Once Upon a Time: Billionaires in Disguise: Flicka

by Blair Babylon

  “S’okay, Leiblingwächter,” she said and rolled off of him. “It’s fine. I never miss a pill. I’m clear in all the ways, too. It’s not a problem.”

  “Jesus, Flicka. You’re only twenty.”

  “And yet I’m responsible about birth control, and that’s why I’m on the pill.” She sat up. “Now quit worrying about it. Nothing’s going to happen.”

  Dieter did worry about it until he saw the little plastic-wrapped things show up in their bathroom wastebasket a few weeks later.

  He breathed a sigh of relief, but the thought had been planted.

  She shouldn’t have to worry about getting pregnant by someone like him.

  Dieter leaned against the wall of the Welfenlegion staff office in Wulf von Hannover’s house, replaying the best moments of his life when he had been with Flicka, but they were all stolen time.

  He should have left her alone. He shouldn’t have ever begun the affair, and he certainly shouldn’t have ended it like he had.

  Opposites Attract

  Flicka von Hannover

  Natural attraction is hard to ignore.

  Flicka and Rae Stone-von Hannover were working in Rae’s study office. Afternoon light slanted in the wide windows, drawing bright blocks on the thick carpeting. The cup of decaf coffee sitting next to Rae’s elbow steamed dark brew scent on its tiny warmer plate.

  Flicka had an afternoon glass of red wine by her elbow as she worked. Evaluating which tablecloth layers to include at Wulf and Rae’s reception and how they contrasted with which of the hotel’s china and crystal sets was making her head spin.

  Too many permutations.

  Part of her just wanted to throw some darts at the computer screen because backwoods Rae and insular Wulfram wouldn’t know the difference, but many people at their wedding would. Many guests would notice whether the china settings were a historical mismatch with certain colors or with the crystal, and they would talk.

  They always talked.

  The chatter of the upper classes drove Flicka insane—the carping and tattling and backstabbing and shade—and she didn’t want any of that to mar Wulfie’s wedding.

  At the other desk, Rae was walled-in by stacks of textbooks and was furiously typing a paper on something or other to do with psychology. Her keyboard clattered under her flying fingertips.

  The door to their study room opened, and Wulfram strode in. He announced, “I’m going out for the afternoon. I’ll be on my mobile.”

  Dieter entered behind him and took up a post by the door, watching.

  Always watching.

  Dieter’s storm-cloud gray eyes surveyed the windows, looking outside for anything amiss, and inventoried the room.

  When Dieter came back, if anything in the room had been moved—books, furniture, whatever—his gray eyes would alight on it and evaluate it for reason and threat level, Flicka knew. Essentially, he took a mental picture of everywhere he was and ran it through a program in his mind that picked out problematic areas and changes.

  Right now, he was staring out the window, checking the perimeter wall and landscaping below for signs of an intruder.

  His gaze wandered to Flicka.

  She was still looking at him.

  Their eyes met.

  It was just a moment of the two of them looking at each other, acknowledging that the other had also been looking, like a touch with their gaze.

  Dieter returned to surveilling the windows.

  Flicka looked back at her computer screen and its maddening color and china choices.

  Wulf kissed Rae on the top of her head. She leaned back and wrapped her arms sinuously around him without taking her eyes off of her computer.

  Wulf made the rounds to Flicka and kissed her on the top of her head, too. She leaned her scalp toward him to make it easier but otherwise glared at the colors and china settings on her screen.

  Wulf and Dieter exited, leaving Rae and Flicka to stare at their screens.

  Rae was staring out of the windows. “Those two, right?”

  “What?” Flicka said.

  “They’re freakishly alike, right? It’s like having two lions stalking around the house shoulder-to-shoulder all the time, like an enormous blond beast with two heads.”

  Flicka sat back in her chair and sipped her wine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. They’re nothing alike.”

  “They’re both six-four, blond, Swiss men with an athletic, muscular build, testosterone-built bone structure on their square jaws, carrying guns, and a little paranoid.”

