She whispered, “What the hell is wrong with you that you came barging in here, making it all about yourself, at such a time?”
“I didn’t know that Rae was having complications. My wife left me today while I was at work,” Dieter said, his voice quiet in the busy kitchen.
A bitchy part of Flicka’s brain piped up, asking,Karma?
But Flicka didn’t say that because her perfect, shiny, medieval suit of armor needed Dieter on board with her plan. Her shattered heart hurt too much for anything else.
He said, “She cleaned out the bank accounts that I use for my business, for over a hundred people who depend on me for their mortgages and food and everything else, and abandoned our daughter with a neighbor. I think she’s been cheating on me with someone else.”
Flicka said, “Wulfram and Rae need usbothto help them right now. Your petty problems are nothing,nothing,compared to what they’re going through. Money is not a problem. Wulfram will dump money on you until you’re crushed under it if you let him. Your daughter appears to be a perfect little angel who is not in any distress. Her mother isn’t dead of cancer, horribly and in pain. She’s just on a nookie run with a hottie. I will arrange for nannies or daycare or whatever she needs.Rae might die,and if she does, Wulf will fall,hard,down that black pit in his soul.Youwill be there for Wulf for whatever he needs,got it?”
Dieter nodded, his blond hair falling over his forehead what little bit his military-style haircut would allow. “I was just shocked. I should have seen it coming, you know? Wulf would have read her mind or whatever he does and known that she was going to leave. I didn’t know all this was going on.”
A person you’re in love with breaks up with you, and then you’re confronted with evidence that they’d been screwing someone else?“That must suck to be blindsided like that.”
He flinched and stared into his coffee. “Is Rae okay?”
“For the moment, yes, but this could go very wrong, very quickly. Wulfram might need us at any time, and wemustbe there for him. I promised her. I promised I would do whatever it takes to keep him from killing himself if she dies.”
Dieter closed his gray eyes for a moment and swallowed hard. “It’s that serious?”
“Absolutely.”
“Sheisse.”
“We both need to be here, in the house.”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding.
“So here’s what we’re going to do. Whenever we’re in a room together, we’re polite. You and I will pretend just like we used to that everything was just damn fine.”
“I thought things were better between us lately,” he said.
“How old is your daughter, Dieter?”
“I swear I didn’t—”
“How old?”
He bowed his head. “Fifteen months.”
“I can do the damn math. Was she conceived before or after you decided that we shouldn’t have a relationship anymore, that even a secret relationship was too much?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said.
“I heard you got married and had a kid, but I didn’t know you walked away from me and married someone elsein less than a month.”
Which meant that it wasn’t that Dieter hadn’t wanted to get married. It meant that Dieter didn’t want to marryher.
Flicka grabbed onto the cold marble countertop to steady herself. “I don’t want to hear about how you met Alina’s mother and then you didn’t give a shit about me anymore. You left me for her, didn’t you?”
“Flicka, I’m sorry—”
“Were you already screwing her when you left London?”
“No.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I can’t bear it. Pierre may be a Rat Bastard, but he’s honest about it. I know what he is, and I’m okay with that. You weren’t supposed to be like that, Dieter. You weren’t supposed to do that to me. I trusted you with my heart and my life. I don’t know how to trustanyoneanymore.”
