In A Faraway Land (Runaway Princess: Flicka, Book 3)

by Blair Babylon

  At the Texas Hold’em table, Dieter asked, “Another beer?”

  His hoard of chips had grown, Flicka noticed, and there were definitely more there than they had scraped together that morning. He even had a small stack of black chips, which were worth one hundred dollars each.

  She looked back at the Swiss guy Bastien who was sitting at the Five-Card Stud table, just to point him out to Dieter because it was kind of weird that another Swiss guy was sitting just five tables away, but his back was toward them.

  “I’ll bring that beer right away,” she told Dieter.

  Counting Cards

  Dieter Schwarz

  I have a specialized set of skills.

  No, not those.

  Other ones.

  Ones that don’t involve killing people.

  Slot machines jangled and flashed around the cluster of poker tables. People pushed and shoved through the crowds, yelling right behind him. Spilled liquor was turning rancid in the carpeting. A row of red and blue lights behind the blackjack dealer ran a wave left to right and blinked three times before it started over again.

  Wulfram could count cards at blackjack.

  Flicka could count cards at blackjack.

  Though Dieter had understood the concept quickly enough the night before when Flicka had shuffled one deck of cards with her dainty fingers and dealt hand after hand, the casino was using a tall stack of at least eight decks of cards. No matter how much he kept track, the cards were too randomized and evenly distributed to allow him to increase or decrease his bets near the end of a shoe.

  And there was no end of each shoe. When about half the cards were played, the dealer shoved the whole stack in a huge mechanical shuffler, and the whole count started over again from zero.

  Impossible.

  He was leaking money, and they didn’t have enough money for him to lose a little every day at the tables while he guarded Flicka at work.

  Dieter moved to a Texas Hold’em poker table so he could read the other players’ body language instead of trying to keep a running total of the value of the played cards.

  At the Texas Hold’em table, the other poker players thought they were being subtle, but Dieter was practiced at finding the one guy in the crowd who was a little too jumpy to be normal. His eagle eye could pick a jackal out at five hundred yards.

  Sitting right across the table from a group of people who were trying to keep secrets from him almost wasn’t sporting.

  Almost.

  When the dealer flipped the river card and one of the other players nearly crawled up on the back of his chair and flapped his arms, Dieter knew the guy must have good cards in his hand, making a full house or straight flush.

  He folded.

  However, when another guy got nervous-happy and kept checking his cards while he was half-hunched in the chair, he was obviously bluffing. Dieter raised and re-raised until the pain became intolerable for the bluffer, and he folded. Dieter raked in that pot.

  Dieter went home almost a thousand dollars richer than when he’d walked in.

  And he was going home to Flicka and Alina, and he thought he could die happy right there on the rug in the middle of the living room, except that it would leave the two of them alone.

  He would never leave them vulnerable. He might not be a mathematical genius like Wulfram or a criminal financier like his father, but Dieter was a hell of a bodyguard.

  He would keep them both safe.

  The Cure For All Ills

  Flicka von Hannover

  Whiskey.

  The answer is always whiskey.

  That morning while Flicka was at work, the free clinic called and left a message detailing Flicka’s clean bill of health, the phone number of a counseling hotline, and reminding her about the big bowl of condoms right beside their front door, where she could just stick her head in and grab a handful any time she wanted.

  When they got home that night, Flicka slammed a bottle of Irish whiskey in the center of the small dining table.

  A few feet away in the living room, Dieter and Alina jumped. The startled toddler started crying, and Dieter whisked her up in his arms and over his shoulder, where she clutched his neck with her chubby arms and subsided to hiccups.

  Flicka held up her hands. “Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.”

  “She’s fine. Teaches character.” He patted the baby’s back and jutted his chin toward the table in the little dining area. “Whiskey?”

  “Yep,” Flicka said. “As far as I’m concerned, whiskey is the cure for all ills. Mix it with lemon and honey for a cold. Put a little on a cotton ball for a toothache.”

  Dieter raised one dark blond eyebrow at her while he patted Alina’s back. “Did you learn that from the nurse at that boarding school you went to?”

  Flicka ignored him. “And when something scares you, tie one on and face your fears. It’s liquid courage.”

  Dieter paused for a moment, patting Alina’s back. The toddler had forgotten that she had been scared and was running her palm over the short, velvety hair on the back of Dieter’s head. He said, without cracking even the slightest smile, “Alina needs her supper before I tuck her into bed. Give me twenty minutes.”

  Flicka unpacked the food she had brought home along with the whiskey bottle, and Dieter did an impressive job of getting Alina to eat a decent but quick supper in the correct proportions. Afterward, splashes and giggling echoed down the short staircase, indicating he bathed her, brushed her teeth, and tucked her into bed. He stepped down the stairs twenty-three minutes later, his shirt sleeves still rolled up to his elbows.

  The faint scent of baby shampoo drifted through the air.

  Flicka raised her small glass of diluted whiskey. “I started without you.”

  The whiskey was sweet, almost honey-like, in her mouth.

  “I’ll catch up. Pour me a strong one.” This time, he grinned. The smile reached his gray eyes, turning them almost silvery.

