Cynda and the City Doctor - Theodora Taylor Page 0,55

until they were deposed after World War I and made royals in historical name only.

“But Rhys isn’t a…” I start to say.

I stop, the truth suddenly blaring in my head like a code red alarm along with his first date mention of having twelve names.

“Actually he is,” Ingrid answers with another tinkling laugh like this is all in good fun. “His formal title is Prince Aleksander of Drosselholz. But our many employees know him as Alek Drossel, the President of DBCare. And this practice is our latest acquisition.”

Wait…what?

The Fine Prince is actually a prince? And even more shocking than that, he’s the President of DBCare!

For a moment I can hear nothing. There’s only Rhys’s steel-grey eyes staring back at me, an emotionless blank.

Then I hear everything.

Ingrid explaining how Rhys occasionally uses, “one of his many names” to acquire certain well-placed practices when the doctors who own them don’t want to sell to DBCare.

The horns blaring as cars cut around my Honda, still idling in the street.

The birds tweeting happily above even as the ground seems to crack underneath my feet.

But one question shines above all the noise.

“Buying my father’s practice on behalf of DBCare, the one company you knew he didn’t want to sell to. Was this…was this all part of your revenge?” I ask Rhys.

A few cold beats. And then, Rhys finally speaks, “Yes.”

It’s officially spring now, but his voice is as cold as winter.

Chapter Twenty-One

That “Yes” echoes in my head as I return to the house.

“Where are the groceries?” A asks when I come through the kitchen door empty-handed.

I don’t answer. Just walk up the stairs in a daze.

It was only six months. But because of that six months, the one thing my father didn’t ever want is happening.

His practice is gone. It’s gone in a nefarious deal to a man who would literally move to small town Missouri in the middle of a pandemic. All to get back at me for dumping him via text.

He’d called himself a nutter during our time in the back house. I thought it had been a self-deprecating joke. But in my room, I pull out my laptop to try to figure out exactly who this psycho is.

Sure enough, there’s Rhys’s picture in the Leadership Team section with the title Director of Acquisitions below his real name, Aleksander Drossel.

No wonder he’d seemed so hard at work for the last two weeks, even though he didn’t have to report for work in Guadalajara.

A scroll through his bio makes no reference to his royal title, but it does mention that he used to be the company’s Chief Medical Officer and even completed a year of fieldwork in a St. Louis hospital before taking on his current role.

A follow-up Wikipedia search informs me that DBCare used to be just DrosselCare and its biggest competitor was Bylund Holdings, a Swedish healthcare corporation. But sometime around the late aughts, the two companies started going through the multi-year process of combining their forces. Supposedly to be able to offer their clients more in the way of health solutions.

But I’m reading between a lot of lines as I do my research. And from what I’m figuring, DrosselCare joined forces with Bylund Holdings, so that they could acquire even more pharmacies and clinics in the much less regulated United States than they could in Europe. Aleksander’s and Ingrid’s marriage should have been the jewel in the two families’ new conglomerate crown.

But then I came along.

Do you know what I gave up to be with you?

That question had seemed so hyperbolic when he’d been taking me roughly in the back house. But further research using Aleksander Drossel’s real name reveals all sorts of German language gossip nuggets, which I read with the help of GoogleTranslate.

Apparently, Prince really was one of his names. His father, who would have been the Crown Prince of Drosselholz if their line had been allowed to continue, had married a woman by the name of Gwendolyn Prince, the daughter of a Welsh business magnate. And Rhys hadn’t been lying about what a good cook she was. She actually had a few cooking shows, including one that sounded like a German-language version of the Great British Bake Off.

Not surprisingly, since their mother was so busy, all three of the Drosselholz children had been sent off to boarding school in England which accounted for Rhys’s accent. From what I could see, Rhys’s younger sister and brother had received most of the online press, with Alek often being reduced to