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Pain stabbed through him as it always did at the thought of Bree. He could never forget that, because God was punishing him for something that had happened aeons ago. Bree had died. And their daughters had nearly died, too. Only a miracle wrought by the doctors and nurses in the Cedars Sinai NICU had kept their premature twins alive.
Dirk’s phone sounded the tune he reserved for his closest friends, and when he swiped a finger over the touchpad and saw who the call was from, he smiled and answered. “To what do I owe the honor of this call, Your Majesty?”
The voice of Queen Juliana of Zakhar sounded in his ear, prefaced by a very unqueenly snort. “Cut that out,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you I’m still Juliana to you?”
“Ahhh, but what would your husband, the king, say to that?” he teased gently.
They bantered back and forth for a couple of minutes, then Juliana said, “I hear there’s a typhoon expected to hit Hong Kong this evening, and I remembered you mentioned you were filming there. Are you and the girls in a safe place? And Vanessa and Hannah, too, of course,” she added, referring to the women who had habitually accompanied Dirk on location ever since the twins were born.
“Hannah couldn’t make the trip, after all,” he explained now. “She fell down the stairs and broke her leg three days before we were supposed to leave for Hong Kong.”
“Oh, no!” Dirk knew Juliana’s concern was genuine. Hannah had been his housekeeper for years, and Juliana had met her every time she’d visited the DeWinters during their years-long friendship in Hollywood. “Is she going to be okay?”
“Yeah. She’s recuperating in a nursing home. But Linden and Laurel ask about her several times a day. And we call her every night.” Hannah, a longtime widow with no children of her own, had taken on the role of surrogate grandmother for the twins in addition to her housekeeping duties, something for which Dirk was supremely grateful. His daughters adored Hannah—whom they called Nana—and she adored them.
“Email me the address and phone number of the nursing home, please,” Juliana asked. “I’ll send her flowers and a get-well card.”
“Will do. And don’t worry about us, Juliana. We’ll be fine. Thanks for calling, though.”
“Kiss your daughters for me.” That was something Juliana said every time they talked, another thing that was genuinely meant—Juliana had her own child now, but was the twins’ godmother and loved them deeply. This time, however, she hesitated, then added in a voice tinged with pain, “I adore the pictures of them you’ve sent me, but every day they look more and more like Bree.”
At first Dirk’s throat closed with emotion at the reminder of his wife, who’d been Juliana’s best friend before she died, but eventually he managed, “Yeah, they do.”
Dirk disconnected just as Patrick pulled in at the hotel entrance. He drove past the fountain that had already been turned off, and would have dropped Dirk at the front door, but Dirk refused. “Just find a place to park,” he told his driver. “Call your parents, but I know what they’ll say. Then we’ll go up together.”
It only took a minute for Patrick to receive his parents’ blessing to shelter at the Peninsula Hotel. More than a blessing, actually, Dirk thought with an inward smile as he heard Patrick’s side of the phone conversation. More like a parental command. But he didn’t say anything. He admired the old-fashioned deference the younger generation showed the older in Hong Kong. Once upon a time that had been common in the United States, too, but not anymore.
The two men crossed the lobby, heading for the elevators, and Dirk was distracted for a moment by the Peninsula Hotel’s typhoon preparations. The beautiful arched picture windows had already been boarded up, and sandbags were being stacked along one wall, merely as a precaution. The hotel wasn’t that far from Victoria Harbour, and a strong typhoon-induced surge could bring the ocean to the hotel’s front door.
“That reminds me,” Dirk told Patrick as he rang for the elevator, “we’d better find out what we need to do to make the suite’s windows safe from the typhoon, if the hotel staff hasn’t already done so. And we want to make sure we have plenty of food and drinking water in the suite—if we lose electricity, there’s no way I want to hike down all those floors and back up again.”
They rode up in the elevator to the palatial Peninsula Suite on the twenty-sixth floor, with connecting bedrooms for the twins and their nanny. Dirk would have been just as happy in something less grand, but the movie studio was footing the bill for the suite, and he’d never stayed here when Bree had been alive—an important factor in his decision to accept the accommodations. The private gym, cinematic screening room and baby grand piano had also been contributing factors, not to mention the isolation. Before he’d become a father himself, Dirk had wondered why parents couldn’t do a better job keeping their children from causing disturbances. Now he knew how nearly impossible that was, but he still didn’t want to impose his daughters’ totally to-be-expected behavior on the hotel’s other guests if he could help it.
