Page 19

Liana waved it away. “I don’t know. Something in science—physics?

Chemistry? It’s all beyond me, which is why my eyes cross when he speaks, despite the very handsome mouth doing the talking.

Perhaps you could follow along, though.” She tapped the novel on the table.

“You picked that up of your own will, after all.”

“A novel is hardly a scientific treatise,” Corinne said with a laugh.

But she could generally follow the conversations of physicists and chemists, if they didn’t get too technical.

She’d read Aristotle, Archimedes, and the other Greek fathers during her lessons on the language as a teen.

Maxwell, Faraday, Planck, and the like during her own schooling at the Sorbonne.

She’d had a horrible time deciding what to focus on in her studies.

Everything interested her. So she’d dabbled for a few years, as Maman had jokingly called it, before settling where she knew she was strongest—linguistics, philosophy.

Between those two she hadn’t been able to decide, so she hadn’t.

A shadow fell over her—a familiar shadow, which had her spinning in her seat and leaping to her feet. “Oncle Georges!” She kissed his cheeks, even as she wondered what in the world he was doing here.

She never assumed her uncle showed up near the Sorbonne by mere coincidence. There were no such things as coincidences with him, only careful planning, evaluations, and follow-through.

If he was here, it was because he’d been looking for her. And as always, he found her without too much trouble.

He smiled with that ease that perfectly covered every single thought in his head. “Mon chouchou.” He motioned her back to her chair and pulled over an unoccupied one from another table. Nodded to Liana. “Bonjour.”

“Ah. Oncle Georges, this is my friend Liana. Her father is the one who rescued me from the parade the day the Nazis took Paris.” She’d told him the story, of course, though she hadn’t seen him since Saturday, to update him on her acquaintance with the rest of the man’s family. “Liana, my uncle, Georges Piers.”

Oncle Georges held out a hand, clasped Liana’s. “ Enchanté. I didn’t realize Rinny had met her savior’s family.”

Liana laughed. “He waylaid her on Saturday and forced her home to meet me and Maman. I’ve declared her my new best friend.”

No doubt because all her others had left Paris, but Corinne wasn’t about to argue. All of her friends had too.

Liana frowned though and looked between Georges and Corinne. “Your...mother’s brother?”

“Father’s,” Georges answered, obviously having no reason to know it would contradict too much of the story she’d told. Or failed to tell.

Liana’s frown deepened.

“Stepbrother,” Georges clarified, eyeing Corinne with veiled questions. “Hence the different surnames.”

“But...” the brunette dropped her voice low, leaned in. “Wouldn’t that make you English too?”

Georges blinked. Then sent a second blink to Corinne, so heavy with accusation that she nearly winced away from it.

Shouldn’t the waiter have refilled their coffee again? She could have used the distraction of sipping it. “They’re on the up-and-up,” she murmured in English, hoping Liana wouldn’t know the idiom. Papa’s English, smooth as butter, posh as first class.

Her uncle let out half a breath, then cut it off. “You could let me be the judge of who learns my secrets,” he said. In his own English, Cockney and harsh. All the proof anyone would ever need that he was no blood relation of the man called Pierre Bastien.

“She didn’t tell me your secrets.” Liana had clearly understood his accusation, though she answered in quiet French. “She didn’t even mention you. I’m sorry if I...I’m sorry. I should go.” She reached for the purse she’d set on the table.

Oncle Georges reached out, his hand hovering over hers, his smile easy again.

“No, no. Please. I’m sorry if I startled you.

It is only that...yes. I am. Or was.

” His words were in French again, colored with the accent of the Pas-de-Calais department he’d learned it in, his shrug so Gallic that Liana frowned again.

“You don’t seem ...”

Georges laughed, and to Corinne’s ears, it was sincere.

His eyes had joined his lips in their smile, twinkling.

“I have been here since I was sixteen. I lied about my age to join up for the last war—or rather, I assume I did. I didn’t honestly know my exact age.

” He shrugged again, his face mimicking the motion in that way Papa had never learned to do.

“I’ve lived far longer here than I did there. ”

Interest sparkled in Liana’s eyes. “But then you...found a brother? Half—or, no, step?”

