He handed his boarding passes and identification to the agent. The woman glanced at Alina Sophie Mirabaud, measuring her age against the date on the birth certificate and the name of her father on that certificate against his red-bound, Swiss passport.
They matched, of course.
She handed the boarding passes and documents back to him. “Have a safe flight, Mr. Mirabaud.”
First Day On The Job
Flicka von Hannover
Waitressing is harder than it looks.
Flicka checked her phone she had hidden behind the bar just for a second’s respite from the slot machines jangling around her, the constant shouted orders from the guys playing blackjack, and the kitchen’s clanking and derisive screaming when she wrote something down slightly wrong.
She was doing her best.
On the screen, a text from Dieter read, I’m on my way back to Vegas. I’m going to the airport within an hour to catch the first flight. Tell me a code.
A code.
Oh, Lord. What kind of code could she use?
She hid the phone back under the counter and grabbed the three glasses the bartender had readied for her, slopping sticky beer on her hand as she balanced them on her tray. She didn’t know which one was the lager and which one was the pilsner, which was ridiculous. Flicka knew a tremendous amount about alcohol, but she couldn’t tell the beers apart without sipping them, which she assumed would be frowned upon. She would have frowned upon it if she had seen a waitress doing such an unsanitary thing. The bartender had slapped all the beers in mugs instead of pouring them into the proper drinkware for each beer type, and he’d put too much head on every single one of them.
When Flicka turned, the casino looked like an amphitheater filled with flashing lights, walls of slot machines, and boulders of blackjack tables. People scurried and milled, unconsciously bobbing along to the insistent rhythm of the ringing slots and mesmerized by the noise.
Which table had ordered these beers again? She couldn’t tell. Three rows of crescent-shaped blackjack tables stretched down the rows, and she wasn’t sure where the blackjack tables ended and the Texas Hold’em tables began. One blackjack table was crowded with Chinese people bantering in Mandarin, and she’d shocked the Hell out of them by asking for their order in the same language. They’d tipped her well when she’d reminded them that it was lucky to tip the waitresses. Large white men and a few black guys stuffed the next table, laughing uproariously like they’d known each other all their American lives even though an hour ago they’d gathered one-by-one at the newly opened table, exchanging names and hometowns.
Flicka waded into the rivulets of insanity, eddied back and forth by people streaming around the blackjack tables and slots, and delivered the few beers to collect her tokens and bills.
One of the other waitresses turned quickly and slammed into Flicka as she hurried to deliver drinks and snacks, glaring at her because she was the fresh meat. Beer sloshed down Flicka’s leg, cold and nasty. She understood that it would take a while to make friends, but this blue-haired, pierced-nosed woman seemed actively hostile, glaring at her through narrowed eyes.
When Flicka got back to the bar about half an hour later, she stared at the text from Dieter on the screen again, trying to decide what she should text back to him.
No imminent danger threatened her. No one was chasing her. She was free to leave this thundering casino if she chose, though she knew that she and Dieter were going to need this money very soon.
She didn’t want to text any of the danger codes to Dieter.
She couldn’t even honestly use any of the other codes that she and Wulfram had set up, such as the words art history, which meant that she was lonely and adrift in the sea of abstract friendlessness, or dream on, which meant that her royal and wealthy friends of the upper one percent were behaving like typical junior-high girls and making her cry.
Instead, she texted, Fiddlesticks.
Anything else was too much to admit. She might want to cry, but she would not.
Mordant the bartender shoved four more beers at her with a scowl. “Get these beers out there before they go flat or those suckers leave before they give us all their money.”
Flicka scurried off into the crowd, doing her best, though her best was surely not good enough.
The Job Description For A Princess
Dieter Schwarz
Fighting with her was the last thing I’d meant to do.
Alina was perfectly well-behaved on the flight, playing with her new bear and watching the flight tracker display the flight’s progress on the seatback screen.
Dieter talked to Alina, narrating the flight and discussing the people around them, while worrying about Flicka.
Kidnapping scenarios played out in his head: Flicka sitting in an office while commandoes stormed through the front door, Flicka typing on a computer as Pierre strode up and grabbed her arm, and Flicka talking to business-suited clients in a boardroom as men swarmed into the hallway beyond the glass walls.
Work.
What kind of a job could she have been hired for, anyway?
Oh, no.
The image of Flicka dancing next to a silvery pole, wearing a few sparkly pieces of a costume pasted on her limber, silken skin while black-suited kidnappers threaded through the crowd of leering men toward her arose in Dieter’s head.
Sheer rage arced through his chest at the thought of those other men seeing her body and touching her as they threw money at her, and the anger warred with his worry about Monegasque kidnappers or murder squads.
Alina hugged Sweetie Pinkie Bear and giggled at the plane on the screen as they crawled toward Las Vegas.
When they got there, another text from Flicka was delivered to his phone. At the rental office, ask for Indrani. She’ll give you a key. I’ll be home around eight o’clock.
He texted back, Where are you? Go to the house, please!
