After Flicka had visited Dieter in the hospital and then been driven back to her hotel, she walked into Pierre’s and her suite still wearing her blood-crusted wedding gown.
She slammed the door open and strode past Rainier Grimaldi, Pierre’s uncle and the reigning Prince of Monaco. He startled like the door had almost hit him, but he wasfeetaway from the swinging door. He shouldn’t be so damn skittish.
Rainier caught the door and left the suite.
Four Secret Service men followed him, staying a discreet distance back.
In Rainier’s defense, blood, gore, and mud covered her white dress. That could startle someone as genteel as an actual sovereign head of a country.
Pierre’s Head of Security, Quentin Sault, was leaning against the wall by the windows, scowling with his arms crossed tightly over his chest.
Pierre Grimaldi was in a cold rage, sitting in a chair with his legs crossed, sipping scotch, while a crowd of his Secret Service men stood in front of him, hands clasped behind their backs, heads bowed.
Two of them had bloody lips.
For just a second, Flicka had an image of someone with a machine gun mowing them all down.
Instead, Pierre said to them, “Get out. I will never have you in my presence again. Your employment with the palace and the government is terminated as of this very moment. Get out of my sight.”
The men slunk out of the suite without a word.
Flicka asked, “Pierre?”
He rose from the chair and walked over to her, and she could have sworn that fury was boiling off of him in waves. His shirt cuff was stained red, and his knuckles were bleeding.
He said, “I am sorry. You will never be unprotected again. Evidently, there were orders from my uncle that my personal safety should be prioritized over yours. I think this mass firing will send a message. I’ll talk to my uncle when we get home. I think this needs to be done in private, not here in France.”
“It’s okay, though,” she said. “Dieter was there. He pushed me down.”
“And he took a bullet for you, yes.” Pierre touched her shoulders and the blood that stiffened the side of her dress. “Are you truly all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine,” she demurred.
“Your driver called in and said that you were unhurt, but you had insisted on going to the hospital.”
“I had to check on my brother’s security man.” She thought fast. “It’s traditional in theWelfenlegionthat my brother or I personally check on anyone who’s been hurt in the line of duty.”
“That’s admirable,” Pierre said. “Inefficient, but admirable. Next time, please let them bring you to a secured location rather than run an errand at the hospital, all right?”
“I’m hoping there won’t be a next time,” Flicka said, “or if there is, that your Secret Service won’t leave the prince’s wife unprotected.”
Pierre’s brows lowered. “I will make sure they never do it again.”
Reception At The Louvre
Flicka von Hannover
My feet
feel like hamburger and ground bones
in these damned shoes.
In the lobby of the Louvre museum, Flicka stood on the raised dais near the orchestra, surrounded by her friends at her third wedding reception of the night.
Above her, stars shone in the night sky through the glass pyramid of the Louvre. Half of the orchestra was on a break, so the remnants of the string section glided through a chamber piece of lilting background music. Hordes of wedding guests thronged the appetizer buffets, steaming scents of pastries and sizzling meat. Black tuxedoes and bright ball gowns mingled among the round tables that studded the lobby, swaying with conversation and laughter.
Flicka’s previous two wedding receptions had been held in the largest hotel ballrooms around Paris. Flicka and Pierre had made their entrance, worked the room efficiently together, and taken so many selfies with hundreds of people. They had danced their first dance together at each, smiling as always, and then rushed to the next reception.