  Flicka tipped the bottle over the other glass and filled it. “I filched it from the bartender. He hides the good stuff, takes some, and then waters down what’s left. I rescued this bottle before he committed the abomination.”

  Dieter sipped some of the whiskey, and his eyes lit up. “This is nice. I like smooth whiskeys.”

  “It’s a Bushmills 10 Single Malt. Highly underrated.”

  He sucked a larger sip.

  “Be careful,” she told him. “It’s considered ‘dangerously drinkable,’ and one of us shouldn’t be smashed.”

  He turned the glass in the light emanating from the overhead fixture. Beams glimmered through the amber whiskey. “How smashed are you planning to get?”

  “As smashed as it takes.”

  He shook his head a little, and his lips thinned. “You know I have a thing about people being too smashed.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I meant, you. I have a thing about women being too smashed.”

  Flicka tossed the whiskey into her mouth and swallowed it down. The fumes in her nose smelled almost like yellow wildflowers. “Right now, I hereby consent to anything. Do whatever you want to me. Make me get over this.”

  He shook his head. “Being shagged while you’re passed-out drunk isn’t going to help you.”

  “Might help that case of half-mast you’ve been walking around with.”

  He smiled a little more. “No one has died from that yet.”

  “Come on, Lieblingwächter. Help me out, here.”

  “I’m not sleeping with you if you’re too far gone. Tell you what, if you’re that wasted, I’ll cuddle you and fix you that way.”

  She grinned. “Or you can roll me over and—”

  “—and make sure you don’t aspirate your own vomit and get pneumonia. I’ve never liked piss-drunk women, Durchlauchtig.”

  “Okay, fine. Point made. But maybe if I just loosen up a little—”

  “That would be acceptable.” He held out his glass to toast.

  Fli
cka clinked her glass against his, a toast to her impending drunkenness that would not get out of hand.

  She knocked back a few more, joking with Dieter about their upcoming “date night.”

  He sipped his whiskey, too, and he poured more into his glass. Flicka could see him holding it on his tongue for a few seconds before swallowing it down.

  “I’m walking a fine line, here. I don’t want to pressure you if you’re not up to this, if whiskey isn’t the magic potion.” He leaned forward, resting his arm on the table, and his voice dropped. His eyes turned that smoky gray that made Flicka think of stolen moments in the London night. “But I miss you. I want to touch you. I want to feel you move under me.”

  Flicka stared straight at him and knocked back another shot. One or two more, she figured, feeling how warm her stomach was, and she would be properly unthinking. Her body would take over, and her brain would shut the hell up. “Good.”

  Dieter sipped his, and he watched her.

  Flicka held her next shot and contemplated the inch of golden liquid swirling in the bottom of the juice glass. She said, “We never talked about what you said.”

  Dieter shrugged, holding his glass steady while his broad shoulders moved. “I’ve said a lot of stupid things.”

  “Was it stupid?” she asked.

  “Depends on what it was.”

  “That you loved me.” She stared at her next shot, contemplating it. “You said that you loved me when we lived in London.”

  “Yes, I said that.”

  “You never said it while we were there.”

  He reached across the cafe-size table, pried her fingers off the cool glass, and held her hand in his large, warm one. He said, “Yes, I loved you then. Yes, I was happy every moment I was near you. Yes, I missed you when we went our separate ways to university each day. Of course, I am in love with you now and every moment in between.”

  Though his mouth curved up in the smallest of smiles, his eyes didn’t waver from hers.

  Flicka nodded. “Okay.”

  “There was something that happened in London,” he said. “It’s private. It’s personal. But that thing happened, and if I’d stayed with you in London, you would have been in danger. Instead of protecting you, I would have put you in more danger. I didn’t want to leave.”

  “You could have told me,” she said. “You didn’t have to walk out like that.”

  “It was better that way,” he said.

  She looked away from his eyes and stared into the whiskey in front of her. “It wasn’t better for me.”

  Dieter sighed and released her hands. “You’re right.”

  She looked up. “What?”

  “I panicked that night.”

  He had been cold and practical, she remembered. He had merely said they should stop pretending that their relationship would work out and that he was leaving. “You didn’t look very panicked. You just said some things and left. You didn’t listen to me. You got on a plane and flew to America without me.”

  He nodded. “I was a special forces soldier. I’ve been pinned down in firefights and made suicidal runs at machine gun nests. I’ve rappelled out of helicopters into terrorist compounds to rescue Swiss citizens. I’ve swum underwater for miles, just sipping the air in my tank so it wouldn’t run out, through enemy territory to rescue people.”

  Flicka watched the small twitches in his brow and the way that his mouth had tightened at the corners. A lot was going on in there.

  Dieter drew a long breath. “Yes, after I saw who was at your cotillion that night, I panicked. My hands were shaking. My stomach was in knots. If they had recognized me, if they had known you were the love of my life and my soul, you would have been in danger.”

  Flicka’s heart stilled as if a beam of sunlight had found its way into her darkness. When you’re used to the dark, warmth and illumination are foreign, and their beauty seems alien. “Who was there?”

