by Cassia Leo
“There’s a little more that Wulf wasn’t discussing with folks back home, but people might mention it today, so let’s just get it all out on the table.” Rae took a healthy bite of her omelet and swallowed it. “Let’s start with his name. Give me a second. Let me remember all of it.”
Lizzy glanced at Georgie, obviously humoring Rae.
Georgie drank her coffee, the roasted goodness mellow on her tongue, with the name Wulf spinning in her head.
Wulf.
Rae sucked in a deep breath. “Okay, I think I’ve got it now. Wulfram Augustus Heinrich Ernst Georg Berthold Friedrich—”
The hot coffee congealed in Georgie’s throat. She forced it down rather than cough out her horror.
Only one other person that Georgie knew had a whole bunch of names like that. Even her upper-crust childhood friends in Connecticut only had the usual number of names, four at the most.
Rae said, “Wilhelm Louis Ferdinand—”
Oh, God. Georgie knew what was coming. The name Wulf wasn’t a memory from her childhood.
Flicka’s face floated in her mind, and the reason that The Dom had been at Flicka’s wedding became teeth-grindingly obvious.
Rae finished, “Prinz von Hannover.”
Georgie set down her coffee cup. The frail bone china clattered in the saucer, so she let go. She asked, “Prinz von Hannover und Cumberland?”
Rae blinked, surprised. “How did you know?”
Because Flicka had droned on and on about her older brother, Wulfram Augustus, who had essentially raised her, who was crazy over-protective and had private security men dogging her every move, whom she loved and worshiped and rebelled against and missed terribly and wanted to drop out of Tanglewood to spend the summer in London with him while he had been finishing a PhD at the London School of Economics.
Georgie had even seen a picture of Wulfram Augustus on Flicka’s dresser, but he had been much younger, maybe a teenager, and laughing and swinging Flicka in his arms when she was about eight. He’d had long, blond hair, down to his shoulders.
“Lucky guess,” Georgie grated out.
This whole time, for the last couple years, Georgie had worked for Flicka’s brother.
The acid coffee raked Georgie’s stomach, and she held onto the edge of the table to keep her hands from shaking.
The Dom must have known who she was. He must have told Flicka where she was.
Georgie didn’t know how to interpret the last few years. It was insane. It was all insane.
Another man came out of the bedroom, not The Dom, and Georgie’s eyes noted that he was gorgeous but the sight buffeted off her stunned brain. The guy grabbed Lizzy’s hand, growled something in her ear, and they ran off together.
Georgie fought to not throw up the bitter coffee and chunks of apple.
The Dom walked out of the bedroom.
No, Wulfram von Hannover walked out of the bedroom.
He leaned down, the Parisian sun reflecting on his bright blond hair, and he glanced up at Georgie only once. He whispered to Rae, and she whispered back.
So many of her conversations with him whipped through Georgie’s head. Surely he must have known. He must know who her father was. He must know what she had done.
He must have told Flicka.
Tremors wracked her whole body, and she fidgeted with her braid, trying not to freak and cause an excessive display of emotion.
Wulfram von Hannover looked up again and smiled at her, a slight curve of his lips, but the coldness never left his dark blue eyes.
Georgie said, “You never told me that you were Wulfram von Hannover.”
“I couldn’t,” he said. His tone was quiet, reproaching her.
Of course he couldn’t have told her. She would have run. “Yeah. I can see that.”
Wulfram von Hannover glanced toward the bedroom. “Rae, may I discuss something with you, privately?”
“Uh, sure?” She glanced at Georgie, smiling, as she walked away and he followed her.
As soon as the bedroom door closed behind them, Georgie bolted, sprinting for the door and the elevator and her own room where she could figure out if she needed to run into Paris or whether she could wait until she got back to the States to change her name and hide again.
She held her hand over her mouth, breathing stinking coffee breath hard into her palm, and leaned against the locked door.
Georgie had seen Wulfram von Hannover, Flicka’s brother, every day for years, and hadn’t known it.
