Raphael
Flicka von Hannover
Sometimes, we didn’t talk.
When Raphael came home that night, Flicka was already in bed, though she wasn’t asleep. She rarely slept when she lay in bed, sometimes dozing, sometimes sleeping for a few hours until she lay awake again, not moving so that she wouldn’t wake Raphael. If she got up, he’d wake up and not sleep until she was backin bed with him.
That night, she was sitting against the padded headboard and propped up on pillows, reading a FrenchVogueshe had found in his mother’s sitting room.
The Mirabaud estate was sadly devoid of reading matter except for the musty tomes that had filled the first-floor library. Flicka didn’t feel like reading Cervantes in the original seventeenth-century Spanish. She wanted to reada nice, small-town romance novel where the girl finally gets the guy she’s been in love with for years, after he’s come back from the military or making his fortune or something. She loved those. The parents and best friends were always so nice and funny. Stories about long-lost high school sweethearts were her favorites.
Flicka missed her friends so much.
But she hadn’t found a single paperbackin the mansion, just gilded volumes and first editions that were worth more than some of the yachts anchored beyond the dark windows and velvet drapes, out in the rippling water of Lake Geneva.
The expectation probably was that people would read modern fiction on phones and tablets, except they wouldn’t let her have a phone or a tablet.
Seriously, she would kill someone for an e-reader.
Raphaelcame in and leaned against the doorway, his suit jacket slung over one shoulder. He stared at the floor.
Flicka asked, “What happened?”
He shook his head without saying anything.
She rested the magazine on her legs, scared. “Should I get Alina?”
He shook his head. “You’re both safe for now, I think.”
“Okay.” She folded her hands on the magazine. “Areyousafe?”
He shrugged. “Probably betterthan before.”
She nodded. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
He shook his head again. He laid his coat across the back of a chair, pried his shoes off with his toes, and crawled up the bed to wrap Flicka in his arms.
Beside her ear, his heart thudded in his warm chest under his shirt, and the thick muscles of his arms held her tightly. He rested his chin on top of her head.
“Raphael?”she asked, wanting to know what the hell had happened.
“Yes.” His voice was a little out of breath. “Yes, I’m Raphael.”
She tried to get him to talk, but he kissed her. There was wine on his breath and desperation in his gray eyes.
His mouth and hands possessed her, covering her skin with warmth and pressure. He slid between her legs, using his tongue and lips to make her squirm, but he pulledback, gently teasing her until she was begging him to let her come. She whispered his name and pleaded with him, a mindless thing he utterly controlled.
After that, there was no more talking as he sank into her, holding her, and his lovemaking was so slow that she thought maybe the next day would never dawn.
Afterward, in the dark, Raphael whispered, “I need the phone number for a contact namedBasch Favre that was in my phone before we smashed them in Paris. Do you remember it?”
She did. Of course, she did.