Dieter watched his phone for a reply text while he carried his daughter on his hip and her car seat out of the airport with her pink diaper bag and his duffel swinging from his shoulders. He watched the screen during the cab ride to the address and while he met with Indrani, but Flicka didn’t text back.
He went to the townhouse, let himself in, and looked around while holding his warm phone in his hand in case it vibrated.
The furnishings in the townhouse were brown and more brown with light brown accents and some other colors, which was fine with Dieter. Brown was fine.
More importantly, the thick, metal front door was studded with sturdy locks.
One of the bedrooms had a king-sized bed and dressers, and the other one—
They trundled into other bedroom, a pink room that Alina was absolutely sure was hers, which was a little girl’s fantasy. Pink unicorn decals and rainbows had been applied to the walls. A mural painted on one long wall showed a castle in the distance. If Dieter squinted just a little, it bore the neo-Gothic outlines of Schloss Marienburg, the castle where Flicka had spent her early years before she had been sent to boarding school. The forest painted around it looked like the deep green, shadowy environs of Northern Germany.
His phone finally buzzed with a text from Flicka: On my way.
He swiped back, Where are you? I’ll come get you. Don’t go out by yourself, even though he had no idea what he would do with Alina, who was methodically digging baby toys out of a small chest and dumping them on the floor.
It took Flicka hours to get home, hours and hours while she was vulnerable and strangers jostled her and men in vans chased her through the streets and the tracts of desert that infiltrated between the houses.
Dieter paced worn tracks in the thick carpet of the living room while Alina played with a whole chest of new toys.
Inexplicably, the clock on the cable box only counted off twenty minutes.
A key grated in the door lock, and Dieter marched to the door and yanked it open. “Where the hell have you—”
Outside the small townh
ouse, fading desert sunlight glared on the bit of gravel that served as a yard and into the street beyond.
Flicka stood there, dressed in something very small that bared her long legs and throat and some cleavage that he sort of hadn’t realized she possessed. A skimpy, black skirt and a white top were wrapped too tightly around her slim body. Her blond hair was bound up in a messy bun with curls straggling around her face, framing her vibrant green eyes that never failed to floor him. Sequins trimmed her clothes.
He was used to seeing her in elegant business suits or floating evening gowns, dressed like a princess. Her regal demeanor shone through this outfit, he was sure, but he had never seen garish clothes like these on her.
Or clothes so small. So revealing.
So damn trashy and sexy.
Flicka set one fist on her hip and leaned to the side, glaring up at him. “You were saying?”
He snapped his mouth closed and reached for her, gathering her inside so he could slam the door and lock it up tightly.
Flicka walked through the little entryway and dropped her purse on a table. “Did you get Alina?”
“Yes—” he stammered. “I—” What the hell was she wearing? “Where were you?”
“Work,” Flicka said.
“What job could you possibly have?”
Oh, that had slipped out wrong, and the Prinzessin who might have ruled a kingdom wouldn’t let it pass, he knew.
Flicka’s chin bobbed up, and her slim jaw clenched. “I made five hundred dollars today, thank you very much.”
“Doing what?”
Yeah, that had come out wrong, too, and Dieter considered banging his head on the door to stop himself from saying stupid things.
Anger lit Flicka’s emerald eyes, and she started picking pins out of the blond twist of her hair. “I’m a waitress at the Monaco Casino, and I made great tips today.”
“You can’t be a waitress,” he said.
What the hell was wrong with him? He needed to crack his skull on the wall to get himself out of this mess. If he were unconscious, he would stop talking.
She said, “I can, and I am, and I made good tips. Not great tips because I couldn’t remember all the drinks that people were ordering. I don’t know what the English nicknames are, and there’s a sea of tables in the gaming room. I can’t tell one from another. But I did well enough. I can survive if I need to. If I make these kinds of tips for three days, I’ll have enough for rent for this apartment for the month. I can do this.”
Such resourcefulness might be important if he were killed and she needed to live off the land for a few weeks until Wulfram or a Rogue Security operator could reach her. It might keep her alive.
But walking around a crowd would allow her to be kidnapped or killed.
He said, “I forbid you to go outside again. You must quit this job.”
Her head bobbed up higher, and her green eyes caught fire. “You work for me, Dieter.”
“I work for your brother. You are the principal target, not my boss.”
“You’re not my boss. I am Her Serene Highness Friederike Marie Louise Victoria Caroline Amalie Alexandra Augusta, Prinzessin von Hannover und Cumberland, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, Duchess of Brunswick-Lüneburg—”
“Then act like it!”
“I am!”
“If you were acting like it, you would let your security do their job, not go running off every damn time I turn my back.”
His phone buzzed in his pants pocket, shivering against his nuts. The pattern was that stutter-step that meant a text. It could wait.
“You didn’t turn your back. You left.”
With that, Dieter knew what this fight was really about, and he had been right to do it. “Leaving London was the only ethical thing I’ve ever done around you. I should have done it the first night you made a pass at me.”
“I made a pass at you!” she gasped. “That is not what happened.”