  Flicka mused, watching the sunlight catch ruby highlights in her wine. “Superficially, perhaps, but Wulf is German, not Swiss.”

  Rae frowned. “He has a Swiss passport.”

  Flicka shook her head. “He’s German from birth, and he’s the hereditary prince of a German kingdom. He can carry a Swiss passport all he wants to, but he loves Switzerland so much that he would like to conquer it and rule every inch, because he is a German warrior prince.”

  Rae had turned to Flicka and was sitting with her chin in her hands. Her dark eyes sparkled. “Really?”

  Flicka nodded and drank a deep swallow from her glass. Sweet berry flavors rode on top of the rich wine, a good vintage and a good year. Wulf had excellent taste in wine and kept a nice cellar.

  Rae asked, “What else?”

  Fine. If Rae wanted the whole comparison, Flicka could recite it. It had gone around in her head so many times that she couldn’t count. She hadn’t ever been able to spew it out because Wulfram was so private that he would have been insulted, and Dieter would have chastised her for a lapse in operational security by divulging too much information.

  Flicka said, “Wulfram is cold on the outside and sweet on the inside. Dieter is salty on the outside and hot, inside.”

  Rae blinked at her a few times. “Okay. I guess I never thought of Wulf as a popsicle and Dieter as a soft pretzel.”

  Obviously, Rae hadn’t understood Flicka’s brilliant comparison that she had been crafting for years. More information was necessary.

  Flicka explained, “As I said, Wulfie is cold outside and sweet, inside. In the Swiss military, Wulfie was a sniper who could control his heartbeat and breathing, tamp down his natural adrenaline response, and keep his hands steady to the micrometer as he shot a bullet to a target a mile away. As a fifteen-year-old teenager, Wulf convinced the German court system to give him custody of me, a six-year-old in crisis when her mother died, and then he convinced the Le Rosey school administration that he was mature enough to run his own household and raise me off-campus. It was an insane idea. I’m still surprised he convinced them.”

  “Most family courts here would never allow a minor to have custody of a sibling,” Rae said. “Even emancipated minors taking care of just themselves are rare.”

  “He is the incarnation of sangfroid, as cool under pressure as the blue glacier ice of his eyes.” Flicka glanced over at Rae, fully aware that Rae was finishing her bachelor’s in psychology and already taking graduate-level psych classes. She wondered idly whether she should be paying Rae for counseling or insist on being paid as a psychology research study victim.

  Flicka said, “But he taught me to ride a bike and kissed my knees when I scraped them. He sat for tea parties and quizzed me on Russian vocabulary. He made us a home. I’ve never been as happy anywhere else in my life.”

  Okay, that was a lie, but she did look back on her days with Wulfie with happiness.

  She continued, “He was as perfect as anyone could have been in his situation, a teenager raising a child alone while finishing high school. I was awful. I can’t tell you how many nannies I escaped from, running away across a park or hiding in a friend’s house when it was time to go home.”

  “And?” Rae asked.

  “Of course, you know about Constantin, his twin. Wulf’s childhood was shattered when he lost Constantin. I can see it in his eyes. On the other hand, I guess it’s not surprising that he was able to run a hous
e and raise me. He was already an adult. I can see the pain when he moves his right shoulder, the stiffness and the muscle damage.”

  “Yeah.”

  Flicka looked up at Rae, balancing Rae’s face over the rim of her wineglass. “I see it less, now. It’s you. It used to be that, when certain black moments came over him, he used to look away through the air, like he was staring into an abyss. Now, he looks at you, and he doesn’t look haunted anymore.”

  Rae looked at her hands.

  “It’s good,” Flicka told her. “I’m glad to see it. He tried to replace Constantin with me, and it didn’t work. After my mother died, I was a grieving child. He became my father, but that’s what I needed, not what he needed. He needed someone to be there for him. His cousin had his own sorrow and a younger brother to try to help. When Wulf brought Dieter home when I was ten, I thought much later that Dieter might be like Constantin, that Dieter might be the brother whom he missed, but that’s not Dieter. They’re friends. Deep friends. Deep, old friends. Dieter was good enough, but he was not enough. But you,” Flicka looked up again, “you’re his soulmate. You’re the one he was looking for.”