  He said, “They might have killed you that night on the dance floor, just to make a point. They might have kidnapped you and killed you slowly, to make an even greater point. It was too dangerous for you. It still is.”

  Her heart warred with what he was saying. Finally, there was a reason other than that she wasn’t good enough for him, that he had never loved her. “You didn’t say that.”

  “Maybe I should have said all this, but you might not have believed me. Maybe you would have convinced me that they wouldn’t care after all this time or that I could somehow keep you safe from them. And then they would have found out about us. And then they would have killed you. And then I would have made sure that I died, too, and taken as many of them with me as I could.” Something changed around his eyes, and the gray smoke within him turned to ghosts. “And maybe I wouldn’t have been a soldier anymore at that point. Maybe I wouldn’t have been a guardian of the mountains. Maybe I would have become something worse, and I would have done something terrible to hurt them the way they had hurt me. And the world would have been a worse place for it.”

  He looked up at her. “I love you. I have always loved you, and I love that you are making the world a better place with your schools and your work. I admire you. I didn’t make the world a better place. I made it worse, and I don’t want to be that man again. If they kill you, I will become that raging, rabid animal again, and the world will have lost you. It’s not worth it. The world cannot lose you and gain another angry, savage beast. It’s the opposite of what you’ve been doing all your life and everything you’ve planned. So I left. But it worked. I protected you from them. You’re still here. No matter how I hurt, no matter how I grieved for us, I knew you were safe from them.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” Flicka said, woozy from the whiskey. “You should have told me why.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve betrayed your brother three times, but two of those lies kept him alive. I betrayed you that one time, and it kept you alive, too. I lied to you, but you lived. Misinformation is a weapon, and I used it to shield you.”

  “You used that weapon against me,” Flicka clarified.

  “I’m a monster, but you need to be a monster to fight the monsters.” He stared at the trace of whiskey in the bottom of his glass and placed it on the table. “I’ve had too much of this.”

  “I don’t think so,” Flicka said, the whiskey making her brave. “I think you haven’t had enough.”

  “I think I have.”

  “You need to tell me the rest of it,” she said. “You need to tell me who they are and why.”

  “We’re away from them, here. If there’s any place you’re safe, it’s in the wilds of Las Vegas.”

  She stared right at him. “But you’ve been guarding Wulfram. You’ve been guarding him for years. They might kill him if they’re that dangerous and persistent.”

  Dieter shook his head. “Wulfram was a client. They wouldn’t have bothered him. They would come after a woman I loved.” He glanced up at Flicka. “They would come after my wife.”

  She flinched. “Then I guess Gretchen leaving you was for the best.”

  “I mean you,” he said. “I wanted to marry you when we were together in London. I looked at rings more than once. I still want to marry you. I want to get this damned divorce of yours finalized and take you to the courthouse the next day. I meant every word I said on that airplane. I want to be with you the rest of my life. I want children with you. I want to see my child growing in your body. I want to hold you in my arms every damn night for the rest of our lives, but I don’t want us to die next week, either. So we can’t be together. We can’t be married. We must not.”

  Flicka didn’t want to journey down that maudlin path again. She knew right where that one ended up: with her sobbing in London and vulnerable to any flatterer who promised to love her, and Dieter in Chicago with another woman.

  “So we have tonight,” she said. “We have tonight and a few more weeks.”

  He nodded, but he still gazed into the dregs of his whiskey.<
br />
  “I need you to keep me safe until I can file the paperwork to divorce Pierre.”

  Dieter’s head rose a little, and he puffed up around the chest and shoulders.

  She continued, “And I need you. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out a way to be together forever, but I have these weeks with you. When I was alone in London, I prayed for another pot of coffee in the morning with you, another evening of watching the soccer recaps, or another night in bed with you.”

  Dieter’s fingers gripped his glass more firmly, and he swallowed so hard that his head bobbed. When he glanced up at her, a glaze shone on his gray eyes.

  She said, “I love you, and if this is all the time we’ll have, let’s be together.”

  He patted his knee. “Come here.”

  That throatiness in his voice sounded almost like when he used to tell her to take her clothes off while he watched.

  Flicka drained the last of the whiskey in her glass and walked around the small table to him. Dieter spread his knees apart, and she sat on his leg.

  He asked, “All right so far?”

  She nodded, but even just sitting on his leg, her heart felt tight.

  “So, safe words,” Dieter said.

  Flicka laughed. “I’d forgotten about those.”

  “I hope you never forgot them in London.”

  Grinning, she said, “If I had, I would have been lying there, tied to the bed, shouting, ‘Lutefisk! Trombone! Proust!’ And you would have been so confused, you would have stopped.”

  He chuckled, and he ran the backs of his knuckles down her arm. Shivers erupted on Flicka’s skin, both the scared kind and the good kind. “So, what is your safeword now? Or do you want to keep your old one?”

  “Yes,” she said, “the old one. And I still remember yours.”

  Sitting on his leg as she was, Dieter’s eyes were just a bit below hers, and he looked up at her. His soft lips parted, and he said, “I remember it, too.”

  “Okay,” she said, mesmerized that she was somehow sitting on Dieter’s lap with one of his strong arms around her waist as if years had fallen away.