Decision: London
Flicka von Hannover
Hormones are dangerous.
When Flicka had been a teenager, she had viewed Dieter as somewhere between an authority figure to wheedle extra permissions or ice cream out of and the jailor to rebel against because he wouldn’t let her walk down the sidewalk without a phalanx of bodyguards around her.
Even if he had good reasons.
When she’d been eighteen and finished her upper school at Le Rosey, she’d come to visit Wulfie in London for a month while she decided which music school to attend for college.
She’d been accepted to the Juilliard School, but the rumor was that Alexandre Grimaldi was going to attend that one. Staying away from that train wreck was high on her list of priorities. Look, she sympathized with him. From the very softly whispered rumors that whirled around him, his life had been hell, but she was not going to be around the next time he snapped.
So Flicka needed to choose between attending the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, the Conservatoire de Paris in France, and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Her choices were an embarrassment of riches, and she dithered.
She fluttered and flew between them for a week while Wulfie and the Kensington Palace Guard watched over her, making lists of pros and cons and debating endlessly with Wulfie until he started avoiding her when she was clutching her white, leather-bound photo album filled with the prospectuses from her three options, pictures that she had taken on her scouting trips to each, and the poems that she had written while her wild mind tried to alight on one of them.
Maybe she shouldn’t have read the poetry aloud so often to Wulfie.
After a week of just her, Wulfie, and the rotating men in gray who oversaw their every move, Dieter came home.
Dieter had been on a week-long “retreat,” as he called it, with some of his old friends. He kept in touch with people who had served in special forces the world over, whom he had met while he had served in the Swiss Army and ARD-10. He knew people who were former SAS, former US SEALs and Army Rangers, former GermanKommando Spezialkräfte,and former CIA and MI6 and Mossad.
Basically, if you needed something attacked or blown up, Dieter knew people who could do the job.
When Dieter Schwarz dragged himself into Wulfie’s Kensington Palace apartment that fine summer day, his ash blond hair was so short that he must have shaved his head recently, as it was about the same length as his scruffy beard. He had one black eye and scabbed-over scrapes covering half his handsome face, and one of his muscular arms hung in a sling.
His gray eyes held a feral savageness that looked like he would pick up a rare steak, bite into it with his teeth, and rip it apart while he devoured it.
Oddly, Flicka wanted to be the steak.
Dieter dumped his only luggage, a small rucksack, on the floor.
Wulfram looked up from the book he was reading. “Good week?”
“The best,” Dieter answered.
From the growl in Dieter’s voice, Flicka could hear that his body still coursed with adrenaline, even though he must have flown home from wherever on a plane for hours.
He shucked his overshirt and stretched, standing in a tank top in the entryway. The sling on his arm fell aside, and he flinched when he rolled that shoulder to loosen it.
Flicka couldn’t look away from the way Dieter’s round muscles stood out from his arms and shoulders, thick cords and hard bulges that were so different from the sinewy or stocky teenagers she had been living with at Le Rosey. When Dieter moved his arms, stretching out kinks, those muscles flexed and moved under his tanned and sunburned skin. The golden fuzz that covered the top of his chest above his tank top looked soft, and Flicka could think of nothing else but the way it would feel against her palms.
Dieter asked. “How were the royal bodyguards, Wulfram?”
“Adequate,” Wulfram answered.
“I suppose that’s okay.”
Dieter leaned over and picked up his rucksack.
When he did, the muscles under the thin cotton of his tank top stood out in lumps that Flicka could count. His webbed belt kept his black fatigue pants up, she surmised, because his hips were slim. He looked like could have won any athletic event or beaten any other man on Earth in hand-to-hand combat.
Flicka couldn’t breathe.
She longed to walk over to Dieter and touch his arms and his chest. She bet that he was warm to the touch, with all those muscles working right under his skin like that. His skin must be silky, or coarse—yes,coarse—and his hands would probably feel callused and rough on her arms.
