Reviewing books I love is often much more difficult than reviewing books that are just OK; Once Upon A Time is one of those books. I’ve been reading Blair Babylon’s books for about four years but it seems like just yesterday. She writes compelling stories with characters that have complicated lives. I don’t just read her books, I become immersed in the world she has created for her characters.

Her Billionaires in Disguise (BID) and Rock Stars in Disguise (RSID) series of books are all connected but they are also written so each series can be read as standalone stories. Even if you haven’t read any of the other series (but I implore you to read them!) you will still be able to enjoy Flicka’s series because of the background information that Blair puts in the story. And the thing about that background information is that it’s written in such a way that it doesn’t seem redundant if you are a fan and have read all of the other books, like I have.

Because I’m a reader who generally hates cliffhangers, I feel I must disclose that this is the first in what will be a series of 3 or 4 books, and you will definitely be left wanting more after reading it. But there’s something other than the wonderful writing that keeps me reading Blair’s books – even with cliffhangers – she has never yet failed to complete a series and she releases the books fairly close together so you aren’t kept waiting forever for the next one (book 2 of this series is coming in a month). She also hasn’t taken one book and chopped it up into multiple parts just to sell more books. This story has nearly 300 pages and, based on past history, the other books in the series will be just as long, if not longer.

It’s hard for me talk about this story without giving too much away. Flicka married her prince but things aren’t good. They had an agreement but he broke the rules and now she has to get away. Fans have been begging Blair to write Flicka’s story and also one for another favorite character who’s been around since the first BID story. It was a wonderful shock to find this much beloved character a prominent part of Flicka’s story.

Flicka is a one-woman dynamo. Her organizational skills are awesome. Yes, she has unlimited help to carry out her wishes, but she is the ultimate organizer. It’s just a shame that she isn’t able to reorganize her life with the same efficiency.

I laughed and I cried while reading this much anticipated story. I can’t wait to read the next one. Next month can’t come soon enough for me.

Reviews for Blair Babylon

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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.”

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 suite 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.

Flicka glanced around them, finally remembering some operational protocol.
She said, “Dance with me.”
Dieter looked out over the crowd of targets and potential perpetrators. “I’m on duty.”
“Everyone is looking at us because we are just standing here, arguing. We’re too conspicuous. Dance with me so people will stop staring.”
He had never danced with her in public. The lapse in protocol would have been insane. “It’s your wedding reception. You just married your husband. You should be dancing with him and mingling.”
“I have mingled and made the rounds and greeted until even I, a classic extrovert, am terribly tired of peopling.”
“Dancing with me would be inappropriate.”
She laughed. “Everybody thinks you’re like an uncle to me.”
That felt like a punch to the gut on so many levels. “Could you say anything to make me feel worse?”
“Even Wulf thinks that.” Her brother, and Dieter’s best friend.
“And there it is.” The banter felt friendly, even normal, and he succumbed to it.
“Come on. Dance with me,” Flicka insisted and held her arms out for him to slide into the waltzing position.
Not taking her in his arms would look more suspicious than just accepting.
Dieter Schwarz, son of no one and owner of nothing, former military officer with no past known before his conscription as if he had dropped out of a cloud onto a Swiss mountain peak, took the hand of Her Serene Highness Friederike Augusta von Hannover and rested his hand on her waist.
The bandage on his arm where the bullet had creased his biceps that morning bulged under his suit jacket.
The tiny beads encrusting her reception dress were sharp against his palm and fingers, and her other hand was as delicate as a breeze in his.
Twice, that day, he had felt her skin against his flesh.
He hadn’t touched her for two years.
Only a thin layer of silk and glass beads separated his palm and fingers from the soft skin of her back.
That morning when he had seen the sunlight flash on the telescopic sight atop the gun, he dove for Flicka and gathered her body and limbs under his. He’d pressed his cheek to her forehead as bullets slammed the ground around him and burrowed through the meat of his arm.
And now, this innocent dance with the bride of the evening, her slender body bending in his arms and her hand clasped in his, was the second time he had touched her today and in as many years.
Every thought drifted away from him except that Flicka von Hannover was in his arms again.
Everyone thought he was like an uncle to her.
Everyone except him and her, who knew better.
Her lithe form swayed inches from his chest. Roses perfumed her skin, and he breathed in that familiar, maddening scent.
Dieter’s attention drew back from the crowd and the vantage points above and the jackals in the room. He focused on Flicka’s warmth in his hands.
The orchestra was playing a waltz.
Dieter stepped toward Flicka as she stepped back, and he steered her through the crowd.
Flicka asked, “Is he going to ask her to marry him tonight?”
“He told me he would. Rae is the sweetest, kindest woman I’ve ever met.”
“I am standing right here.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Asshole.” She moved a little closer to his chest.
Dieter slid his hand farther around her back. The tiny beads felt rough on his palm and caught on his calluses. “Rae doesn’t want to burn the world down.”
Flicka shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

Flicka’s hands cramped from squeezing the life out of her little clutch purse.
Dieter stood behind Wulf, his face as grim as she felt.
He wasn’t watching the clouds outside the windows or the closed door, however, like he always did.
His dove gray eyes were trained on her, locked on her face.
Between them, Flicka’s brother Wulfram married the woman he was so in love with.
Flicka’s serene smile never faltered. She was too much of a princess for that.
But his eyes—
She had thought of his eyes as just gray when she was a kid, but her perception had changed the year she’d turned eighteen.
They were too dark to be silvery.
They were the gray of dangerous storm clouds building on the horizon, ready to sweep down and overturn your life.
Every time he had touched her, her whole world had turned upside down. Everything she had thought was important in her life—music, revolution—had fallen away when his fingers had grazed her skin.
She had been twenty when he’d made love to her the first time.
Her very first time.
And it had been completely her idea.
And after that, she’d never gotten over him.
If she had been so uncultured to not remain still and serene at her brother’s wedding, she would have shaken that thought out of her head.
Instead, like a chain of thoughts, it was replaced with moments from their year-long affair. She could feel the patchwork of it: a touch from the night she’d attended Christine Grimaldi’s recital, a glance from his gray eyes on a day after she’d aced a performance at college, the way he moved in her one late night when she’d attended a charity benefit with a date but gone home with Dieter.
Every moment of their year together was at her fingertips.
He had insisted that they keep their relationship an absolute secret. No one knew at the time, and no one must ever know.
So Flicka went to charity and social events with other men.
Her dates picked her up in their cars driven by their chauffeurs, danced with her, talked with her, and drove her home for a comparatively chaste kiss.
Dieter squired her inside Kensington Palace without a twitch of emotion for her or them, even though he had been shadowing her all night from the walls, the balconies, and the front seats of the cars.
Once inside, his hands found her.
One time, she had been out with some duke or another to some event benefitting the impoverished children of somewhere, and the duke had been driven off in his limo into the night.
As soon as the door had shut on the Kensington Palace apartment that they shared for her protection, he had shoved her against the wall.
He whispered in her ear, “Out there, who are you?”
“Prinzessin Friederike Augusta,” she whispered, trying not to smile too much.
“And in here?” he asked. “In my bed, whose are you?”
“Yours,” Flicka whispered.

 

Runaway Princess: Flicka Series

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