Page 86 of In Shining Armor

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’dneededit. 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 wordsSwiss Passportwritten 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.”