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“It isn’t something I like talking about.

” But in this case, it effectively put an end to the talk of beautiful women, and for that, he was grateful.

Ackermann’s friend turned the conversation to how their boys were giving the RAF a run for their money and would soon have Londoners begging Churchill to surrender, and he and Ackermann mused on how long the English could hold out. Not long, they all agreed.

Gustaf, after giving the other two a few minutes to settle into their boasting of the Luftwaffe, leaned toward Christian. “I really am sorry, Bauer. I didn’t mean to dredge up painful memories.”

He forced himself to smile. “Quite all right. You couldn’t have known.”

And besides, it made it so that he could make his excuses soon after, and no one tried to stop him or cajole him into dessert.

He was able to hurry into the car that Kraus had left him with and drive back to Boulevard Arago.

He parked in his usual place in front of the library and stared for a moment at the door to Corinne’s building.

First, the library. He let himself in and gathered the books he’d been stashing in the covered box, slipping them all into a tote. Darkness was falling outside, and though there was still an hour before curfew, few Parisians were out.

Good. No one saw him as he turned into her building, and he kept the door from banging behind him.

He’d learned the noises of the stairs by now and kept his steps quiet as he ascended to her floor.

At the door, he scratched instead of knocking.

This was one time he didn’t really want anyone seeing him come in.

It was too late for a social call, a conversation on books—and without the excuse of seeing her safely home like the night they’d met at Josef’s.

Too late for the sort of visit she could admit to her neighbors.

Though if she didn’t hear his scratch, he’d—

The door swung open, and Corinne motioned him inside, closing the door silently again behind him. “I’m so sorry to have alarmed you,” she whispered the moment the latch released under her palm. “I knew I shouldn’t have, but he was so upset—and I couldn’t risk a second note to call you off.”

“It’s all right.” He whispered too, even though the low drone of the radio would have drowned out any risk of the neighbors overhearing. “How is he? I didn’t know what to think when I saw you on campus this afternoon.”

She winced and took the tote when he offered it to her, not even glancing inside, just setting it down by the entryway table, like she always did the books he brought her.

“There were a few things I had to do before Monday. Madame Dardenne sat with him for an hour—I think Felix caught it from Desirée anyway, and gave it to Josef, though of course the children seem to succumb last and recover first.”

“And praise God for it. Fever?” He moved toward her mother’s bedroom, the one Felix had slept in before when he stayed here.

“Low-grade when he went to bed.” She followed him inside. A small lamp glowed, bathing Felix in golden light. “He vomited twice, but not since lunch. He’s eaten a bit since then and kept it down. Desirée had it yesterday but is nearly back to normal today, so I pray he’ll be better tomorrow.”

“No doubt he will.” But he sat on the bed and brushed his fingers over Felix’s forehead, as he’d wanted to do all day. Cool, though he had shadows under his eyes to prove the day he’d had.

His lashes fluttered open. “Vati?”

“Shh. I’m here, Felix. Tante Corinne tells me you didn’t feel so well today.”

“Belly hurt,” he mumbled around his thumb, his eyelid falling closed again. “Better now though.”

“Good.” Christian brushed his too-long curls away from his face, traced the tiny shell of his unformed ear and, when Felix rolled onto his side as he always did, he rubbed circles over his small back with the tips of his fingers.

He knew what that back felt like when it was flushed with fever, knew how clammy it would get, how his whimpers and moans would make everyone wonder if something really was wrong, if some unforeseen lung or heart condition was developing.

If this was the time they’d realize there was something malformed on the inside too.

He knew the fear of nursing his child when he was sick. And he knew the relief when the fever broke and the aches ceased and he turned into his happy, if tired, little fellow again.

He moved his gaze to Corinne, who had sunk to a seat in her mother’s dainty little armchair.

She looked exhausted, and he prayed it was merely from worry and not because she, too, had caught the bug.

“Thank you.” Two little syllables that couldn’t begin to hold all the gratitude in his heart. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Don’t be silly. Josef couldn’t have cared for him, and it is no great thing for me to miss one class—Dr. Tessier was perfectly capable of filling in for me, as I’ve done for him from time to time.”