HIDING IN A HOTEL ROOM
Georgie
Georgie paced through the hotel room, past the huge bed backed up against one wall, past the plush chair, the desk, and the couch, all of it upholstered in royal blue and pristine white shining satin. The roses fumed their sickly sweet perfume through the room like they were trying to cover up a bad smell. She kept her eyes on the royal blue carpeting.
Royal blue. Oh my God. Georgie’s stomach cramped hard with panic and she almost threw up again, but she paced instead.
She paced past the blue and gold silk curtains that puddled on the floor, yet more regal excess. Georgie’s mother would consider this opulence to be trying too hard, but she was an upper-crust New Englander.
Too much energy coursed through her thin frame. She hadn’t gone running today. Georgie needed to run, run far, run fast. At least ten miles. Maybe farther than that.
After twenty minutes of pacing, Georgie finally burned off enough panic that she sat on the bed, pulled out her laptop, and tried to deal with emails from the home front. Nothing important had hit her inbox. A couple friends wanted a study group that afternoon, which she declined because she was on another continent.
Some other stuff.
Chatty emails and rumors about professors.
Nothing Earth-shaking.
No death threats today.
Georgie dealt with the emails and then stared at the screen, trying to decide what to do without enough information, when Lizzy breezed into the room, pink-cheeked and pale blue eyes sparkling, giggling and bursting with energy.
“Hey!” she chortled.
“Hey, yourself,” Georgie said. “You look freshly fucked.”
“You betcha.” Lizzy spread her arms and fell on the other side of the king-sized bed as if she were falling backward into water and bounced on the mattress.
Georgie’s laptop bounced on her knees from the quake. She switched to a paper she was working on just so she would have something to stare at and started typing about hegemony in South American politics.
Lizzy sat up and asked, “What’s going on with you?”
Georgie typed. “Nothing.”
Lizzy sighed ostentatiously, which was her signal that she knew Georgie was lying. “Okay. Fine.”
Georgie deleted the drivel that she had typed. “Something sure is going on with you, though. That was Theo, right?”
Lizzy’s goofy smile said it all. “Yeah. That was Theo.”
She thought hard about what Georgie Johnson would say if she wasn’t screaming inside. She would probably scam on Lizzy’s guy, not really, but just to bolster Lizzy’s choice of anyone except Mannix fucking Bonfils.
Yeah, that sounded right.
She asked, “That Sun God is your Medium Adult?”
Lizzy rolled over on her tummy and stretched backward, curling herself into a backwards circle, a Mobius strip of a girl. “What? You saw him at the contract signing.”
Georgie ignored her contortions. “I was busy trying to place Mannix fucking Bonfils and getting you dressed in something other than slutwear. I didn’t even notice him.”
“You saw him at the dorm, too,” Lizzy said.
“I wasn’t really looking at him because I was worried about you. Evidently, my psychic gaydar doesn’t use visible light. I didn’t even notice that he was blindingly beautiful.”
“He had a scruffy little beard, then.”
“Oh, that’s why. So gross.” Georgie twirled the end of her brown braid
around her finger, desperately trying to think of something to say.
She asked Georgie, “What happened to Dieter, the hottie in the SUV?”
Lizzy must have been too busy gawking at Paris to listen to the conversation. “Married.”
Lizzy grinned a manic, bitchy smile. “But Theo’s not blond-blond like The Dom, and he’s not all smoldery, like Mannix—”
Georgie leaned across the soft bed and backhanded Lizzy on the arm.
“Ow! Hey!”
“Yeah, ow. This from the masochist sex submissive. What is wrong with you?” Georgie waggled a finger at the door, indicating Theo, out there somewhere. “He’s gorgeous!”
“Well,” Lizzy dithered. “He’s pretty.”
“No, I mean seriously. If you can’t see that, you need a good eyeball-licking to clear your vision. You hit that?”
“Uh-huh.” Lizzy grinned again. “He’s really buff, too. Hard and lumpy in all the right ways. There’s an eight-pack under that lawyer suit, and his back is like a big, gold Brahma bull. He’s a gentleman in the parlor, a Dom in the bedroom, and a good man to have at your back in a fight.”
