Once Upon a Time: Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka Read online

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  Runaway Princess: Flicka

  Book 1

  By: Blair Babylon

  ONCE UPON A TIME

  Runaway Princess: Flicka

  Book 1

  By: Blair Babylon

  When a real princess falls in love with a man who is definitely not a prince, a royal fairy tale turns dangerous.

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a beautiful princess. Flicka von Hannover lived an enchanted life. She jetted around Europe staging charity events with friends, had married a handsome prince in the most spectacular royal wedding of the 21st century, and should have lived happily ever after.

  But then she found the handsome prince in bed with a duchess. And then a coffee shop barista. And then her own goddamn secretary.

  Finally, the beautiful princess had had enough of the cheating prince, and she ran away.

  Once she had stepped out of the royal fairy tale, life became grayer, grittier, and rougher. The prince didn’t like that she had left and sent henchmen to take her back to the castle. Her worried royal brother sent people to look for her, too.

  But the princess didn’t want to be found. The princess got a job as a waitress and made her own way in the world. Even cut off from everyone she knew, she was more resourceful than she had thought she might be. She did okay. From hiding, she sent legal separation papers and then divorce documents, but the prince wouldn’t sign them. He said he wouldn’t let her go. Even in these modern times, the prince could lock the princess up in a dungeon of legal forms and provisions that she wouldn’t be able to break out of. The prince wanted his princess back because he couldn’t take his throne without her.

  Until a man walked into her bar one day, one who was frankly not a handsome prince.

  He was the last man on Earth the princess should have fallen in love with.

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  Published by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Copyright 2018 by Malachite Publishing LLC

  Table of Contents

  Once Upon A Time Top

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  Once Upon A Time -- Table of Contents

  ~~~

  A Fairy Tale, Told By A Princess

  Escape

  Time, Stand Still

  A Thousand Words for Hell

  Just Another Bright, Sunny Day

  At The Hospital

  Mass Execution

  Reception At The Louvre

  Dancing With Your Uncle

  Christine Grimaldi

  The Wedding Night

  Calling Home

  An Errand to the Airport

  At The Wedding: Flicka

  At The Wedding

  Georgiana Oelrichs

  In The Closet

  Alwaysland

  Texts

  Second Betrayal

  Honeymoon

  A Confession

  A Princess In Charge

  Text Me

  Opposites Attract

  At Home

  Next Flight

  Yoshihito

  Betrayed

  Math

  Sisters

  Confrontation

  Under The Same Roof

  Mission Is A Go

  Blue Skies

  Calling Georgie

  Rescuing the Napkins

  A Human Resources Decision

  The Prince Arrives

  Kidnapped #1

  Kidnapped #2

  Revelations

  For Old Time's Sake

  Entry Team

  Dressing The Bride

  The Wedding of Rae and Wulf

  On Duty, Sort Of

  Not A Monarchy

  Saving Flicka

  The End

  Escape, Again

  Insomnia

  Three

  Sneak Peek at In Shining Armor

  A Note From Blair

  ~~~

  Blair Babylon Books

  Dear Reader

  A Fairy Tale, Told By A Princess

  Flicka von Hannover

  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, and heir to an assortment of other useless titles to extinct kingdoms and duchies but including a three-digit succession number to the British throne through George V of Hannover who had been George III of England—is staring straight at you.

  Her golden blond hair curls in waves past her shoulders. Her heart-shaped face and pixieish chin are level and serious.

  Her clear green eyes don’t waver from yours.

  She says, “Let me tell you a story—a fairy tale, actually—but it’s not about a princess. No, it’s about a golden-haired little girl who has no shits left to give. It’s a Goldilocks story.

  “So, this little girl lives in a village, and a family of bears lives outside the village. Bears. Man-eating, fanged, enormous Kodiak bears with blood dripping from their claws and chins. There’s probably a sign on the road that reads, Danger! Get the hell out of here! and old police tape fluttering from the trees from all the times that headless corpses have been found on the property with their guts torn out.

  “But what does Goldilocks do?

  “Does she run and hide? Does she stay safe in the village?

  “No.”

  The way she’s staring straight at you is unnerving. “Goldilocks walks down the road, past the danger sign and shredded police tape, and breaks into the bears’ house. She vandalizes the place, throwing porridge at the walls and breaking the furniture, eating whatever she finds, and then she lies down and takes a nap.

  “A goddamn nap.

  “These are not the actions of a good citizen. These are not the actions of a person who gives a shit about what is nice, or proper, or appropriate.”

  Her Serene Highness Flicka von Hannover has not blinked her wide, crystal-green eyes all this time.

  She says to you, “That is a golden-haired bitch who wants to watch the world burn, who wants to see it all burn to ashes, and something better—much better—rise to take its place.”

