In Shining Armor

by Blair Babylon

  Flicka von Hannover

  It took me a while,

  but I finally figured it out.

  I can’t believe I was so stupid.

  When Flicka and Dieter reached the desk at passport control, the man reached through the hole at the bottom of the scratched bulletproof plastic and said in French, “Passports, please.”

  Flicka hung onto Dieter’s hand and idly watched the people around them. Considering the potential for chaos, the crowd was rather orderly.

  Dieter slid the two red booklets through the slot.

  The man sucked on his tobacco-stained teeth. He opened one of the booklets and scrutinized Dieter, looking at the passport’s photo and back to him. He flipped through the booklet and squinted at the pages. His glasses slid down his little nose to his pudgy cheeks, and his frown looked like he might need stronger reading glasses.

  Flicka glanced at Dieter’s passport booklet as the guy flipped it. The pages in the rest of it were blank with no stamps at all, just a pristine passport that was several years old.

  Weird. The one he’d given her had a few stamps.

  The man frowned as he rubbed the book on a scanner. “New passport, yes?”

  “Yes,” Dieter said.

  “There is no record of you ever traveling before.”

  Dieter shrugged. “It’s my first time out of Europe.”

  Switzerland was a signatory of the Schengen treaty, so Dieter could have traveled within the EU for the last few years without ever showing a passport. Even if an official had asked, he wouldn’t have needed more than a Swiss identity card. Most of the time, travel between Schengen countries wasn’t tracked or checked at all. That’s how they’d gotten from Switzerland to France so easily by train.

  The guy raised one eyebrow at him. “Well, hope you have a nice time in the United States.”

  Dieter nodded. “Thank you.”

  The guy shook his head and looked at the other passport, Flicka’s. He smiled at her when he rifled the pages. “Now you have traveled.”

  “A little to the States, not too much.” She could have recited all the dates if he’d asked.

  “You were born in Lucerne?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what astrological sign are you?”

  “Taurus.” She smiled at him and leaned toward the glass a little. “What’s your sign?”

  The officer smiled back. “I’m a Taurus, too.”

  She smiled larger and blinked at him, indicating friendship and camaraderie. “I should have guessed that.”

  The man slid the passports back to them. “Have a good trip.”

  That kind of thing always worked.

  Flicka waved as Dieter collected the passports. They walked into the terminal.

  Dieter said, “I really should hire you for black ops.”

  “Oh, you would not believe how very calm and controlled I am, even when I am about to lose my mind,” she said, keeping her voice light.

  He looked sharply down at her as they threaded through the crowd toward the upstairs area with the gates.

  At the gate area, the whole pitched ceiling was made out of glass. Planes circled and clouds scudded in the azure, Parisian sky.

  Flicka had always loved the sky in Paris. Even when it was raining, the clouds roiled over the gorgeous architecture and hills. When the sky was as blue as now, her whole world lifted.

  They found seats near their gate.

  The enormous plane waited outside the glass walls, and a long tunnel snaked out to it. The gate agent, a tiny woman wearing a dark blue hijab scarf to match her British Airways uniform, was typing on her terminal as the time to board the flight neared.

  Dieter asked, “Is there a problem?”

  Flicka paused because once she broached this subject, there was no going back. She swallowed hard and said, “That’s a real passport, isn’t it?”

  “I told you it was,” he said.

  “You said that it was someone you knew through Rogue Security.”

  Dieter looked down between his knees, bracing his forearms on his thighs. He had the grace to not answer with another lie.

  “Dieter, whose passport is it?”

  He looked around at the crowd around them. “Gretchen, my ex-wife. Alina’s mother.”

  “You married a woman who looks almost exactly like me?” She flipped the passport open to the front page, showing him the other woman’s birthdate because Flicka didn’t need to damn well look at it. “And she is six months younger than I am when my stupid age upset you so much, and you married her within a few months of leaving me?” The thin passport shook in her hand. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “I never understood why you dropped me like a damn rock and married someone else right away.”

  He reached over and tried to take her fingers in his.

  She snatched her hand back. “Don’t touch me.”

  He nodded and folded his hands together around the other passport. “I left London because I thought it was the right thing to do, but leaving you nearly destroyed me. I couldn’t even drink it out with Wulfram, because what could I say? That I had been sleeping with his younger sister, betraying his trust when I was supposed to keep her safe from men exactly like me? That I was out of my mind because I’d left you when I shouldn’t have?”

  Flicka heard that he shouldn’t have left her and held tight to it, even though the rest of his speech made her want to shove his ex-wife’s passport right down his lying throat.

  He said, “I was drunk in a bar one night. I saw a woman. I knew she wasn’t you. If you’d been there, I would have been on my knees in front of everyone begging your forgiveness, but I knew she was just some woman who looked uncannily like you.”

  “Yeah.” Flicka stared at the picture of the woman’s face that so freakishly closely resembled her own. “No wonder Alina called me ‘Mama.’”

