In Shining Armor

by Blair Babylon

  The horror of Flicka threatening suicide faded, leaving Dieter with the realization that he was holding her tightly against his chest, his arms wrapped around her. Her arms clutched his neck, and her soft lips were very near his.

  Flicka looked back and forth between his eyes.

  He didn’t move.

  She stretched her neck, and her arms tightened around his shoulders.

  The gulf of inches between their lips narrowed.

  Dieter bent and took her mouth with his. The warm, sweet taste of her lips was everything he remembered, and her body curving against his jolted a year’s worth of memories through his mind.

  That kiss was his life flashing before his eyes as he lay dying, the moments of passion and nights lying in her arms. It was fire and life and the sweetness of desire as his lips caressed hers.

  He knew she needed comfort, so he backed off, reluctantly.

  Flicka settled against his side, laying her head on his shoulder.

  Dieter surveyed the train car, noting the other passengers and lack of threat. Only a few other businessmen were taking a Sunday afternoon train to Paris for early Monday meetings.

  He cradled Flicka, treasuring the feel of her in his arms once again.

  A few minutes later, she was dozing as he held her, just like a few years ago.

  This didn’t mean anything, he told himself. Adrenaline was a potent aphrodisiac. When they got to Paris, Flicka might not want to continue this. She might think that kiss was a mistake, a moment of weakness, or him taking advantage.

  But for those moments, he had her in his arms again, so he would savor them.

  A few minutes later, a customs inspector ambled through the speeding train, glanced at Dieter’s backpack that held illegal weapons and millions of dollars in diamonds, and passed by.

  Dieter rested his cheek against Flicka’s forehead and maintained operational security, but they were on a high-speed, maglev train en route from Geneva to Paris. The chance of anything happening on the train was slim.

  He smiled as Flicka slept in his arms.

  When Dieter Met Flicka

  Dieter Schwarz

  Men shouldn’t be attracted to children,

  and I wasn’t attracted to Flicka when she was a little girl.

  Not until she grew up.

  The first time Dieter Schwarz met Flicka von Hannover, he and Wulfram Hannover had been hanging out in the Swiss Army barracks together for a few months.

  On weekends and off-duty weeks, Wulfram went home.

  Dieter never left the barracks overnight.

  Wulf noticed and invited Dieter to his house for the weekend.

  When they arrived at his huge house near the town of Rolle, laughing and carrying cases of beer, a hyper little ten-year-old dust mop flung itself at them, battering their legs and torsos and yipping with glee.

  Dieter jumped back, grabbing the case of beer to his chest so he wouldn’t drop it and smash the fluffy thing. “What the hell is that?”

  Wulf laughed, which made Dieter jump back even farther, and he swooped the whirling dervish up in his arms. “This is just my sister, Flicka.”

  “You didn’t say you had a sister.”

  “I invited you to my house,” Wulf said, his voice already deep at twenty years old. “My sister lives at my house, at least on weekends. During the week, she lives at Le Rosey School, just a few miles away. I pick her up for weekends.”

  “Not often enough, Wulfie!” the child barked.

  “But you invited me to your house when she’s here,” Dieter said. His back bumped the wall beside the front door.

  “Yes, but surely Flicka can still come over. We don’t get sloppy drunk, usually. We’re not that bad an influence.”

  “I’m just some guy.” Dieter’s voice dropped in anger. “You don’t know who the hell I am.”

  “Sure I do,” Wulf said. “We’ve known each other for six months.”

  “I could be anybody,” Dieter growled. “I could be a goddamn pedophile who wants to do terrible things to her. I could be a damned Russian trafficker who would take her in the middle of the night and sell her to some jackass who turns food into shit and little girls into corpses.”

  Wulf set Flicka on her feet. “Go to the kitchen. Tell Frau Keller that I said you may have ice cream before supper.”

  The child scampered off, her eerily green eyes wide on her small face.

  Wulf had watched her go and turned to Dieter. “What is this about?”

