In Shining Armor

by Blair Babylon

  “Prepared, aren’t you?” she muttered as her skin settled on his blazing hot chest.

  “If you’re not prepared in the Alps, you die,” he grunted, flipping her over on her back.

  “Whoa. Wait!”

  “I’m fighting myself not to roll you over and take you hard right now,” he panted, sweat gathering near his blond hair.

  “Do it.”

  “Don’t tempt me.” He looked up at her, and his gray eyes had gone feral. “You know what I like.”

  He opened his mouth and sucked on her breasts again, now so sensitive that an orgasm began to build in her stomach from just his mouth on her tits. Flicka gasped, and he moved lower, biting and sucking on her stomach until he slipped off the bed and landed on his knees.

  “Dieter?”

  He grabbed her hips and dragged her and the whole bedspread to press her sex against his open mouth.

  Wildness shot through her, and she arched up off the bed, crying out.

  His tongue pressed inside her as he sucked on her clit, roughly mouthing her until she thrashed back and forth and grabbed his hair.

  “Please,” she panted. “Please, I’m almost there,” her voice managed to say over the roaring in her head.

  The insane pressure left her clit, and Flicka gasped, trying to breathe as Dieter crawled up her body. He snatched the foil packet, jammed on the condom, and pressed himself to her.

  Flicka lifted her hips and squeezed her eyes closed.

  Dieter, it was Dieter.

  Dieter, who would never hurt her.

  His hardness filled her, a slide that grew inside until the pleasure gathered so hard that it almost hurt.

  His hard body reared above her, and she started shaking even as he drove into her. “Wait—”

  He grabbed her around the waist, dipped his broad shoulder, and rolled so that she ended up on top of him.

  The shaking fled, and desire overwhelmed her.

  Flicka braced her hands on his shoulders and shoved herself backward, taking all of him inside her.

  Dieter groaned and thrust with his hips, meeting her. He groped her and pressed her down, rubbing her clit on the rough mat of him, grinding into her.

  Flicka scooted her knees down and rocked backward, taking him deeper, as he bucked into her from below.

  Her body wound more tightly, coiling hard, and her clit swelled. She tried to go more slowly, tried to make it last, but Dieter made her ride him hard.

  One more jerk of his body up into her and fire rushed up Flicka’s spine and grew out of her skin, blasting her to nothing.

  She couldn’t even hear herself crying out, but her throat scalded as she came apart.

  Later, whether minutes or hours, her cheek was warmed by Dieter’s wide chest. His burly arms wrapped her shoulders and around her head, and she was clutching his shoulders as she gasped.

  He stroked her hair. “You’re okay,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

  Wetness streaked her face.

  She stretched her arms to cling to him. “Lieblingwächter.”

  He stroked her hair and murmured, “Durchlauchtig.”

  Counterfeit Passports

  Flicka von Hannover

  It’s just a counterfeit passport,

  right?

  That night, Flicka slept in Dieter Schwarz’s arms.

  He curled around her in the dark, spooning behind her or gathering her under his arm as they slept.

  He murmured to her in Alemannic, the alpine language that people called Swiss-German, but Flicka thought it didn’t sound like German much at all. She understood what he was saying, though. Wulfie and Dieter used to speak Alemannic around her when she was a kid, and between those two plus a lot of the support staff at her boarding school and the people in the town around Le Rosey, Flicka had picked up enough of the language to avoid looking like a deer caught in headlights.

  Dieter whispered into her hair, “I have missed you so much. I have missed you every day.”

  He moved her hair aside, kissed the back of her neck, and said, “I swore that if you were ever in my arms again, I’d do anything to keep you. Anything.”

  He cradled her, and every time she started to move away, he pulled her back, threaded his fingers through her hair, and ran his lips over her shoulders. “Don’t go. Stay.”

  When they had been together in London, Dieter had always turned gentle like this after sex, caressing her and whispering to her. The first time he’d done it, it had been so unlike him that she’d been astonished, but she’d gotten used to it.

  And then she’d needed it. She couldn’t sleep without him.

  And then, in the intervening two years, she’d gotten used to living without it. Pierre slept on his own side of the bed.

  Sleep hadn’t come so easily for two long years.

  The next morning, Dieter went out while she packed their few belongings and two more sets of clothes in their single duffel bag. He brought back coffee and pastries for breakfast in their few minutes before they had to leave for the airport.

  Flicka stuffed a croissant in her mouth, and it fell apart into tender layers and flakes. “So good.”

  Dieter sipped his coffee. “We should talk about the passports.”

  He laid two scarlet passport booklets on the table.

  Flicka craned her neck. A gold cross was embossed on the covers below the words Swiss Passport written in five languages. “Swiss?”

  Flicka used a German passport because she had been born in Hannover, Germany. Pierre had given her Monegasque citizenship and a passport because she was marrying him and was going to be a sovereign princess of that country, too.

  “One of them is for you,” Dieter said. He flipped one open, set it down, and handed her the other one.