“What else would you call—”
“You’d been touching me, stroking my neck or shoulder, and staring at me like you were about to pounce for a year at that point.”
“No, I hadn’t,” he denied, louder in his vehemence. “I would never have done something so unprofessional, so unethical. You were my principal security target and the younger sister of my best friend in the world, my only real friend in the world. I would never have made a pass at you, even though I was already in love with you.”
Flicka stared at him, her eyes huge. Her heavy, blond hair fell out of the bun on the back of her head and trailed down her arm.
Dieter realized what had just escaped his mouth, and the fact that he was still her bodyguard meant that he should immediately retract it and prioritize her safety before any emotion of his own.
But it was the truth, a truth that had burned in his soul for years.
He drew a breath to tell her that he had loved her for so long, that the first time she had kissed him, she’d woven a spell that had dazzled him ever since. He wanted to fall to his knees and tell her that he had always loved her and always would.
Instead, something small patted his knee.
Alina lifted her green baby eyes to look at him. She said, “Dada, up?” in her baby voice.
He hauled the toddler into his arms, where she started playing with his collar as if he had not been wearing the same clothes they had seen each other in all day.
Alina said, “Dada, shhh. Dada wake the baby.”
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said to her, looking over her blond curls at where Flicka was still staring at him. “I won’t yell. I’m sorry,” he said to Flicka over the the toddler’s head as much as Alina.
His phone vibrated in his pocket again, jumping against his leg. Alina looked down like she had felt it, too.
Flicka hadn’t blinked yet. “You said—”
“Not now. Not in front of Alina.”
“But you said—”
“And it is true,” he told her. “Every word. But it’s also true that I can’t let Pierre’s Secret Security team take you back to Monaco. They will try. You know that they will find you and try. They’ll be able to trace you now.”
“I used Gretchen’s passport and green card,” she said.
Alina’s tiny fingers wormed down his neck and toyed with the stubble on his jaw. “They’ll find you eventually. They have so much electronic surveillance equipment at their disposal.”
“But we need money to live on,” Flicka said.
“No, we don’t. I set up an account to funnel money from Rogue Security. In a few days or so, we can retrieve your crown and hole up here. We can have food delivered and never go outside.”
“What an absolutely horrible scenario,” Flicka said.
Alina said, “Dada quiet now.”
“Yes, Alina,” he said. “Daddy is quiet now. Go play now, and we’ll have supper in a few minutes.”
The toddler climbed down from his arms and over to the corner where some toys were stashed in a box, crawling around on all fours like a puppy while she jabbered baby talk to herself.
His phone buzzed yet again, dammit.
He waited until she was happily playing with Sweetie Pinkie Bear.
To Flicka, he said, “The money will arrive soon, in a few days or so. I’ll provide for you. You shouldn’t have to work.”
“On the contrary, I’ve been raised to work all my life. Arbeit macht das Leben süß. Work makes life sweet.”
“You sound just like Wulfram,” he groused.
“Wulfie made sure I had a strong work ethic. No one expected me to retire to a country house after I got married, and I never wanted to pop out a couple of kids and then send them off to boarding school at the age of five. I’ve run my own foundation for years, including running the big fund-raising projects and overseeing the finances. You can’t think I’m going to lie around this townhouse and eat bonbons all day.”
“No, but we can all stay here with Alina where it’s safe. I’ll get a gun
for you.”
His phone buzzed again. Jesus H. Christ, what was it? He yanked his phone from his pants and looked at the screen.
The text from an unknown number with a long string of weird numbers at the beginning read, Account compromised. Do not access. Location will be known if you do. They were on it before we could even move. Other side has state-sponsored intel. Do not reply.
“Elands,” Dieter said, cursing bitterly in Alemannic. “How the hell?”
“What?” Flicka asked, rounding on him.
He showed her the text. “The money isn’t coming. Pierre has hacked it, somehow.”
“Damn that jackass.”
“Such language, Prinzessin.”
“Screw that asshole!”
“You can stay here, and I’ll work,” Dieter said. “We’ll wire this place so that no one can get in, and I’ll find a job.”
Her light eyebrows rose. “So, you want me to take care of your toddler that you had with another woman while you go out all day?”
That wasn’t what he’d meant. “I want you to be safe.”
“You want me locked in here as tightly as I would have been in the Prince’s Palace in Monaco.”
He raised his hands. “That’s not what I meant.”
She sucked in a deep breath and glared at him. “I am not a nanny.”
He gestured to her skimpy clothes. “A princess cannot be a waitress.”
“I want to be a waitress.”
“And I’m sure you’ll be running the place in three days and franchising it in a week, but it’s not safe. Can’t you want to be a nanny?”
“No.”
“But I can’t stand guard over you while you wait on tables, and who would take care of Alina?”
Flicka looked at him and blinked slowly, and then she did it again.
He’d seen that look since she was twelve. It meant that the gears in her head were grinding, and she was figuring out how to get her way. “Flicka—”
In A Faraway Land (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 3) Page 6
