In Shining Armor

by Blair Babylon

  A sound escaped her throat.

  Dieter shook in her arms, and his back rose up as he crushed her against his warm skin.

  Her whole body craved him like she’d been missing sunshine her whole life. Every place he stroked—her shoulders, her breasts, her stomach—made her more desperate for his warmth.

  Her moan changed to a gasp as she ground her hips against his.

  Dieter shoved her over onto her back and mouthed down her belly.

  “No,” she whimpered. “Not that. I want you.”

  As she protested, her hips curled up to meet his tongue.

  “This,” Dieter said. “This first.”

  He folded her knees to her chest and sucked and massaged her with his warm, wet tongue on her clit and his fingers inside her until her body twisted in an impossible tension and then flooded with waves that crested over the top of her head.

  She grabbed the bedsheets in her fists and cried out for him to stop.

  As he crawled up her body, his warm skin and heavy muscles covering her, her body felt like her soul had broken free and was floating near the ceiling.

  He whispered in her ear, “You’re sure?”

  “Yes,” she whispered back, still floating. “Make love to me.”

  He slowly pushed inside her still spasming body, a fullness that opened her to him. Her lower back ached, but her channel pulsed against his hardness. That’s what it was supposed to feel like, not the superficial pangs of fingers slipping on skin.

  He moved above her, a male made of hard muscle and strength, and she opened her softness to him.

  Dieter breathed as he stroked into her, his breath warm on her neck. “Durchlauchtig.”

  Yes, in his arms, his body moving in and above hers, his breath panting on her shoulder, she did feel like his queen, His Most Serene Highness. That silly nickname became charged, like whenever he called her his Durchlauchtig, it would be a memory of this moment, when he had been her first, and he had become her everything.

  She whispered, “Lieblingwächter,” her made-up compound word that meant darling guard, because he kept her safe, because she would always be safe in his arms.

  When she moved her hips to meet him, he gasped, and his arms clenched around her as his body went rigid.

  He held her until they both stopped shaking, and then he carefully washed her in his shower and wrapped his arms around her. He brushed her hair away from her face, toyed with the straps on her nightie, and told her how beautiful she was and that she was his, that night and always.

  When he settled down to sleep, his arms loosened, but his hands remained clasped around her, embracing her.

  Flicka couldn’t sleep.

  She had thought she had a years-old teenage crush on Dieter Schwarz, her bodyguard, her older brother’s best friend.

  She’d thought she could handle it, that she’d have a youthful fling and fondly remember him. The affair would probably even satisfy her crush, and then she’d be ready for the rest of her life.

  Oh, God.

  She couldn’t bear to move. She couldn’t think about leaving the next morning for class.

  She was trying to memorize his soft breath on her shoulder and his skin on hers.

  He gathered her closer, tucking her head under his chin, even in his sleep.

  Her head lay on his chest.

  His heart beat under her ear, a solid pulse of life.

  She’d been dying for this moment her whole life.

  Golden Glow

  Flicka von Hannover

  We had a year together.

  When Flicka looked back over her twenty-three years, she still viewed that year in London with Dieter with a kind of golden glow, even though every moment hurt to look at after it was over.

  They had two months of gentle English summer before their classes started again, and they picnicked in the countryside outside of London, away from snipers seeking notoriety or kidnappers with seven-figures of ransom dancing in their feral eyes. They made love on blankets far from prying eyes and booked small B&Bs in Scotland for weekends of lazing in bed.

  When their classes started, Flicka had a heavy course load and was preparing to compete in the first rounds of The Leeds competition during the spring of the following year. The first round was in April, which meant Flicka had seven months to prepare to be one of the top sixty young pianists in the world. She thought she might have a chance if she worked hard. If she made it past the first rounds, the final rounds would be later that year in the fall, after she’d graduated.

  Dieter had been accepted to study for a Master’s degree in business administration, having completed his Bachelor’s degree the previous spring.

  So they were busy, each working hard on their respective academic careers. Dieter escorted Flicka to the Royal Academy of Music in the mornings. Wulfram had agreed that she was safe within the building, so Dieter went on to his classes at the London Business School, fifteen minutes away on the other side of Hyde Park.

  In the late afternoons, they reversed the trek.

  They negotiated tea, studies, and supper, sometimes out or in their apartment, until some subtle signal—an overwhelming, frustrated passion that had been building all day—brought them together.

  As Flicka practiced in the study rooms at the college, as she took notes in composition classes, as she met with her tutors, her skin flushed with heat. Her lips blossomed every time she thought about Dieter, like he was already kissing her. Those odd moments of random, giddy lust when she should have been taking notes were, she suspected, moments when he was thinking about running his thumb down the back of her neck or his tongue over her collarbone.

  For Dieter, it was his hands that distracted him. While he was pressing open business policy textbooks and taking notes, he was aware that, the previous evening, his palms had been wrapped around Flicka’s silken hips as he pushed himself into her, her hot moans muffled by a pillow. His fingers had stroked her breasts until they were full and pink, and then he massaged her clit until she cried out his name.