  “You can’t just bring strangers into your house and around a child, Wulfram! It’s unsafe. It’s not proper operational protocols. It’s just a damned bad idea!”

  “You’re not a pedophile, Dieter.”

  “You don’t know what’s going on in my head. You never know what’s going on in people’s heads until it’s way too damn late.”

  “You have terrible taste in women, Dieter, but you like psychopaths, not children.”

  Shudders ran through Dieter. “There’s no way you could know that.”

  “It’s in your body language. It’s in who you look at and how you respond when they look at you. It’s in the fact that, when Flicka ran out here, you nearly crawled up the wall and clung to the chandelier rather than let her touch you. I would have other hypotheses as to why—”

  “Don’t. They’re all wrong,” Dieter said.

  “—but the chances of you being a pedophile are between infinitesimal and nonexistent.”

  “You have to be careful,” Dieter said. “You can’t just invite men to your home when she’s here. The world is a sordid, terrible place. Some men are disgusting and will attack anything. You never know until it’s too late.”

  “Right,” Wulf said. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

  Dieter’s chest hurt. Breathing hurt. “Don’t take any chances with her. Can you imagine if something happened to her, too?”

  Wulf’s voice was low, almost gentle, “If I had had the slightest question about you, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “You should have questions about everyone,” Dieter said, “absolutely everyone.”

  “That sounds like experience talking.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “I promise that I will leave no one alone with my sister, even you.”

  “She’s a pretty little girl, right? Other men will notice that.”

  Wulf looked at the chandelier above them. “I don’t think of her that way. You know how we think of other men’s bodies as—utilitarian? Men might as well be silver coffee-can robots for all we care. It’s kind of like that. Flicka is like a puppy to me. I react to her like I would an excitable dog. I’m careful about the paws so I don’t get stomped in the groin, but I don’t want to have sex with it.”

  Dieter nodded. “Okay. Just be careful. The world is a terrible place, Wulfram.”

  “Come,” Wulf said. “Herr and Frau Keller will doubtlessly call us to supper soon. All right?”

  Dieter scrubbed his face with his palms. “All right.”

  They ate supper, and effervescent little Flicka charmed him with her funny gossip about her boarding school.

  Dieter recognized several of the surnames of the children she went to boarding school with, and he made a note to tell Wulfram about them sometime that Flicka would not be sent to the kitchen for ice cream before supper.

  After supper, they adjourned to the television room where Frau and Herr Keller popped by every few moments, Dieter was pleased to see, and they watched a movie that wasn’t too scary for Flicka to sit up and watch.

  At first, she crawled all over her brother, sitting on his lap and rubbing his neck from behind the couch. Every time Frau or Herr Keller dropped in, she scampered over to see what they had brought.

  Seriously, at ten years old, Flicka was a blond Pekinese puppy scurrying around the floor.

  That night, Flicka ended up sound asleep over both their laps while they watched a late movie.

  Her blond head lay
on Wulf’s knees. She drooled in her sleep, making a wet spot that spread down Wulf’s knee toward his ankle.

  Which meant that her feet were in Dieter’s lap.

  She dreamed and kicked him in the nuts.

  Hard.

  She was only around on weekends and holidays when she was little, of course, because she went to boarding school.

  Over the months and years that Dieter spent first as a guest at Wulfram’s house and then as his Head of Security, Flicka grew from a Pekinese mop to a yellow Labrador pup, all paws and elbows and knees and hard, whacking tail.

  Dieter developed a flinch whenever that daffy child threw herself at him, turning to protect his testicles with his thigh, lest one of her sharp, bony body parts nail him yet again.

  When she was sleepy, though, she was cuddly as a kitten, and Dieter could let his guard down as she snuggled between the two of them on the couch as they talked and watched the television.

  He’d nicknamed her Durchlauchtig within those first few months, a royal style higher than the joke name that he called her brother, Durchlaucht.

