“I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “But it seems pretty obvious my government is grateful for what your father and the other general—”
“Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein,” she furnished. “My husband’s father.”
“What’s a Graf?”
“A title of nobility. A count—or an earl, as the English rank their nobility.”
“Does it come with a crown? Or a castle?”
“No crown, Jimmy, at least in recent times. But there is a castle, Schloss Wachtstein.”
“What about you? Were you a princess in a castle?”
“No. My father was a simple soldier.”
“I thought he was a general.”
“He was.”
“Generals are not simple soldiers.”
“What does Colonel Mattingly have in mind for me?” she said, changing the subject.
“I’m crushed. I’ve been lying here thinking, ‘Jimmy Boy, here you are sitting with a princess in her see-through underwear. You’re a long way from the ol’ F-Bar-Z.’ And now you tell all you are is an Army brat.”
“You’re making me blush.”
“I like it when you blush.”
“Even though I didn’t understand half of what you said.”
“The see-through underwear part?”
“What’s the F-Bar-Z?”
“The name of the ranch, outside Midland, Texas.”
“An ‘Army brat’?”
“An officer’s daughter. There were a lot of them around A&M.”
“And what’s A&M?”
“My university. Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University.”
“If it makes you feel any better, when I married Karl, I became a Baronin, a baroness.”
“So, at least, here I am, sitting around with a baroness in her see-through underwear.”
She shook her head. But she smiled as she touched her fingertips to his face.
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?” she then said, pulling back her hand.
“Tell you what?”
“What Colonel Mattingly is going to do with me.”
“All I can do is guess, Baroness. I think the government, my government, is grateful for what your father and the count tried to do with Hitler, and are going to try somehow to show that gratitude. Let you go to the States. Something like that.”