  “How did you get a Swiss passport for me?” The answer was obvious. “Wulfram, I assume. You got Wulf to pull strings with the prime minister or something because he’s Swiss now, or he thinks he is.”

  “No, we haven’t contacted him. It’s not safe until I know for sure that Quentin Sault doesn’t have a person inside his security.”

  The pattern of Swiss crosses embossed on the passport’s cover was bumpy under her fingertips, and she opened the little booklet.

  Her own picture stared back at her.

  The shot wasn’t a particularly good picture of her. Most passport pictures tend to be less than flattering because they’re taken straight on and, Flicka swore, with a fisheye lens and an ugly filter.

  But it was definitely her.

  The name on the passport was Gretchen Mirabaud.

  Shivers climbed Flicka’s back up to her neck. Couldn’t he have given her a fake name that wasn’t the name of his ex-wife? “Well, that’s interesting. I don’t know where you got that awful picture of me, though. Surely I never authorized that one for release.”

  “That’s not you.”

  “Sure it is. You mean it’s a computer-generated image or something? Like an avatar? That’s one damn ugly avatar. I look angry or something.”

  “That’s not your picture, although it’s obviously close,” Dieter said. “It wasn’t safe to use a real picture of you. Biometric passports hold computerized images of your face and fingerprints. If Pierre convinced the French government to put out a high-level alert, facial recognition software might pick out your picture and alert the authorities.”

  Flicka glanced up.

  His gray eyes were serious, and his mouth pressed into a tight line.

  She looked back at the passport. “That’s not me?”

  “No. It’s someone we knew at Rogue Security. Her passport shouldn’t set off any warning bells.”

  “She really looks like me.” Even as Flicka said it, she scrutinized the picture.

  The blond, green-eyed woman in the picture had a slight bend in her nose, unlike Flicka’s, like it might have been broken a little at some point. Her face might have been a little fuller in the jaw, just a touch more Slavic than Flicka’s heart-sh
aped face.

  But just a little.

  Barely any at all.

  Almost imperceptible unless you were looking for it.

  She said, “Gretchen Mirabaud. That’s odd, a German name and a French one.”

  He shrugged. “Swiss people mix and match. It’s not unusual.”

  “I know several people with the last name of Mirabaud.”

  “It’s a common name among the Swiss French.”

  “I didn’t think it was.”

  “The important thing is that you need to memorize her birthdate and other information. If the passport control official here at Charles de Gaulle or the US immigration official questions you, you need to be able to answer fluently and easily.”

  She studied the information in the passport, looking at every line and feeling the rhythm of the numbers and letters, for about fifteen seconds. “Okay, got it.”

  “All of it?”

  She’d already let on that she might have a touch of the Hannover memory thing, so she shrugged.

  “When’s your birthday?” he asked.

  “May fourth.”

  “What’s your sign?”

  “I don’t believe in astrology.”

  “Okay, decent answer, but you know your real sign is Pisces on the cusp of Aquarius even though you don’t believe in it. So if your birthday is May fourth, what’s your sign?”

  Flicka thought about it. “Gemini?”

  “Taurus,” Dieter told her.

  “Oh, no. I could never be a Taurus. I don’t even like beef.”

  He laughed out loud. “For today, let’s pretend you’re the most atypical Taurus on the Earth.”

  “Silly things like that don’t matter. I can recite the passport number if I need to.”

  “They’re not going to ask you to recite the passport number, but they might try to trip you up if they suspect that the passport has been altered. There is a problem with it. I handed it off to Aaron for a few hours yesterday. He sabotaged the fingerprints in the biometric chip, but we didn’t change the picture. So the fingerprints aren’t going to come up on their computers. If there is a scanner, keep pressing your finger on it like you must be doing something wrong or it’s broken.”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  “And I’ll be traveling as your husband, so I’ll be there to intervene.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “You need to know my information, too.” He handed the passport to her.

  She surveyed it. The name on this one was Raphael Mirabaud, a very French-Swiss name, not a mishmash of German and French. Though she scrutinized the picture, she was quite sure that this passport bore an authentic and recent picture of Dieter, not a very close clone like hers. “This picture really is you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And yours says you were born in Geneva. I could actually believe that.”

  “Best to make these as believable as possible.”

  “Where were you born, Dieter?”

  His eyes flicked toward her, and he didn’t move for a moment. He said, slowly, “I sprang into existence at eighteen years old as a recruit for the Swiss army.”

  “Fine. Don’t tell me.” She glared at the passport, memorizing it. “And your fake birthday is October twenty-sixth, which makes you a Scorpio. Scorpios are secretive, intense, and ruled by their desires. That’s you. You always seemed more like a Scorpio than a Virgo.”

  “What, I don’t seem like a virgin to you? Guileless, innocent me?” he mocked.

  Flicka snorted. “I don’t think you were an innocent the day you were born. Virgos are supposed to be worrywarts, modest, and shy. You’re a Scorpio.”

  “You don’t believe in astrology, remember?”

  She shrugged. “I read a book once.”