  “I almost walked out the door when she did that.” Dieter’s head drooped so that he wasn’t looking at her, and he stared at the other Swiss passport still in his hands. “I picked Gretchen up and took her to a hotel, and the condom broke, or else I was so drunk that I didn’t put it on right. I don’t know. We were both drunk as shit. But it broke. We both knew it the next day. I offered to get her a morning-after pill, but she said no, she was on birth control pills anyway. She called me a couple of weeks later, saying that the pregnancy test was positive.” He sucked in a deep breath. “I took responsibility. We met a few times after that, and I offered to marry her and try to do the right thing for the baby.”

  Flicka stared at the birthdate on that damn passport. “What would you have done if I had gotten pregnant?”

  “Married you, right away.”

  Flicka sat back in her seat. “You couldn’t have. There’s a month-long waiting period in all of the UK.”

  “Not in Gibraltar,” he said. “You register and get a license, and it’s valid right away. You just have to stay the night before or after in a hotel.”

  “You found that out because of Gretchen,” she said.

  “I met Gretchen in Chicago. We eloped to Las Vegas. I researched wedding laws in the UK after we forgot the condom that one time.”

  “You wouldn’t have married me,” she said, shaking her head. “You couldn’t wait to leave London. You didn’t even take any of your clothes from our flat. You walked away with nothing and boarded a flight to Chicago at Heathrow.”

  A woman sat in the seat on the other side of Dieter, juggling her handbag and a rollaboard suitcase.

  Flicka said, “A few months later, I packed your clothes and gave them to charity. I thought I was going to die while I did it.”

  Dieter leaned toward Flicka. “I would have begged you on my knees to marry me if you’d gotten pregnant,” he whispered, his jaw clenched. “And not just to save my own life after Wulfram found out.”

  She snorted, which was all the laughter she could manage through her chest that was ti
ght with wanting to sob. “Yeah, he would have shot you.”

  “Bare hands,” Dieter said, his voice very low. “Not a gun. He would have beat me to death with his fists, and I would have let him because I would have deserved it, except that would have meant leaving you alone. I would never have done that.”

  Flicka couldn’t answer because her throat was closed up, but she didn’t believe him.

  He had left her alone in London.

  Completely, utterly alone.

  Dieter looked up and surveyed the crowd around them. He whispered to Flicka, “We should get on the plane now.”

  “But they’re not boarding yet.”

  A line had formed by the ticket counter, and people were marching onto the aerobridge and toward the plane.

  Dieter was already standing up beside her. He slung the duffel bag containing their few clothes and her diamond tiara over his shoulder and held out his hand to her. “We need to go now.”

  She ignored his hand and stood up, lifting her chin and letting her eyes suck in her tears in the dry, air-conditioned terminal. “Fine.”

  He pushed through the crowd, insinuating himself into the business-class line, and opened a space for Flicka to step in front of him.

  She did, but only for expediency’s sake.

  Behind her, he whispered near her ear, “A security guard saw me and looked at his tablet. He’s conferring with another official right now. They’re by the help desk.”

  Flicka knew better than to look that direction. “Why would they be after you?”

  “Quentin Sault saw me in the van. They know you’re with me.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Get ready to move, but let’s try to get on the plane.”

  “Right.”

  “If they arrest me, get on the plane. Go to Nevada. Get a burner phone and call Wulfram.”

  “Okay.”

  “Take the duffel bag, just in case they come over here. Keep it.”

  Flicka felt the bag nudge her arm, and she arranged the strap of the light duffel on her shoulder.

  Dieter’s fingers wound in hers, and she let him because she hurt so much and his hand helped.

  Seeking comfort in his touch was ridiculous because he was the one who had sliced her open, at least metaphorically.

  He moved closer to her, not touching her, but his warmth spread through the thin cloth of her blouse and over her back.

  “I didn’t want to trap you. You were so young—”

  She waved Gretchen’s red passport over her shoulder without looking back. “You don’t get to use that excuse anymore.”

  The line moved ahead of her, and Flicka handed her ticket to the agent. The agent scanned the ticket and handed it back. “Thank you for flying British Airways.”

  Flicka trotted ahead of Dieter, the duffel bag banging her hip, and heard the agent say the same thing again. When she risked a look back, Dieter was jogging down the aerobridge to catch up to her.

  When he caught up to where she was waiting to enter the plane, she said, “Don’t sit near me. I don’t want to talk to you right now. I need to think.”

  “I have to.”

  “What?”

  “They assign your seat. It’s printed right here on the ticket.” He showed her where her ticket was marked 53A and his read 53B.

  She scowled at the pieces of paper. “Well, don’t talk to me. I don’t even want to talk to you right now.”

  A Proposal at Thirty Thousand Feet

  Flicka von Hannover

  Dieter isn’t impulsive like that.

  It was weird.

  They entered the plane, and an attendant looked at their tickets and directed them to their assigned seats.

  The seats were pressed next to each other like theater seats, except that she was supposed to spend nine or ten hours cooped up in that chair, not just one symphony.

  Flicka considered scaling the side of the airplane and crawling on the ceiling to escape the many other passengers that crowded the aisle behind them.