  Rae’s dark eyes were wide on her face. “You okay with that?”

  “Of course,” Flicka said. “I’m a grown woman. I’m married. When one marries, one leaves one’s birth family behind. That is the natural order of things.”

  And Flicka would keep repeating that.

  “And Dieter?” Rae asked.

  “Dieter is Wulf’s opposite,” Flicka said, watching the sunlight lance through the wine again. “He’s salty outside but runs hot on the inside.”

  Oh, the heat that used to blaze from his skin, Flicka remembered. Damp London had chilled her, and she had huddled close to him in bed. His body was a nuclear furnace. His heart must pump molten fire.

  “That’s interesting,” Rae said.

  “His sarcastic bite on everything makes me laugh, and he sees the dark humor in every joke. He’s sharp.”

  Rae laughed. “His sense of humor is razor-sharp.”

  Flicka tilted her head, thinking. “In the Swiss military, Dieter was a commando. He was the guy who went over the bunker, ran across the field of fire and leaped, screaming, into the enemy’s machine gun nest to slaughter them all with a knife, emerging streaked with bloody dirt and cleaning his nails.”

  Rae’s dark eyes were wide. “Yeah, I can kind of see that.”

  Flicka nodded. “It was somewhere in Africa. He and Wulfie had friends from their military days over at our place. I listened at doors when I was supposed to be asleep.” She could have recited their words, but she paraphrased. “They said that the Swiss military wasn’t officially supposed to be in Africa at all, but his ARD-10 unit became pinned down during a civil war. They were there to protect the Swiss embassy, ostensibly. Actually, they were ferreting out drug runners who had kidnapped several Swiss bankers who had been doing business with them. Dieter had great moral ambivalence about ‘just letting those assholes rot in their own corruption.’ In the end, he didn’t get to decide. While rescuing the hostages, the drug runners outmanned and outgunned them. Dieter had to do something to save his fellow operators’ lives, or they would have all died that day.”

  “What else?” Rae asked.

  This was getting too personal. Flicka didn’t like feeling analyzed. Wulf had insisted that she speak to a counselor after their mother had died when she was six. Flicka had screamed at and kicked the woman until Wulf had let her quit.

  It was that Hannoverian privacy thing, probably.

  Yet Rae should know who she was married to and who was guarding her, even if Dieter was no longer Wulfram’s head of security and had his own, more diversified security agency.

  But Dieter would be guarding Rae at the wedding.

  That was how Flicka rationalized talking about Dieter even though she knew that she was lingering over the descriptions too much and speaking too rapturously about his heroics.

  The psychologist in the room might notice.

  Flicka said, “Dieter was the guy who sneaked into a terrorists’ compound, evacuated Swiss citizens who had been kidnapped, and then drove them away without a whisper or a shot fired, just a glare in the rearview mirror as the walled house went up in a fireball.”

  “And when he was young?” Rae asked. “You talked about Wulf’s childhood.”

  Flicka’s eyebrows pinched together, and she held her wineglass too tightly. “Dieter never talks about anything that happened to him before he joined the Swiss army when he was eighteen. I’m pretty sure he’s a natural-born Swiss citizen. I think he was raised in a city because he’s comfortable in an urban area. He knows Geneva well. But I know nothing else, and Wulf says he doesn’t, either. It’s like Dieter sprang whole from the Swiss Alps and landed in the Swiss army as an adult.”

  “He’s never spoken about it,” Rae clarified.

  Yeah, this was like therapy. Flicka tried not to snap at Rae. “He’s never said anything at all. Not even references to Christmas as a child or school. When an opportunity occurs to say something, he passes, and Wulfram and I fill in the conversation.”

  “Wow. That’s weird.”

  “And then, of course,” Flicka mused, staring at sunshine in her red wine and realizing that this was her third glass this afternoon as she tried, vainly, to get through the anxiety-provoking wedding details, “there were the women.”