  Escape

  Flicka von Hannover

  This is the night my life ended,

  and though I didn’t know it at the time,

  the night I was reborn.

  The long hotel hallway, lined with doors, stretched in front of Flicka von Hannover as she ran as hard as she could.

  Her ankles wobbled in her gilded, stiletto sandals every time her feet thudded on the carpeting. Her slim, crystal-encrusted skirt was bunched around her thighs so she could stretch her long legs. Her purse dangled from her wrist and bounced against her thigh with each stride.

  Just a few more doors.

  —432, 434, 436—

  If she could reach room 460, she had a chance.

  She glanced behind her, risking a stumble as she sprinted.

  Doors studded the silent hallway behind her. Shimmering sconces threw dim light over the grand hotel’s gold carpeting, and black night pressed against the windows. She could still taste the metallic tinge of blood in her mouth.

  No other hotel guests were standing around in the hallways at four in the morning.

  —442, 444, 446—

  When she had escaped from her own sui
te minutes before, the Secret Service men, armed with handguns and large knives, had been chasing her. Flicka had leaped into the closing elevator, rolling on the floor and slamming her shoulder against the back wall. It had been a stroke of luck that the elevator was at the penthouse and the doors had been closing just as she had run. That little bit of luck had allowed her to make it this far.

  At the fourth floor, she had pushed all the buttons to send the elevator lower into the hotel, hoping to confuse her pursuers.

  —450, 452, 454—

  Flicka ran harder, trying to make it.

  She looked back again.

  The hallway behind her was still empty. Her husband’s Secret Service men hadn’t expected her to be able to sprint so quickly in high-heeled shoes and a slim ball gown, but princesses are accustomed to wearing evening dress. She could probably rappel down a cliff face in petticoats and pumps.

  Flicka von Hannover was a real, modern princess, not a fairy-tale one, and she had run for her life more than once.

  The Secret Service men must have made for the stairwells, splitting up to search each floor for her, planning to communicate her position to each other for reinforcements. That’s how she would have orchestrated the search. They would come thundering out of the stairwells at each end of the hallway at any moment and see her racing through the hotel with her pale pink dress hiked up around her hips and a diamond tiara glittering in her blond hair.

  Room 460.

  Flicka pounded on the door and held her hand against the wood, willing it to open right now.

  The door moved under her hand.

  The tall, blond man opening the door saw her, and his gray eyes glanced down the corridor—worried. A white towel was slung low on his hips below the accordion pleats of his abs, and a livid scar creased the skin on his biceps on one arm. Other, fainter scars criss-crossed his pale gold skin. “Durchlauchtig?”

  Flicka whispered, “He said he’d kill me.”

  Dieter grabbed her wrist and pulled her inside, bending to survey the hallway after she passed him. Dieter Schwarz was one of the bodyguards who’d protected her from assassins for years. “Did anyone follow you?”

  Flicka leaned against the wall beside the door, still out of breath from running. “I lost them.”

  Dieter pressed the door closed and flipped the locks. “You’re sure?”

  “—I think so.”

  He held his finger to his lips, watching through the door’s peephole.

  Flicka flattened herself against the wall. Her purse dropped off her wrist and thumped on the floor.

  Dieter waited, peering through the lens, and then dodged to the side, ending up standing inches in front of her. He flicked off the lights and turned, shielding her from the sight of anyone looking through the other side of the peephole. The view through the lens probably didn’t go far to the sides and no one should be able to see them in the darkness, but she hid behind him anyway.

  In the faint light misting from the bedroom, Dieter’s chest and shoulders were broad, so wide across, and his muscles were chiseled lines in his flesh. The scent of fresh soap and an herbal, spicy cologne wafted off of him, faint until her nose was literally two inches away from his tanned skin and rounded chest muscles. He must have showered after they had both closed down Flicka’s brother’s wedding reception that night, only a few hours before.

  Flicka tried not to breathe, tried not to gasp and cry in rage or frustration. Those emotions whipped around inside her until she couldn’t help herself any longer.

  She leaned toward him and rested her cheek against Dieter’s strong shoulder, seeking comfort.

  His bare skin and silken chest fuzz warmed her face. She breathed in his comforting, male scent that had felt like safety to her for so many years. A little bit of cinnamon. A little bit of clean soap and wildness.

  She knew she shouldn’t. She knew she should lean back and pull away from him.

  But the terror subsided a little, so she didn’t move.

  Dieter’s hand cupped the back of her head, cradling her. He moved closer, resting his forearm on the wall as they waited.

  Revulsion and terror warred inside Flicka. She didn’t want anyone, anyone at all, to touch her. Her guts twisted in her stomach, and yet this was Dieter, just Dieter.