  Durchlaucht meant Serene Highness and was a gender-neutral term for a high-ranking royal such as a prince. In Dieter’s mouth, it was sarcastic as hell because Dieter was Wulf’s superior in the Swiss army.

  Durchlauchtig meant Most Serene Highness, a term for an anointed sovereign. Flicka had known immediately that her nickname outranked Wulfram’s, and her haughty grin had kept Dieter and Wulf amused for years.

  One time, she’d sidled up to him and asked, “You know it’s not really Durchlauchtig, right? That’s the adjective.” Her pointy, little chin popped up again. “You may call me Durchlauchtigste.”

  Dieter frowned. “That’s too long of a word.”

  “It’s funny. A native German speaker should have known that.”

  “I speak Alemannic.”

  “It’s the same thing as far as that word is concerned.”

  Jesus Christ, one wrongly conjugated word had given him away. “I like Durchlauchtig. I’m going to call you Durchlauchtig, not Durchlauchtigste. I don’t like the sound of it.”

  The child Flicka grinned at him. “You speak German funny sometimes.”

  “I’m Swiss! And it’s not ‘funny.’ It’s perfectly standard Swiss German.”

  Her grin didn’t drop. “If you say so, but you don’t sound like the housekeepers at Le Rosey, either.”

  Even as a tween, Flicka still sometimes flopped over in her sleep when they were sitting on the couch and jammed an elbow or a knee into Dieter’s crotch, sometimes hard enough to make him run for the bathroom to puke.

  Wulf was quicker to protect himself from her. More experience, he assured Dieter.

  Dieter got better at the duck and cover maneuver.

  Even his army Krav Maga instructor noticed his quicker reaction times and reflexes to kicks and thrown elbows.

  Dieter became kind of an honorary uncle to Flicka, and they maintained that affectionate, entirely platonic relationship for years.

  But not forever.

  Freedom

  Flicka von Hannover

  Dieter saved my life that day.

  Flicka von Hannover was sixteen years old, beautiful, and loose on the streets of London.

  Her Swiss boarding school, Le Rosey, was on summer break, so after she had built a school in Africa by amateurishly pounding nails into boards and tutored students in Indonesia so that she wouldn’t be a total rich brat all her life, Flicka had flown to England to stay with her brother for a few weeks before the new term started.

  Just a few weeks before she went back to the high fences and locked dorms of Le Rosey.

  She watched through the bulletproof glass of the car that drove her from Kensington Palace to a friend’s house, watching people out there.

  People crowded the sidewalks of Kensington High Street as the car bumped along in gridlock traffic. One of the palace’s drivers was chauffeuring her that day, not Dieter or one of Wulf’s couple of other guys.

  The tires crunched asphalt as the car stopped.

  Flicka craned her neck, looking over the front seat and out the windshield.

  Cars were stopped ahead, lining the road into the distance.

  On the sidewalks, people bustled as they walked to the shops farther down or into Kensington Gardens.

  Just a few more weeks before she would be locked on the grounds of Le Rosey again.

  But here she was in London.

  Her friend Josephine was staying with her cousins just a few blocks down. Josephine Alexandrovna was eight years older than Flicka, but they’d hit it off when Flicka was little and stayed friends now that Josephine was twenty-four. Flicka knew right where they lived.

  Flicka stared out the front windshield again at the lines of cars and lorries that stretched way down the street.

  She tapped the driver on the shoulder. “It’s faster to walk. Thanks anyway.”

  The driver wrenched around in her seat. “Hey! You can’t walk! Security!”

  But Flicka had already hopped out of the car and slammed the door on the driver’s protests. She darted through the stopped cars to the sidewalk.

  Freedom!

  Flicka walked down the sidewalk, swinging her purse, just like a normal person.

  The trees of Kensington Gardens beyond the sidewalk and fence cast long shadows over the sidewalk, cooling her. The summer sun warmed her skin when she walked through spots of sunshine.

  She could go for a damn walk if she wanted to. Half the people on the sidewalk were teenagers like her! It was perfectly safe or else everyone would have bodyguards.