  “Women?” Rae asked.

  “Wulf has lovely taste in women, present company, no exception. He likes nice women. When he brought home a date, I’d cuddle up with them, and they’d read me books. I’m still friends with many of them. Josephine Alexandrovna and I travel together and talk, often. All of his dates he picked out were sweet. Sweetness, kindness, and intelligence matter most to him, it seems.”

  Rae asked, “And Dieter didn’t date nice women?”

  Flicka snorted through her nose. “Dieter had abominable taste in women.”

  Again, present company, not excepted.

  Flicka studied her wine. “He prefers beautiful psychopaths and narcissists to anyone who could love him. When his relationships go south, and they always do, Wulf is there to pick up the pieces. It’s a good thing, too. They’re both a little too tightly wound. Without each other, one of them would snap, and it would get very ugly, very quickly.”

  “You weren’t jealous of Dieter’s dates, were you?” Rae asked.

  Flicka kept her eyes on her wine. If she had glanced at Rae, it would have been admitting that there had been something between her and Dieter, maybe even that she was still in love with him.

  No, that she had been in love with him.

  Because surely Flicka wasn’t still in love with him. It had been two years. She had married Pierre.

  Flicka swallowed to make sure her voice would be steady. “Do you know why they resigned from the army?”

  “Wulf said that you convinced him that it wasn’t an appropriate career for him, and I agree with you. He wouldn’t have been happy unless he were the supreme commander of all the forces. The problem is that Dieter is exactly the same, so they might have ended up killing each other.”

  “That’s not it. After Wulf had been in the Swiss army for two years and was ready to re-enlist, Dieter had a problem. His CO suggested that perhaps the Swiss military was not active enough for Dieter, as Switzerland’s neutrality prevented them from participating in most UN conflicts. Some members of the government questioned the need for their special forces unit ARD-10 at all.”

  “Oh, no,” Rae said.

  Good. Rae understood.

  Flicka said. “No matter how Dieter protested that his heart was in the Swiss military, that he was the perfect ‘guardian of the mountains’ as Swiss people believe they are, and that his blood ran with alpine ice, there was no real choice when the government reduced the ARD-10 in force from two hundred to forty members, and two-thirds of those were support personnel like inventory control. All they had left were ten comm
andos and no missions. Their funding had been slashed. ARD-10 just wouldn’t have enough action for Dieter Schwarz anymore, and they all knew it.”

  “That must have been rough,” Rae said.

  “It was brutal. Wulf brought him home, both of them sick-drunk. Leaving the military had ripped Dieter up by the roots. He’d been stumbling and in shock when Wulf had found him.”

  “So Wulf takes care of Dieter when he’s ripped up.”

  “And Dieter takes care of Wulf, too.” Flicka looked at the ceiling, choosing between the myriad possibilities. “Wulf would probably have died from overwork with his financial instruments. He might have fallen too far down his own personal pit and not been able to climb out. Certainly, in the last decade or so, one of the jackals—” the code word that meant an assassin, working alone, for whatever crazed reasons were swirling in his head “—would have gotten him. Enough of them tried. Statistically, I’m surprised that at least one of them didn’t get through, except that Dieter anticipated, or blocked, or shot them all. I can’t count the number of times he saved Wulfie’s life.”

  The wine in her glass left red streaks on the inside of the crystal.

  “And my life,” Flicka said. “He saved my life, too.”

  The sunlight was lowering, slanting sideways through the scarlet wine.

  “Countless times, really, in so many ways,” she said.

  She downed a large swallow of wine, thinking about the livid red scar on Dieter’s arm from just a month before when, again, he had tackled Flicka, driving her to the ground while she still wore her wedding dress from marrying another man, and the bullet had hit Dieter instead of her.

  “They are opposites, but they are the closest of friends. Nothing could ever come between them.”

  Flicka hoped that was true.

  When she looked over, Rae was watching her closely. Her dark eyes studied Flicka’s every twitch.

  Flicka frowned at her. “Get back to work.”

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