  In October, the two of them celebrated Oktoberfest, first with Flicka and her friends in the beer gardens, with Dieter standing dispassionately nearby. When he got her home, he teased her ass for the first time while he ate her out, sucking mouthfuls of her tender skin against his tongue, and she came so hard that she passed out.

  After that, it was a slow, gentle preparation, over weeks, as he readied her, slowing using his fingers as he took her and then larger toys, making her want it. In November, he pressed himself past the hard ring of muscle and into her tight asshole, stroking slowly until he shot himself into her bowels and the world went white with silence and bliss.

  In December, Wulfram came to London for Christmas. They were the very souls of decorum while he was there, exchanging their usual gag gifts, because what does one buy for the extravagantly wealthy Prince and Princess of Hannover? The only thing they could not purchase was their extinct kingdom, and neither of them wanted it, never mind that Dieter would have gladly led the conquest for either of them.

  Flicka gave Dieter a water pistol because that was the only type of gun that he didn’t seem to have. He gave her a coffee mug from the Royal Academy of Music.

  Later, after Wulfram had gone back to Chicago and his university post, Flicka gave Dieter a set of old books from the library at Schloss Marienburg, the Hannover castle in Germany. The three slim volumes were a first edition of the seminal masterwork on the philosophy of war, Vom Kriege by Carl von Clausewitz. Even she knew what those were and what they meant.

  Dieter gave Flicka a piece of jewelry, a pin, which had been fashioned out of a tiny military ribbon about an inch long. The ribbon had yellow ends and a black field in the center, upon which crossed mountaineering tools overlaid a minuscule gold wreath. It had been meant to be worn as an honor on the dress uniform, but it had been altered to make it beautiful for her.

  The jewelry around it was stunning. The cloud of spun gold was made of tiny stran
ds too delicate to be called wires, and they turned the military honor into a work of art. Diamonds glittered around it.

  She held the pin carefully in her palm, the wrapping forgotten on the floor. “This is your alpine mountaineering ribbon.”

  Dieter nodded, his neck muscles flexing where they connected to his strong shoulders.

  “I was at your ceremony where they awarded it to you. I was, what, eleven? Twelve?”

  “Around then, yes.”

  She searched his gray eyes, looking for reticence. “But don’t you need it for when you wear your dress uniform?”

  “I never wear my dress uniform anymore, not since I mustered out. I suppose I could order a replacement if I needed one, but this is the one they pinned on me when I completed my training in alpine warfare and rescue. It’s the real one.”

  “This is too much,” she said. “This is too important to you.”

  He took her hands and closed her fingers gently over the pin. “When I joined the Swiss army, I left everything that I was behind and became someone else, someone better. When I completed the alpine mountaineering course, I felt whole for the first time. I was a Swiss man, a guardian of the Alps, sprung from alpine culture, not the boy I was before.” He looked up at her, his snowstorm-cloud eyes absolutely serious. Sunlight glinted on his eyelashes, dark around his eyes. “I felt like I was born again up there, in the snow. Everything that I had done wrong in my life was washed away in alpine ice.”

  Flicka turned her hand over and held his large, warm fingers. “Did you need to be reborn?”

  He nodded. “You wouldn’t have liked me as I was before. I didn’t like me.”

  “But you were eighteen years old when you joined the army. You were a child.”

  “Some kids can get into things that they shouldn’t, terrible things. The Swiss army probably saved my life, and it definitely saved my soul.”

  Flicka gripped his hands. “I’m glad. I’m glad you’re the man you are.”

  Dieter said, “I want you to have this. The Alpine Decoration is my heart and my soul, the essence of who I am. No matter what happens, I want you to know who I am.”

  “I know who you are now. That’s all that matters.” But she was inquisitive, and she asked a question that maybe she shouldn’t have. “Was your name Dieter Schwarz, before?”

  He shook his head, his blond hair glistening in the sunlight.

  “What—what was it?”

  He swallowed hard. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not that person anymore. I picked a name as far away from my old one as I could, a typical, boring Swiss name,” he smiled, “even somewhat Germanic.”

  “I don’t care what your name is or was,” Flicka said. “You’ll always be my Lieblingwächter.”

  He kissed her, his mouth slowly working over hers, and he whispered, “And you’ll always be my Durchlauchtig.”

  Spring arrived, and with it, London sprang back to life. They were young and in love, and they spent every moment they could outdoors in the sun together. When they couldn’t be outdoors, they made love in their apartment, refusing to believe that life wouldn’t always be carefree. Even while Flicka worked like a demon on the annual charity ball she threw every year and Dieter wrote his M.B.A. thesis, they drowned in each other every moment they could.

  Library

  Dieter Schwarz

  Sometimes,

  studying gets boring,

  and my mind wanders.

  Dieter sat at a long table in the library of the London Business School where he was taking coursework for his Master’s of Business Administration, surrounded by books.

  History and strategy books were piled three deep in places as he took notes on loose paper and added to the outline on his computer screen. The argument he was constructing was an important pillar in his thesis, so he was working hard on it.

  Yet he couldn’t quite keep his mind on the books.