Something in her gaze must have convinced Georges of what Corinne had decided so quickly upon meeting the Moreaux.

He smiled. “I’d never met Corinne’s stepfather before the war.

But I had a friend whose brother had gone missing in the mud during a battle, in the region Corinne’s family is from.

I wanted to see if I could find evidence of him, for his family.

Find a grave, perhaps, though that seemed a long shot.

So many were lost in that mud.” He closed his eyes, seeing what likely haunted his nightmares still, as it did hers.

And he’d poked through far more of it than she had, searching for friends and comrades-in-arms. She’d only ventured out to the field near their little cottage, hoping to find rations in some abandoned corpse’s pack.

The hungry years.

“So I went searching for this one missing English soldier’s grave, and what I found instead was a story of a man who miraculously survived months of infection and pneumonia, who spoke French like he was educated in London.

Well, that intrigued me. I expected to find a stranger, never thought in a million years it would be Bastien, the very man I sought—but it was.

” His lips curved into a smile shadowed with memory.

“And when he realized I knew his family—the family that believed him dead—he about went mad. I thought he’d kick me forcibly from the house.

Might have done, if he’d had the strength.

He’d already decided, you see, to stay dead.

Because he believed his brother to be the better heir to their father. ”

Corinne grinned. Those years were more blur than clear memories, but she remembered that day, at least in fragments.

Opening the door to Georges, a tired-looking young man, no older then than Liana was now.

Hearing him ask for Pierre Bastien, saying he’d come from the priest in town.

Hearing Papa—only just her Papa, two weeks before—explode when Georges admitted he knew Papa’s brother.

She leaned over to bump her shoulder into Liana’s. “He’d fallen in love with Maman by then, of course. They’d just married. Then this man claiming to have links to the past he’d relinquished showed up and put it all at risk.”

Georges chuckled. “I thought I was doing his brother a favor. Turned out, I was doing myself one. I agreed not to tell anyone who he was—I knew what it was to have secrets, after all. And it was...comforting. Knowing there was someone else a bit like me nearby. My wife and Corinne’s mother became close as sisters.

” Another shrug, this time with a single shoulder.

“I count several brothers that aren’t my blood.

Bastien’s one of them. Which makes this troublemaker more niece to me than my others”—he directed a fond, teasing grin Corinne’s way—“given that I’ve had to keep an eye on her every day of her life to keep her from unleashing the very hounds of the netherworld. ”

Corinne laughed. Really laughed, like she hadn’t done in months.

He’d been there the day Papa read her the legend of Cerberus, and he’d declared then that she’d probably set him loose if they didn’t watch her, just as she had old Madame Martin’s pack when two boys from the village school wouldn’t stop pulling on her curls.

He’d been proud of her for that quick thinking, she knew. The boys hadn’t chased her home again. She wasn’t so sure he approved of her quick thinking with Liana’s family yet, but at the very least, he’d decided to draw them in, if only to test them.

It made tension unknot in her chest. Or perhaps it was the laughter that did that.

Liana was smiling too. “What a wonderful story—a wonderful family. I call my mother’s oldest friend tante too, despite that she’s no blood relation. It makes her no less family.”

Corinne reached out and covered her uncle’s calloused hand with her own. “Oncle Georges is the only family I have left in France. He’s promised to watch out for me, never mind that I’m a grown woman who doesn’t need a chaperone any longer.”

Georges snorted a laugh of his own. “You, Rinny, will always need a chaperone. Knowing you, you’ll be slipping chocolate rations out of Nazi pockets and giving the stolen treasure as gifts for Christmas.”

She made a show of pursing her lips. “Not a bad idea. Who knows what the shops may be like by then. And stolen chocolate is sweeter than any other on earth.” She waited for their laughter to die down, gave a lazy stretch that allowed her to make sure no one was paying attention, and then said, “Liana has just invited me to a...poetry reading, Oncle.”

He was skilled enough in hidden meanings to note that slight hesitation.

To hear Corinne’s unspoken request that he judge Liana’s age, her disposition, her politics.

He tilted his head, his smile soft and small and infinite.

“Yes? I imagine it will be filled with young people eager to perform. But if ever you find yourself longing for the stylings of an old hand who has recited many a poem before...” He reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a carte de visite .