  Instead, she shoved the duffel in one of the overhead bins and sat in the 53A seat, which was right next to the window. She surmised that she looked as if she were accustomed to commercial travel, so casually stuffing her bag in the bin up there. She fit right in.

  The airplane was much wider than any plane she had ever flown on before, with seats squeezed in with two each near the walls, and then a block of seats that was seven chairs across running down the center of the plane. The thought of sitting in one of those center seats gave her disagreeable chills.

  A small tablet embedded in the back of the seat in front of her showed the outline of an airplane superimposed on a map of Europe.

  Good. At least she would have something to look at while she was ignoring Dieter and regaining her equilibrium.

  Dieter fell into the seat beside her. “You have to put on your seatbelt.”

  She squinted at him. “My what?”

  “Seatbelt. The seats on private planes have them, but they’re usually tucked down in the corners. On public planes, you have to wear them. The flight attendants will come around and check to make sure you’re wearing it.”

  Flicka strapped herself in with the ineffective seatbelt and buckle. If they wanted passengers to be safe, why didn’t they use a three-point harness like she’d seen in the galley area for the flight attendants?

  She ignored Dieter while the rest of the passengers boarded and the plane rolled away from the gate.

  As they took off, the engines screamed through the plane because they were just outside the fuselage, bolted to the wings right there, instead of tacked onto the tail like a proper Gulfstream or a decent Lear jet.

  When she sneaked a peek at Dieter, his head was lying back against the seat, and his eyes were closed.

  Damn him. Her mind roiled too much to even conceive of sleeping.

  She flipped through a magazine and read an article, something about steakhouses in the Midwestern US. The little screen in the back of the seat in front of her showed a tiny plane clearing the coast of France to fly over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The plane leveled out, and her ears popped in her head.

  Dieter opened his eyes. “Can we talk?”

  “I can’t stop you.”

  He took her fingers in his again. She let him because her heart hurt so much, and holding his hand helped.

  Dieter leaned toward her shoulder and whispered, “I never stopped missing you. I thought about you every day.”

  “You married someone else.”

  “She was pregnant with my child. Because I married her, when she left, it was easy for me to get full custody of Alina. I can’t defend myself except to say that my child is non-negotiable.”

  “Well, of course not. Wulfie would have done anything for me when I was little.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But it’s vulgar to say that you missed me. You left me alone in London.” She stared straight at the backs of the heads and seats of the people sitting in front of her.

  Down the aisle, the flight attendants jiggled their steel cart into the aisle and began asking people for drink orders.

  “I thought about you all the time, Flicka,” he whispered near her shoulder. Her real name on his lips jarred her. “When you first kissed me, it was like you as a woman walked in the door. Everything changed. You changed. I changed. You were everything to me. You still are.”

  “You never said that,” she said, “and I don’t believe it.”

  “I didn’t want you to be trapped with me.”

  “But you married her. You trapped her. Just not me.”

  “She was pregnant, and I wanted to do the right thing for the child.”

  Flicka whispered back to him, lest someone hear her over the roar of the airplane engines just outside the walls. “So I should have gotten pregnant,” her voice was a little stupidly squeaky, “and then you wouldn’t have left me. Because I was the responsible one, because I didn’t let myself fall pregnan
t, because I managed our relationship and everything else and didn’t get drunk off my ass and get knocked up, you left me, and you married her.”

  His fingers firmed around hers. “That’s not how I meant it to happen.”

  “But that is how it happened. That is exactly how it happened. You married her, and you didn’t marry me.”

  “Did you want to marry me?” he asked.

  She wouldn’t burst into tears on an airplane filled with hundreds of people. She wouldn’t. She was 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, etc. She needed to maintain her dignity and decorum. Wulfie had raised her to be more refined than that.

  A hot thing dripped down her face.

  Dieter’s gray eyes widened, and his lips opened. He whispered, “Flicka?”

  She sucked in a shuddering breath and removed her fingers from his. “It doesn’t matter. It was over between us a long time ago.”

  “You would have married me?” he asked.

  “You never asked,” she told him, trying to turn her hurt to anger. It was easier to do than she had thought.

  “Durchlauchtig—” His parted lips made him look far too surprised that an infatuated twenty-one-year-old would have accepted a marriage proposal.

  “It doesn’t matter. You never asked. It’s a life that didn’t happen.”

  She turned and looked out the window at the sun sparkling off the ocean waves far below the plane.

  Dieter’s seatbelt clicked beside her.

  He shifted in his seat, and he reached over to take her hand again.

  She didn’t look at him.

  He tugged her hand, turning her.

  Flicka acquiesced because she didn’t want to make a scene on an airplane.

  He was kneeling on one knee out in the aisle and reaching across his seat for her hand.

  She whispered, “What the hell are you doing? You’re not impulsive. You would never do this. What is wrong with you?”

  “Durchlauchtig, I was wrong to leave while we were in London. It was the most stupid mistake I have ever made in my life. Will you marry me?”