He caught the flare of her nostrils though, the way her lips quavered a bit. He saw the way she swallowed hard as she watched Felix shift in his sleep. “Does it get easier?” she whispered, voice strained.

He breathed a laugh. “No. Never. Perhaps it will, someday. But it hasn’t yet, not for me.” He eased his hand off his son’s back, and when Felix didn’t budge, he leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his temple. “I love you, mein m?uschen .”

Felix’s lips moved against the thumb dangling just outside his mouth—a sleepy reflex of a response.

He knew he should let him rest. Even so, it took him several more minutes before he could convince himself to get up.

He moved slowly back into the living room as Corinne followed him out.

She left Felix’s door open, the little lamp on.

She would all night, he knew, so that if his son woke up, confused as to where he was, she could hear him, and he would see the increasingly familiar surroundings.

She didn’t sit, but she leaned against the sliver of open wall with a sigh. “I’m sorry I worried you,” she said again. “He was just so—”

“I know. I know how he gets. I wish I could have been here.” In Berlin, he could have called in at the university, as Corinne had done today.

But now, here? He would have had to feign an illness, to convince Kraus to go home.

And then one never knew if a fellow officer might take it upon himself to knock on his hotel room door and make certain he didn’t need a physician.

They took health seriously in the ranks, since contagions could spread so quickly among them.

Her smile was self-deprecating. “I know he wished you could have been too. But Madame Dardenne assured me I was doing everything I could do, at least. And the worst of it passed by noon. We got through. It was just a day.”

A day that had no doubt dragged on, feeling twice as long as it really was. He moved toward the door.

She pushed upright, brows drawn. “Are you leaving already? I mean—I know it’s late. But I hate that you came all this way for a ten-minute visit, and him asleep.”

He’d travel much farther for a much shorter visit, if that was all he could get. But he’d not been reaching for the doorknob, just for the tote of books. “I brought you something.”

This time she breathed the laugh. “Let me guess—books?”

“I am so predictable.” But as he pulled the four from the bag, something flickered in her eyes.

Because they weren’t the new books he usually brought, or even used copies of unfamiliar tales.

She’d know these. She’d know them because she had no doubt bent over them at one of the desks in the library next door and scratched those words into the margins. He held them out to her.

She met his gaze and didn’t move.

“Take them,” he said, voice sounding gruff in his own ears. “I’ve marked them all as destroyed due to mold.”

Slowly, cautiously, more timidly than he’d ever seen her move, even when he caught her in the library that first day in June, she eased forward and took the books from his hands.

Once their weight transferred from his palms, he rallied a smile.

Small, but the best he could manage. “Someday, when this is all over—when France and Germany are both free—you can tell me all about it. For now...” He shrugged.

“You’re keeping my secrets. The least I can do is hand you back your own. ”

“Christian.” She pushed the books onto a shelf in front of the tidy row of her own titles and stepped closer. “It’s not...you could probably guess—”

“No.” The shake of his head was fierce enough that he had to reposition his glasses. “I don’t want to know or to guess or even to speculate. The books are damaged. That’s all. I’m removing them permanently from the library. Consider this my rubbish bin.”

For a moment, she grinned at the idea—her flat being his rubbish bin—but then it shifted into something so much deeper. So much softer. And her hand found his cheek again, in that way he’d dreamed over and over of her doing.

He didn’t mean to slip an arm around her waist, to anchor her there.

He certainly didn’t mean to tug her closer, so that her stomach touched his and reminded him that, despite it all, he was alive , and he was capable of yearning for more than safety for his son, and that his heart was still beating, beating, beating.

Her fingers traced his jaw, feathered over his ear, and slid around his neck. “Why must you be so good ?” she whispered. “Why must you be everything I’ve ever wanted when you’re nothing I dare to have?”

He leaned down until his forehead rested on hers. “Why must you be so clever and so fearless and so much a part of the world I can’t claim?”

“Why couldn’t you just have come with Felix, months ago?”

