Whispered, In The Dark
Flicka von Hannover
We weren’t sure if there were microphones
in the walls.
Flicka lay on the bed, holding Dieter’s large hand on the clean, white sheet.
Dieter stretched out on the other side of the bed, his long legs reaching almost the bottom of the bed. He was wearing pale blue, silk pajamas that still bore the creases from the packagea sleepy housekeeper had handed him.
Flicka wore an oversized, white tee shirt that smelled faintly like the formaldehyde of new clothes.
During the quick evacuation of the Nevada townhouse, Flicka had thrown a footie sleeper in the diaper bag for Alina, so she was sleeping in the second bedroom of the suite on a double bed, hemmed in by pillows.
The mercenaries had checked the suite and thenwithdrawn for the night, staying in the suite’s living room, as if Flicka and Raphael would be perfectly tractable now that it was bedtime. Considering their professionalism earlier, it had surprised her.
When the mercenaries spoke, which was little and not often, they didn’t have a Swiss accent, nor French, nor German. Flicka was pretty sure that she heard a flat, Russian accent when they didsay something.
Flicka gripped his fingers. “Dieter, talk to me.”
“It’s Raphael,” he said, and his voice still had that hollow sound. “You have to call me Raphael, and I need you not to slip and call me the other name, even in here. I need to keep that history out of it, if I can.”
“I can do it,” Flicka said. “I’ll watch myself. I can say it, but I can’t believe your name is Raphael. It seemsso weird, but I always thought of you as my guardian angel.”
“An angel.” His chuff of breath sounded like a snort. “I’m anything but.”
“I wish I’d known, even if it was our secret.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I’m sorry that I didn’t whisper it to you in bed in London and trust that you could handle it.”
All the retorts rose in her throat, every one of them meant to slice him openand hurt him like she was hurting.
Instead, she said, “What was it that Shakespeare said? That a rose by any other name would smell as sweet? It doesn’t matter what you call yourself. You’ve saved my life more times than I can count, and Wulfram’s life more times than that. You’ll always be myLieblingwächter.Nothing can change that.”
He held her hand in his fist and pressed it to his heart.His pulse beat fast beneath her hand, and he whispered,“Durchlauchtig.”
She smiled at the old, grammatically incorrect nickname. “What happens if I slip?”
“You can’t.” He rolled his head on the pillow, shaking his head no. His gray eyes didn’t leave hers. “It’s important to keep this consistent. What did you tell my mother in the car?”
Flicka recounted the conversation. “That was okay, right?”
He smiled a little. “That’s the best I could have hoped for. She didn’t say anything about me?”
“I think she wanted to, but I negged her and made her feel bad about bringing up Constantin’s murder.”
“Did you say that Wulfram and I are—close?”
So very repressed, and Flicka almost laughed at him. “No. I said you met when you were young and that you headed his security team. And that you weregood at it. And then I pretended to go to sleep.”
“That’s okay. That is about as good as I could have hoped for.”
Flicka wanted to laugh at how terribly serious he was being. “What could she have said about you that was so awful?”
His downward glance was odd, and the creases at the corners of his eyes scared her. “You’re going to hear this at some point. It might as well be from me.”
She heldhis hand more firmly. “You’re myLieblingwächter.Nothing could change my mind about you.”