Be the slut. What would Georgie the slut say? “I wouldn’t kick him out of my bed. Seriously, if you’re through with him, can I have your scraps?”
Lizzy grinned harder, obviously thinking she was winning the banter. “He’s not your type. He doesn’t do one-night stands.”
“No! Crap.” Georgie sighed, gazing back at the hotel room’s door. “What a waste. If I could sneak off with him for a couple hours, I could ditch this whole wedding.”
Lizzy sat up and stared at her. “Georgie, you aren’t jonesing for The Dom, are you?”
Georgie shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m fine with him. They’re a cute couple. Tall, but cute.”
“Rae?”
Uh, no. “Nah. I rarely swing that way.”
“What then?”
Georgie sighed. “I will bet you, dollars to donuts, that at some point today I’m going to have to crawl under a table. I am simply fucking dreading it.”
Lizzy rolled off the bed and grabbed some stuff out of her checked baggage. “Your mysterious Parisian enemy?”
Georgie couldn’t hold it back any longer, not from Lizzy, with whom she had lived for almost three years and the one person she might email later from somewhere else. “She’s not an enemy, and she has every right to wrap her pretty little hands around my throat and choke me until I die. If some blonde tries to kill me, just let her.”
Lizzy sucked in a gasp. “Georgie, what did you do?”
Georgie shook her head, pulling the hairs on the end of her long braid. “Something that I had to. And I was young and didn’t know any different. But that doesn’t make it any better.”
FRIEDERIKE VON HANNOVER AND GEORGIANA OELRICHS
Georgie
Georgie hid in her hotel room, applying layer after layer of make-up at the wide bathroom counter and mirror before the civil ceremony where her friend Rae Stone was to marry Wulfram von Hannover. The crystal sconces threw harsh light at her face, slicing deep shadows under her cheekbones and nose so that she looked ghastly. No amount of make-up could hide that kind of shame.
When she and Flicka had known each other at Tanglewood, Georgie’s hair had flowed long and blond-streaked brown and free, so now Georgie twisted it into a severe knot on the back of her head like she was trying to yank her ears to meet at the back of her skull.
At Tanglewood, they wore no make-up except for performances, so Georgie pulled out all her own make-up and dipped into Lizzy’s to apply huge, smoky smudges around her eyes, contrasting them until they almost looked hazel. She contoured her cheekbones until her face looked gaunt.
She shouldn’t have brought a black dress. Musicians invariably perform wearing black formals, and Georgie had worn black dresses around Flicka often. Hopefully, the jewelry-weight silver chains that twisted into a belt around her waist and dangled in back from the high neckband, falling like a silver waterfall down her bare spine, would break it up enough. The green dress that she had procured was, indeed, too slutty.
The woman in the mirror was almost unrecognizable to Georgie. She hoped that Flicka wouldn’t recognize her, either.
If she was even there. She might be away on her honeymoon.
Yeah, Flicka might skip her own brother’s wedding.
The brother who had raised her like a father.
The one that she was so lonely for as a teenager that she almost dropped out of Tanglewood.
She was so going to be there, and she would be all over Wulfram and Rae.
Georgie applied scarlet lipstick, allowing the creamy stick to go beyond the natural lines of her already puffy lips until she looked like a fucking clown.
Better.
Black SUVs picked them up from the hotel lobby, and Georgie and Lizzy rode with some of the security guys.
At the ceremony in a small law office far up in a skyscraper, everybody spoke French, which Georgie didn’t, so she kept her head tucked down and tried futilely to hide behind the tiny, slight form of Lizzy. She must have looked like a cow hiding behind a sapling.
During the ceremony, Georgie sat in a chair that had been shoved to the back of the room. Lizzy was standing in front of her, all giggly and bouncy as if true love always wins.
Georgie kept her chin tucked down and her elbows close to her sides and tried not to scan everyone walking in the door, but she couldn’t help herself.