“Why couldn’t you have just returned to Germany with Josef, triumphant, when Hitler was forced out of power by the return of sane-minded people? You could have come for a visit and fallen in love.”

“With Berlin?” Her eyes were so close to his that he could barely see their color. Yet the blue scorched him like the heart of a flame.

“That too.” His other hand had, somehow, moved up to touch her curls, as he’d wanted to do since he first realized she wasn’t so much younger than him.

To test whether they were as silky as Felix’s—they weren’t, not quite—whether they would wrap around his fingers—they did.

“Someday the world will be right again. It will be right, and you can tell me about the books, and all the impossibilities won’t matter anymore. ”

“And in that day?” Her other hand had lifted too and rested against his chest. No doubt showing her how his heart was beating, beating, beating.

He let his eyes slide shut because he didn’t dare to look at her, because already it was too overwhelming.

Because her scent—lilacs and Paris and spring rain even though it was autumn—wrapped around him and made him weak in the knees.

“In that day, I’ll tell you how I feel as I watch you love my son.

And I’ll kiss you like I’ve been wanting to for ages. ”

At her tsk ing sound, his eyes opened again, and he found hers dancing.

“Wrong again, Professor. In that day, you’ll offer to apply at the Sorbonne or I’ll say I’ll apply at the University of Berlin, and you’ll get down on one knee very romantically, and then we’ll sort out how to get Felix to call me Maman instead of Tante.

This is the day that you kiss me and tell me you love me. ”

His throat was dry as the Sahara. A striking contrast to his weak-willed eyes, which went wet as the sea. His fingers pressed into her waist. “I can’t. I can’t love you when you can’t love me back, Corinne—and you can’t love me back, not yet. Not now. Not as I am. Not in this uniform.”

Her hand curled around his lapel. “You know, there’s something you should understand about me. When someone tells me I can’t do something, I feel it’s my God-given duty to prove them wrong.”

He smiled because he couldn’t help it. “Now that you mention it, I’m pretty sure I surmised as much the moment we met. One of the many things I...love about you.”

She tilted her head, both letting their eyes meet better and putting her mouth but a tantalizing inch from his. “That was close. Try again. A simple rearranging of the words and you’ll have it.”

He touched his lips to hers first, because he couldn’t not, because he needed the strength she gave him, because his heart wasn’t just beating but was pounding, pounding, pounding in his ears so that he couldn’t hear his own thoughts above it. A soft touch, a gentle press.

All you get, he told himself. “Je t’aime,” he whispered against her lips. “Ich liebe dich. Te amo. I love you.”

She’d understand the words in any language he could toss at her—but she clearly hadn’t heard his command to himself to stop at one touch of their lips.

She pulled him closer, lifted onto her toes, and held him there as she kissed him again—nothing soft, nothing gentle, nothing light.

Her lips were fire and weight and demand and need.

Promise. Her lips were promise as they melded against his, as they parted and drew him in. They were faith in that tomorrow he had to believe would come someday. They were hope in a world filled with despair.

When at last they broke apart for breath, he realized he was holding her two inches off the floor and he set her back down, knowing well his cheeks and neck looked every bit as red as they felt.

Corinne, arms still wrapped around him, didn’t let go. “I guess I should have listened to Madame Dardenne last week. She told me you were interested in more than just books.”

He laughed. And kissed her again, because his lips had a mind of their own now. “She is a wise woman. Perhaps someday she won’t look at me like I’m a monster.”

“Someday.” She pressed her cheek to his chest, one of her hands running slowly down his back, over the wool of his uniform. “I love you, Christian. Even now, when I can’t.”

“That’ll just have to be enough.” He held her tight. And then he set her away, stepping back toward the door. “Until we’re free...no more of that. Just books and Felix and Josef.”

She wrapped her arms around her middle, but it was mischief sparkling in her eyes. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle, mon amour .”

He settled his hand on the knob. “But when you make your three wishes, you can’t get him back out again. I’d just as soon save my other two for when I really need them.”

Her laughter followed him out into the hall.