“What?” she asked, watching him because you always watch guys, just to make sure everything’s okay, even though Max was just about the last guy inthe world she would have worried about with little kids.
“Is Alina—” he asked, gesturing between the child and Flicka. “Is she—yours?”
It took her a beat to figure out what he meant.“Oh!No. I mean, she’s notmine.”
From where he crouched, he looked from Alina’s pale green eyes, porcelain skin, and silvery blond hair to Flicka again. “If you say so.”
“Really! I’m serious. Jesus—” She almostsaid something that she probably shouldn’t say around a guy who was studying to become a Jesuit priest. “She’s not my daughter. I don’t have any kids. I’m just babysitting her.”
Maxence stood up and laughed so hard that he bent over and grabbed his knees. “Now I know you’re lying. You,babysitting?”
“She’s a friend of mine’s kid.” Flicka wracked her brain, trying to come up with reasons to explainwhy the royal princess was babysitting. None sufficed. “It’s complicated.”
“I’ve got to hear this.”
Because there is evidently a God in Heaven and He heard Flicka’s frantic prayers that day, Kyllikki called out as she wheeled a tray bearing a silver tea service through the foyer, “Ma’am? You said the blue sitting room?”
“Yes, Kyllikki!” Flicka grabbed Alina’s hand and walked after the housekeeper.“Come on, Max. You look like you could use a good cup of tea. Alina, want a cookie?”
The toddler skipped ahead of them, following the silver tea service cart and the housekeeper because she knew where the good stuff was.
Maxence chuckled all the way to the sitting room where he accepted a cup of tea and thanked the housekeeper. “Alina is around two?”
“She’s not two yet,” Flicka said, pickingup a chocolate-coated cookie. “Alina, you can have three cookies. Go eat them withGrand-maman.”
The toddler carefully counted out three cookies, looking up at Flicka to check in that she was doing it correctly, and then she scurried out of the room with her stash.
Maxence swallowed the cookie he’d been chewing on. “I do remember, right after you graduated from college, that you got a little—”Flicka could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought fast for a word that would not lead to her decking him,“—softerfor a few months. You were absolutely beautiful, as I remember, as always, but you looked more—” another quick glance at her,“—voluptuous.You know you could tell me anything, and you know that I can keep a secret from absolutely anyone.”
“Max!”The stress of the lastfew months had been overwhelming, and that was why Flicka snapped in half. “I fell in love with my bodyguard and had an affair with him. When he dumped me, I drowned my sorrows in sticky toffee pudding and cheesecake for a few months. I only gained twenty pounds, dammit. I was out in public the whole time. I was certainly not pregnant,ever.Meanwhile, my bodyguard went off and shagged a womanwho looked freakishly like me for some odd psychological reason, and Alina was born.”
Max sipped the tea, obviously digesting the information. “And the bodyguard is here?”
“Of course. I didn’t steal the man’s child.” She chomped down on the cookie because the tea was not Sophie’s special brew.
Maxence looked around the parlor, surveying the luxurious silk curtains draping the window and theornate moulding around the ceiling. “Nice house, for a bodyguard. I think you’re overpaying him.”
“You know whose house this is.”
“Yes, I do, though I’m not sure how that fits together. And after what you’ve said, I’m not sure what to think at all. And this was, when, exactly?”
He was staring into his teacup as he asked, but Flicka knew what he was really asking.
She leaned over and liftedhis hand, holding his fingers. “I started seeing my bodyguard about two years after you and I broke up, when I was twenty. It wasn’t him. It wasn’t anyone else, Maxence.”
“Ah, well. Good to know.” He squeezed her fingers and released them. “And now you’re looking after his child. How civilized of you.”
“Yeah, well, I kind of owe him. After Pierre raped me and beat me up, Raphael hid me and keptme safe until I could divorce Pierre.”
Maxence had been raising the cup to his lips to sip his tea, but he reversed its course and set the cup back in its saucer he held in his other hand. He gently placed the cup and saucer on the table beside them and turned to Flicka, looking her straight in the eyes with his hands clasped in front of him and leaning toward her. “I beg your pardon?”
Flickasighed. “I didn’t know what else to do. You weren’t even at Wulfram’s wedding, so you can’t say that I should have come to you.”
“No, the part where you said Pierrerapedyou? Did I hear that correctly? And beat you?”
“Yeah. That happened.”
“I’ll kill him.” His voice was lower, far more dangerous than she had ever heard it.