  Besides, the plan had been to drive her over to Josephine’s. Anybody who was planning anything nefarious would be waiting at the proverbial ends of the diamond, the origin of the journey and destination.

  The car could have taken any number of routes between the two points. No one would have expected her to walk.

  From an operational security standpoint, walking was an excellent choice.

  Besides, she had done it before. Ditching her security was practically a hobby for Flicka.

  Sometimes, she just wanted to walk the Earth and see the world.

  People bobbled into her just like everyone else. The Brits apologized, and the Canadians, too. Some other people didn’t. Flicka nodded to most, smiling tightly like a British person, and she talked to some of them.

  Some of them had Northern British accents, which was really interesting to listen to. At school, Master Hamilton would fail her if she had spoken with such a substandard accent in his class, so she listened closely to the people ahead of her, whose accent was so Northern that they might be Scottish.

  Flicka was so intent on listening to their fascinating maybe-Scottish accent—Aye, lassie, that’s a wee bit o’luck—that she didn’t see three men turn in the crowd to follow her.

  The Scots merged into the crowd ahead of Flicka, and she couldn’t hear them anymore.

  No matter.

  She swung her purse a little, playing with it, while she trotted toward the corner of Kensington High Street and De Vere Gardens, where Josephine’s family had a flat among the gorgeous period buildings there. They had bought several flats and integrated them so that they had a whole floor to themselves.

  She was just about to step off the sidewalk at the corner when two men grabbed her elbows. “Hey!”

  A dirty, white car pulled up right in front of her, blocking that way. The back door opened.

  She struggled, trying to get away.

  The man growled, “In,” and shoved her toward the door.

  Flicka fought them, but they were so strong that she could barely wiggle. She pushed with her feet and tried to sit down on the sidewalk, but the men lifted her by her arms.

  The men tossed her inside. Flicka landed on her hands and knees in the back seat of the dirty, white car.

  Her little purse tumbled off her wrist. The upholstery inside was ripped, and sandwich wrappers rattled
on the floor.

  She kicked backward, trying to catch one of them and at least hurt them.

  Her thin sandals probably wouldn’t do a damn thing. Damn it, why did she have to be such a pretty-ballerina princess? She should have cultivated an edgy persona so that she could wear combat boots and kick the shit out of these assholes.

  Her foot connected with somebody.

  A heavy hand swatted her leg to the side, banging it on the door frame.

  She flipped over on her back and started kicking like she was trying to stomp out a fire.

  The angry man sneered and slapped at her feet, trying to close the door. His accomplice was already running around to the passenger side.

  Flicka kicked harder.

  The angry man flew sideways, his mouth an O as he fell.

  Dieter replaced him, his gray eyes slitted in rage. He shoved the car door aside and reached in, grabbing her ankle and yanking her out.

  She pushed off the car seat and flipped toward him, landing in his arms.

  Dieter slung her legs around so that he carried her against his broad chest and sprinted into the park of Kensington Gardens.

  Flicka clung to his neck and watched over his rounded shoulder.

  The dirty car peeled out and drove into the barely moving traffic. Other cars honked and ran up on the sidewalk, trying to get away from it. The kidnappers turned across two lanes and raced down the avenue of De Vere Gardens.

  “It’s okay,” she told Dieter, breathless from terror. “They drove away. They’re not chasing us.”

  He ran farther with Flicka in his arms and turned down another sidewalk. Trees blocked their view of High Street.

  Dieter jogged to a stop and set Flicka on her feet.

  He grabbed her shoulders and shouted at her, frantic, “You must not run away from the drivers. You must not ditch your security! Flicka, they got you this time!”

  “I’m sorry!” She stupidly burst into tears. “I’m sorry! I just wanted to walk because traffic was so bad—”

  Dieter lunged forward and wrapped his arms around her, clutching her to his body. “Durchlauchtig, promise me that you won’t ever do this again. Never, ever again.”