Pierre Grimaldi, Prince of Monaco, strode into the room and was even more gorgeous close up than in the pictures on Georgie’s computer. The pictures didn’t show the sensual way he moved, like he was built out of pliant, limber muscle that he might wrap around you at any moment. His sultry glance around the room caught even Georgie’s attention, and she knew that he was married.
Beside him, a willowy woman wore a pale blue dress that brought out the brilliant green of her eyes and made her skin all the more perfectly porcelain. Her curly hair was woven into a golden chignon that made her look like a goddess.
Despite the years, Georgie could have picked Flicka out of a crowd of perfect blondes without blinking. She was more beautiful, but she hadn’t changed.
Flicka began to turn toward Georgie.
Georgie ducked behind Lizzy and waited, but she didn’t hear anything.
She hid until the short ceremony was over, then trotted into the generic, whitewashed corridor and sneaked around the corner until the rest of the wedding party had left the office.
Flicka walked up ahead, so Georgie hid behind the wall of black suits that surrounded Rae and Wulfram von Hannover.
Every time she looked at Wulfram now, she could see Flicka’s elegant bone structure in his face, although his was obviously a masculine version of it. How could she have been so blind? Years. Georgie had known him for years.
Flicka strode across a wide sidewalk and climbed into a waiting SUV. The door slammed, and she was gone.
Georgie deflated with relief, but she followed Lizzy and Rae into the waiting SUVs and then hid in her hotel room, typing about Latin American hegemonies, until she absolutely, positively, had to go to the reception downstairs in the George the Fifth hotel.
Rae, still glowing in her ivory cocktail dress and nearly giggly with happiness, had shown Georgie to the center table with the rest of the wedding party, where scarlet roses and royal purple hydrangeas built enormous centerpieces. The sweetness of the roses perfumed the air so heavily that Georgie couldn’t smell the croissants that must be baking 24/7 in the hotel’s ovens. She caught a glimpse of herself in the table settings, rimmed with gold, as were the crystal goblets. The paleness in her face looked ghostly, but maybe that was the snowy white bone china and not her own trepidation.
If Flicka did see her, Georgie could duck under the many tablecloths, sumptuous layers of royal purple, blue, and red topped with a pristine white one. Her New England mother would have gasped at the decor, first with horror at the excess, then
at the audacity of the opulence, and then she would have gone back to their home in Conyers Farm and recreated it for her lady friends, and they all would have tittered about what better taste they all had than the royals.
Georgie hid on the perimeter, sometimes in the hallway, sometimes near the back among the greenery, checking the location of Flicka and her crew—because Flicka had always been gregarious and a cadre of gorgeous people had always crowded around her, and her brother’s impromptu wedding was no exception.
Rae and Lizzy had sent Georgie in search of champagne because evidently Georgie was just picking at her food, and she clutched four flutes of champagne in her fists by the stems, watching to make sure Flicka’s back was turned before she wove through the crowd toward Lizzy and Rae.
Georgie dodged a woman in a ruby choker and matching dress, threaded between a few men in morning dress or perfectly tailored suits, and made a beeline for Rae’s table, fully intending to drop off the booze and break for the shrubbery again, when she heard a woman’s dulcet tones behind her ask, “Georgiana Oelrichs?”
She cringed. Georgie would have known Flicka’s voice anywhere, too.
“Um, yeah, but it’s Georgie Johnson now.” She reached without looking, stretching four champagne flutes toward the table. The wine glasses were plucked out of her hands just before she dropped them.
She turned and stared right into Friederike von Hannover’s shocked and hurting green eyes. She was even more beautiful up close, and Georgie felt even more like a little shit. “Hi, Flicka. Can we talk somewhere?”
Flicka wound her arm in Georgie’s, just like they had when they had strolled the fields around Tanglewood together, and guided her toward the hallway outside.
The truth, Georgie decided. The whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help her God.
Outside the double doors, she and Flicka sat on a velvet settee bench and bent their heads toward each other. Flicka’s golden hair, always as soft as silk, stroked Georgie’s cheek.