  He leaned his elbows on the table. “At the airport, follow my lead. You’ve already shown that you’re a natural at black ops when you lured that lawyer Blanchard out of his office. Let’s see that again. This time, you’re just a bored Swiss tourist, tired from France and not looking forward to a long flight to Las Vegas, and you just want to get through passport control with your husband who is a pain in the ass.”

  “Careful, Dieter,” Flicka said. “Typecasting.”

  Kill Zone

  Dieter Schwarz

  It felt like a kill zone.

  Dieter, for there could be no denying that he had thought of himself as Dieter Schwarz for many years, held the passport with someone else’s name on it and stood on line with Flicka.

  He had hung their duffel bag over his shoulder because he was no longer a bodyguard. Smuggling a principal out of Europe on someone else’s passport was a black op, not personal protection.

  As they waited on line, he offered Flicka his elbow to hold, and she curled her delicate fingers around his arm.

  But she didn’t look up at him.

  She stood beside him, holding onto his arm and staring at the flat shoes they had bought her yesterday.

  He dropped his arm and wound his fingers in hers.

  This was the first time they’d held hands in public, he realized. In London, they had never shown any signs of their relationship when outside the apartment, plus he had needed his hands and eyes free to protect her.

  Her delicate fingers squeezed his.

  Dieter lifted her hand and pressed it against his chest, right over his heart.

  His heart thumped against their hands, and for a moment, Dieter closed his eyes and tried to stretch out that moment.

  Voices around them echoed off the silver ceiling and blue columns. The gates’ waiting area at the Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris had a peaked, glass roof like a greenhouse, but passport control felt more like a bunker.

  The line ahead of them moved.

  They stepped forward to keep up.

  The queues for passport control weren’t so much a line as a collection of lines, a linear mob, all moving in staggered fashion toward a long line of desks at the front. Dieter wasn’t accustomed to being a member of the herd anymore. Wulfram always flew through private terminals, where passport control officers inspected official documents in the comfort of his rented plane.

  He could only imagine what Flicka was thinking. This was probably her very first time being crowded by rabble like him.

  Someone bumped Flicka, and she stumbled against Dieter’s side. He caught her under his arm and glared at the guy over her head.

  The older man apologized, and it seemed to Dieter that it had been an honest mistake. He accepted the man’s apology and smiled, and then he ducked and made sure Flicka was all right. “Gretchen, you are okay?”

  She nodded. “Yes, Raphael. I’m fine.”

  Raphael.

  The name shot straight to his heart because even though he had been called Dieter his entire adult life, his mother and grandmother, his sisters and father, his cousins and uncles and his childhood friends had called him Raphael.

  The name shook him.

  He’d never wanted to tell anyone about his young life as Raphael Mirabaud before. Indeed, he’d been desperate to hide every last moment of it, everything he’d done, everything he’d been, everything he’d had to do to escape.

  But here, he had one more chance with Flicka.

  Whether he should or shouldn’t have left her in London, his decision had devastated them both. He’d hoped that she would pick up and flit off, date a bevy of safe and normal men, and then choose an excellent husband who would cherish her for the rest of their lives.

  But instead, she’d chosen Pierre Grimaldi, and even Dieter had known she was making a mistake.

  Considering what she’d said before her wedding, he suspected that Flicka had known even then that marrying Prince Pierre Grimaldi had been a bad idea.

  And now she’d left Pierre, and Dieter had one more chance with her.

  If they were to have a chance, a real chance at something lasting—and he couldn’t believe that he was even thinking about such a thing wh
en her marriage was currently falling apart and not legally dissolved yet—then Flicka had to know everything about him.

  She had to know who he was and what that meant.

  She had to know why he’d left her in London.

  She had to know what he’d done and what he’d refused to do.

  This time, their relationship had to start clean.

  He couldn’t talk to her now, though, not in the middle of an airport terminal, waiting in line for passport control and security, and not when the police milling around with their automatic weapons and fatigues were clearly scrutinizing everyone in line, perhaps looking for two blond fugitives.

  And yet, there was a chance that they might be grabbed and separated, and he might never see her again in this life.

  Because if the French police found a man traveling under the passport of Raphael Mirabaud, Dieter might be charged, tried, and convicted of terrible things.

  He might go to prison.

  If he did, he would certainly be murdered there.

  He held her hand against his chest and waited for the passport control line to inch forward.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Dieter watched an airport security guard twiddle his fingers on the assault rifle he held across his chest. The guy checked a small tablet and surveyed the waiting crowd. From his demeanor and regulation haircut under his black riot gear and body armor, Dieter guessed that the guy was one of the military or police security officers who guarded the airport, rather than one of the five thousand private security guards who augmented the officials.

  Security staff ringed the crowd that was trying to clear passport control.

  The part of Dieter’s brain that would always be a commando hated this situation. It felt like a kill zone.

  Another of the security personnel consulted his tablet and then looked over the crowd.

  Dieter ducked his head, held Flicka’s hand closer to his heart, and watched.

  They took another step toward the bored officials behind the desks and bulletproof glass.

  Scorpio