  She’d loved him once, and she’d hated him, but she couldn’t imagine running to anyone else when her life was in danger. If anyone could protect her, it was Dieter Schwarz.

  And if no one else would take the chance, Dieter would.

  Flicka snaked her arm around Dieter’s tight waist to hold onto him, lest her shaking knees give out.

  Under her arm, the sinews woven around his torso slid under his skin as he barely breathed. His terrycloth towel snagged on the crystals covering her silk dress.

  Dieter wrapped both his arms around her shoulders and whispered near her ear, “Does he know about us?”

  Flicka shook her head. “I never told him.”

  “Good.”

  Footsteps marched down the hallway outside and paused outside the door.

  Flicka held onto Dieter’s strong waist more tightly and tried not to breathe.

  Time, Stand Still

  Three months earlier.

  A Thousand Words for Hell

  Dieter Schwarz

  I will betray my best friend

  three times

  before this story is finished,

  and my name is not Dieter Schwarz.

  The languages of the world hold a thousand words for Hell.

  Abaddon, Gehenna, Pandemonium, Hades, Chthónios, the Inferno, the Underworld, the Netherworld, Tartarus, Tophet, the Abyss, the Pit, Sheol.

  And so many more.

  A soldier knows them all, the ancient words and the modern ones.

  Dieter Schwarz, as he called himself, had seen many of those iterations of Hell.

  Now, Dieter’s own personal Hell was unwinding itself around him.

  He shouldn’t be so selfish. He had seen spilled blood and broken bones and screaming pain. He had felt the gaping emptiness of death.

  But this one played out in slow motion over a whole day.

  And he couldn’t make a sound.

  Dieter stood at the back of the small dressing room in the rear of the Basilica Sacre-Coeur cathedral. The church topped one of Paris’s hills in the Montmartre district of the eighteenth arrondissement. He silently scanned the windows for the lens flare of a sniper or the fist of a fascist and listened through the wall behind his head for stomping boots or gunshots.

  He was only a bodyguard, there for the personal protection of 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 and a host of other defunct and extinct titles. However, the fact remained that she was as beautiful as pink roses and golden lilies, rich beyond belief, and the most upper of the upper-classes. In addition, her older brother was notorious for a childhood tragedy.

  Someone would try to take her if Dieter relaxed his guard, just to make the papers, just to add more misery to the world.

  It had happened before.

  Often.

  She had grown up with a target painted on her back, one that glowed brightly for terrorists and sociopaths.

  Dieter looked out the window and listened through the wall, but he knew that Flicka’s hair was pale gold, her eyes were crystal green, and she had a heart-shaped face. He knew the scent of the herbal-mint shampoo she used and the sweet fragrance of her skin. He knew the taste of her mouth after she’d been drinking wine or eating vanilla ice cream, and he knew the satin of her skin under his hands and tongue.

  He knew he missed her.

  Dieter was contracted to give his life for hers, should the need arise.

  The whole point of personal protection was to prevent the need for such a sacrifice from arising, and everybody stayed alive.

  He listened through
the walls and watched the windows.

  Plus, Dieter was married to another woman, the mother of his child, and he had no right to look at Flicka von Hannover on her wedding day.

  Dieter had met Flicka when she had been ten years old and he was twenty-one. Flicka’s older brother Wulfram had raised her since she was six because their father was an ass and had shipped her off to boarding school the very day after her mother had died of breast cancer. She had been just a gangly puppy-child to Dieter until one particular night a decade later, when she had been twenty years old, and she had insisted that Dieter open his eyes and look at her.

  His world had turned on its axis. The very stars changed for him when he looked into her dark green eyes and saw her as if for the first time.

  But that was three years and a lifetime ago.

  Now, his only job was to watch for threats to her safety.

  Therefore, Dieter kept his gaze away from the bride, scanning the windows and listening to the hallway, while Flicka von Hannover wept into her hands on the day she was to marry another man.

  Not just any other man.

  Her fiancé was the Prince Pierre Grimaldi, the crown prince of Monaco, the man who would inherit the throne of the principality when his uncle died or passed it over to him. Not that the change was anticipated to happen anytime soon. The current prince, Prince Rainer IV, was robustly healthy and planned a long reign, as he sharply told anyone who dared ask.

  Prince Pierre Grimaldi would inherit one of the world’s great fortunes and have actual royal power. He could give Flicka absolutely anything she wanted: islands, jewels, and protection from anything that might harm her. His Secret Service could encircle her far better than a poor Swiss mercenary could ever hope to. The Prince’s Palace of Monaco was a fortress that had repelled medieval invaders, and it was located in one of the safest countries in the world.