“Wait—what?”
He let her up, and Flicka sucked in a deep breath of air, maybe exaggerating the not-breathingthing a little.
His grin turned rueful. “We can be married in Gibraltar immediately, just like I planned when we lived together in London.”
All the problems slammed into her. “I can’t go to Gibraltar. It’s part of the UK, sort of, not part of the Schengen area. I don’t have a passport unless I use Gretchen’s again. Heck, I can’t get married because I don’t have any identification with my realname on it.Friederike von Hannover doesn’t exist anymore.”
Raphael smiled at her. “I got a copy of your birth certificate a few days ago.”
“What?”
He whispered very quietly into her hair, “That night we used the burner phone for one text each, I contacted Magnus Jensen. He went to your father’s castle to get any identification they had for you. He found your original birth certificate. Magnuspassed it to me on the street as a bump. I was hoping for a copy of your passport so we could put you on a plane to the States, but it didn’t happen. It is enough to marry, however. You already have the signed divorce decree from the judge in Las Vegas.”
She said, “That’s pretty sneaky. You managed to get documentation so that I could marry you but not the kind of documents where I could escapefrom you.”
“You’ll have to use Gretchen’s passport again to get to Gibraltar, but they might not even look at it if we use the bank’s private plane. We can be married tomorrow, if you want.”
“Tomorrow,” she said, feeling the word in her mouth.
“Tomorrow,” he said, sliding down to talk to her, nose to nose. “Give up being a princess and marry me.”
“That’s not really how it works, you know.”
“Tomorrow, you will become Mrs. Flicka Mirabaud, commoner, and spend your life with me.”
She leaned forward and kissed him, feeling his lips under hers as she said, “Yes.”
“I wish I had a ring,” he said. “If I had known, if I had suspected, I would have flown over to the diamond district in Antwerp and bought a ring, no matter what those jackasses standing by the door said.”
Flicka fumbled insideher bra and found the little alpine mountaineering ribbon pin he had given her for Christmas so many years ago. She’d pinned it to her bra strap every day as solace.
She held it out to him. “You could give me this again.”
Raphael looked at the piece of gold fluff as it landed in his palm. “You still have it.”
“Of course. I always keep it with me. I was wearing it at the courthouse in Las Vegaswhen your father grabbed us.”
He looked up. “You must have had it when you ran away from Pierre, the night of Wulfram’s wedding.”
She nodded. “It was pinned into the seam of my reception dress.”
“Why?” he asked.
Flicka dithered a bit. “I tend to wear it for luck, or when I need some extra strength, or just when I am upset and need some comfort. Sometimes, when something upsets me, I kind ofpress it against my skin, just so that I know it’s there.”
“How often?” he asked, staring at her.
“Just when I need it. You know, when I need a little bit of calm, or happiness, or safety, or mindfulness, or luck, or comfort, like I said. So, just stressful times.”
Against all logic, Flicka kept talking.
“And a lot of days have been stressful lately, you know, with Wulfram’s weddings, andmy wedding, and planning for that for over a year, and all the charities’ needs all the time, and The Leeds piano competition and other performances before that. So, on stressful days. And a lot of days have been stressful. Almost all days were stressful. Pretty much every day since you gave it to me,” she admitted. “I took it off when I went swimming.”
Raphael studied the pin in his hand, turningit to catch the dim light. “When I joined the Swiss army, I left Raphael Mirabaud behind and became someone else, someone better. The alpine mountaineering course was a baptism in ice. Afterward, I was a Swiss man, a guardian of the Alps, sprung from alpine culture.” When he looked up at her, his snowstorm-cloud eyes were level and serious. “I gave it to you because it was the best of me. Youdeserved the best of me, not Raphael Mirabaud, but here we are. I’m Raphael Mirabaud again, and you deserve better.”
He closed his hand around the pin.
Horror swam through Flicka. What he had said sounded just like what he had said in that London flat in Kensington Palace, right before he walked out on her. “No.Don’t.”
