Slowly, Flickaseethedless.
Seething in rage was exhausting.
So now, two years later, she had a little more information about why her affair with Dieter had ended. It didn’t change anything. It wouldn’t have changed anything if she had known it at the time, except perhaps to have hurt her more deeply.
Her relationship with Dieter had been doomed from the start. He’d wanted something else, and he’d found it, at least for a short time. Maybe he needed someone less driven who kowtowed to his needs more, and if that was the case, Flicka could not have been a good match for him. It was probably for the best, after all.
When Pierre had courted her, she was ready for him, having learned valuable lessons about heartbreak, acceptance, and commitment.
When she had been very young, she’d had a child’s crush on the dashing Pierre Grimaldi.
Maybe, in her innocence then, she’d known that Pierre was the one for her.
And so Flicka let her anger at Dieter Schwarz settle down and flow away because she had, indeed, ended up married to the right man.
The suppers became easier for her, and she perhaps didn’t argue quite so vehemently against all of Dieter’s ideas.
Maybe when he smiled at her, she noticed—in a platonic, detached way, of course—that he was an incredibly handsome man, with a Nordic jaw and cheekbones carved by testosterone and gray eyes like smoke above a smoldering fire.
Yoshi seemed more pleased with their supper conversation, and the tension drifted away from the house.
Then, one day, Wulf took Rae to a doctor’s appointment.
There was an ultrasound.
Wulf’s voice on Flicka’s phone said, “The placenta is viewed to have lifted off the cervix. It is safe for Rae to travel, though we must keep a close watch and not overtax her.”
Flicka sprang into action.
Her first call was to Dieter Schwarz.
Mission Is A Go
Dieter Schwarz
Go time.
Over the weeks that stretched into months while he lived at Wulfram’s house under the same roof as Flicka, Dieter took over theWelfenlegionagain as a side project while he managed his private security firm, Rogue Security, and tracked his wayward wife.
Wulfram’s lawyers called Dieter the day after he arrived, while he was still reeling from Gretchen’s decision, and he signed the paperwork for legal separation based on abandonment and full custody of his daughter within a week. That snarky note she had signed and dated made the proceedings exceptionally quick. The divorce process began in her absence.
Once Dieter confirmed that Gretchen had left with his friend HansWerner, tracking them had become easier. Dieter was disappointed in how easy it was to track them to northern California, using the information from Hans’s credit cards where they checked into hotels. Any of theWelfenlegionshould have been better at subterfuge than that.
Oddly, Gretchen hadn’t taken her passport, so she and Hans couldn’t even leave the country.
They tried to spend the money that they had stolen from Dieter, but he and Wulfram’s lawyers slapped liens and holds on their accounts. Dieter found evidence that she had sold her car for cash, which was just fine with him. It meant that she wasn’t able to get the money that she’d stolen, and she probably didn’t have any other money of his hidden.
He silently raged at her through computer screens and via lawyers’ documents, but that anger soon turned on himself.
Dieter blamed himself for causing all this heartache. He had tried to do the honorable thing at every turning point in his life, which had always been a terrible decision.
He had walked away from Flicka because he had been betraying Wulfram’s trust, he wasn’t an important enough person to be her husband, and because he had seen a man at her Shooting Star Cotillion who looked too familiar. That man had overlooked Dieter because Dieter was merely a hired security thug, but he would eventually see Dieter and know who he was. That was too dangerous for Flicka.
When Dieter had left, he’d broken both their hearts.
He had married Gretchen because, after a drunken one-night-stand, she’d gotten pregnant, and he’d taken responsibility for a young, wild woman who wasn’t ready for a family. His only consolation was that when Gretchen had finally, inevitably bolted, the marriage had made it easy for him to take full custody of Alina. His daughter was certainly his responsibility and his one joy in this part of his life.
There was one more decision, far in his past, where he had made the honorable choice, but in that case, the honorable choice was theonlymoral choice. He had lost his birth family and his name, but he couldn’t have lived with the alternative. It would have caused worse suffering for too many.
