snobbish earl and his dog, she would resist him. Every glance, every undercurrent when she spoke, every shiver of pain that went through her body at the thought of losing her family told him this.
Even though she had decided to expand her world, to have her clinic, it did not mean that she wanted a life with Wulf. Taking on his baggage was an entirely different decision.
Asking her to make two such enormous decisions in an hour was cruel, but the compulsion to ask her now, now, had seized him.
Maybe it was Paris.
Perhaps it was seeing the sister whom he had raised from childhood marry.
Probably, it was that he could not stand another moment without his ring on Rae’s hand.
Half the people downstairs assumed they had already married, secretly. Most of the women and a few of the men had noticed Hannover royal jewels around her neck and the Laurel Tiara sparkling in her auburn hair. Traditionally, only married, royal women wore tiaras, so Wulf had implied to them all that Rae already was, or at the least would soon be, a Hannover Prinzessin.
Hannover princes had a genetic weakness for arrogance.
Wulf had reveled in every glance at her wearing the jewelry and the tiara, followed by an eyebrow raise, and he smiled.
Yes, she was his.
Yes, he was deliriously happy.
Wulf studied the painting of the nobleman, looking for inspiration in his haughty expression, but found none.
Dieter was right. Countering Rae’s fears with icy German logic would not reassure her.
British understatement and command would send her running for the jet, possibly tonight.
Wulf had to break through the bulletproof armor around his heart, rip it out, and give it to her, like an American.
Friedhelm relieved Dieter from his post with Wulf, and Dieter sprinted to the staircase and pattered down it, mumbling into his lapel the whole way down.
Friedhelm looked askance at Wulf.
Wulf shrugged and tapped the ring box through his trousers, feeling his nerves begin to sing.