  Flicka’s pale skin under his tanned fingers, her lips parted when she drew in a gasp, the curve of her hips that dipped to her narrow waist that he liked to encircle with his hands when he was going down on her.

  He still could not reconcile that the woman Flicka, whom he was obsessed with, had been the child Flicka, Wulfram’s younger sister. She hadn’t been around much when she was a child, just a weekend visitor to Wulfram’s house because she lived at her boarding school for three-quarters of the year, every year, until she graduated when she was eighteen. When she was fifteen, she started spending more weekends at the boarding school with her friends, too.

  And then, suddenly, a woman had walked in the door to Wulfram’s apartment, an adult unconnected to the child he had known.

  And she was an alluring, beautiful woman with a sharp sense of humor and strong work ethic. Dieter respected both.

  Dieter shook his head. He needed to keep his attention on the common translation errors in Carl von Clausewitz’s book, Vom Kriege, which meant On War, one of the most influential treatises on war and military strategy, written by the Prussian general and military strategist Carl von Clausewitz.

  Dieter had the three volumes of Vom Kriege stacked among the other books on the library table, though they were over to one side. He didn’t want to have a brain fart and throw them in the reshelving bin with the rest of his research books. A librarian would probably recognize the three rare books were worth about as much as a Lamborghini.

  His military history class had read On War that semester.

  Dieter had been sitting in class, taking notes and debating, when one of the students quoted the book, saying that the book defines war as “the continuation of policy by other means.”

  “No, no,” Dieter said, dismissing the other student. “Not by other means. The quote is, ‘War is the continuation of policy with other means.’ It’s not exclusionary.”

  “That’s the quote,” the guy said.

  Dieter shook his head. “The word ‘by’ suggests that, once war begins, all other political means stop, such as diplomatic, sanctions, and all that. Clausewitz never said that. He would never have said that.”

  The professor and other students were staring at him as if he had grown a few more blond heads on his shoulders.

  Dieter asked, “What?”

  The professor tugged down her suit jacket sleeves. “No, the quote is that war is ‘the continuation of policy by other means.’ It’s one of Clausewitz’s most famous quotes. Everyone knows it. It’s even one of the chapter titles.”

  “It’s got to be ‘with,’ not ‘by.’” Dieter dug inside his rucksack and pulled out his leather-bound copy of Vom Kriege that Flicka had given him for Christmas that year. He opened the cotton sack he’d used to protect the three antique volumes and flipped the first one open. The aged paper felt like onion skin under his fingertips. “Yes, here it is. War is ‘the continuation of policy mit Einmischung anderer Mitteln.’ Mit means with, not by. ‘Continuation of policy with other means,’ and mit means something like, ‘with and in addition to interference and other means.’”

  The professor stared at him. “You’re reading it in German?”

  Dieter shrugged. “It was written in German.”

  Swiss children learn German early because it has many words and syntax in common with Alemannic. Most people who speak Alemannic easily understand and speak German, though the reverse is not true.

  “Could mit mean by, as well as with?” the professor asked.

  “No,” Dieter said, his head ringing with another one of Wulfram’s drunken diatribes on languages. They had been drunk together a lot while in the military. “German is a very precise language. Just ask any German.”

  That got a round of laughter from the British class.

  “Well,” the professor said, “it must be a misprint.”

  Dieter held up the leatherbound book. “First edition, 1832.”

  Flicka really knew how to pick out a Christmas present.

  The professor’s jaw had dropped. Mauve lipstick smeared her teeth. �
��Can I see that?”

  Dieter had always felt an affinity with Carl von Clausewitz. They had both entered the military very young and as grunts. Granted, Clausewitz had been twelve and Dieter, six months shy of eighteen. Clausewitz had started as a foot soldier and risen to be a field marshal and a master tactician.

  Dieter had been a raw recruit and now wanted to form a security agency.

  No one called such an organization a mercenary army these days.

  Besides, there were laws that prevented Swiss citizens from serving as a mercenary, so Dieter most assuredly wasn’t one.

  He was a personal protection bodyguard, which was nothing like a mercenary.

  That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

  The most amusing thing was that Clausewitz had fought in the Prussian-Saxon army commanded by Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, against France during the Napoleonic wars. When the Prussian army had disintegrated during the Jena campaign, Clausewitz had been captured along with 25,000 prisoners and the duke himself.

  Yes, the man that Dieter Schwarz revered as his military strategy mentor from across the centuries had served the Duke of Brunswick.

  When Dieter and Wulfram had gotten smashed in the barracks one night, just kidding around, Dieter had pressured Wulf into reciting the whole list of his royal and noble titles a few times. Both of them had laughed harder at each recitation until they were both red-faced and their stomachs ached with laughing too hard, but despite the whiskey, Dieter had memorized it.

  Wulfram von Hannover was His Serene Highness, the Hereditary Prince of Hannover and Cumberland, Prince of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and a few lesser titles.

  Dieter shook his head over the last one.

  The Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

  Clausewitz had served the Duke of Brunswick.

  One night, over apple and pear Obstwasser brandy—and you can get sloshed on that stuff fast—Dieter had told Wulfram about Clausewitz and the Duke.