Lost Among the Living(82)

His grip flinched on my wrist, his fingers flexing without thinking. “No,” he said. “My cover was as a messenger, remember? No, I didn’t fight. Not then. But I can’t speak to what I did before I became Hans Faber, Jo. Don’t ask me. I don’t much like to remember.”

I looked into his blue eyes and held his gaze. He had always been so good at everything—he’d be good at killing, too, even if he didn’t want to be. “I did go to war,” I said. “Maybe I didn’t shoot guns or parachute out of planes, but I did go to war. I rolled bandages and I bought liberty bonds and I lined up for rationed food. And I read the casualty lists, and I waited, and I wrote the War Office and the Red Cross after the Armistice, and—and I packed your things; I put them in boxes. I—”

“Sweetheart,” he said.

I jerked my wrist from his grip. “You can’t understand,” I said, tears burning my eyes. “I did everything wrong, don’t you see? Mother shouldn’t have been in that place. They told me it was best, but I should have fought them. She died among strangers, alone in the middle of the night. And you . . .” I pressed my hands to my eyes as the tears fought their way down my cheeks, desperate and hot. I sat on the edge of the bed, the strength gone from my legs. “I took all of your things—your clothes, your belongings—and I got rid of them. Dottie was—she was taking me to the Continent, and I couldn’t afford the rent on the flat for the three months I would be gone, and I . . .” I heard him sigh, and I took a gasping breath as the words fought their way from my throat. “I should have known,” I said, shame burning me, “you were alive. They never found a body. I should have believed. I should have known. All of your things, I—the shirts you liked so much, the cuff links you got at Oxford, the coat you wore the day we met.”

I heard him kneel in front of me. “Look at me,” he said softly.

But I kept my eyes closed. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” I confessed. “Any of it. I could have begged Dottie to store it, but the truth is I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I kept the camera, but everything else, I—even my lavender wool dress. I couldn’t look at it anymore. And I’m so sorry.”

His hands came over mine, lifted them gently from my face. I blinked at him, his face fragmenting as I still fought my tears. He did not speak. Instead, he put his hands gently on my neck, his fingers pressing up into my hair, his thumbs along my jawline. He leaned in, and for a moment I felt his breath on the skin of my neck, just below my ear. Then he kissed me there.

My reaction was so immediate, and so overwhelming, that I gasped. I could not move. He held me still, and he pressed kisses down the side of my neck, slowly, savoring me. Everything in me burned—the blood in my veins, the tears in my eyes, the breath in my lungs, the surface of my skin. Everything burned for him, and when he kissed my lips at last, I stopped thinking.

He pressed me back on the bed, his weight on me, warm and familiar. I arched beneath him as he bit me gently on the tender flesh where my neck met my collarbone and his hands pushed up the hem of my skirt. Then his fingers were tracing my inner thighs, deft and clever, and my hands fisted in the folds of his shirt as I moaned against his neck.

It took only minutes. When I was finished, I helped him undo his trousers, push down my underthings, and then he took his turn. We did not speak. I wrapped my legs around him and arched again, and he met me wave for wave, one hand hard on my hip through the cloth of my skirt, his breath harsh in my ear. It was not slow or graceful, perhaps, but it was us, every languorous rainy afternoon or adventurous night or sleepy morning we’d ever had. Afterward he lay on top of me as both of us caught our breath on the rumpled coverlet.

He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked down at me. “Was there anyone else?” he asked.

I blinked at him, stunned. “Is that a serious question?”

“Yes,” said Alex. “It bloody well is.”

I pressed my hands against his chest and pushed him off me. Then I stood and walked to the washstand against the wall.

“It’s a question that’s kept me awake at night for three years,” Alex said to my back. “Colonel Mabry said you didn’t seem to have anyone else, but—”

“Colonel Mabry?” I was holding the pitcher of water, and I paused in outrage before I poured water into the basin. “You had Colonel Mabry watching me for you?”

“Not precisely,” Alex replied. “He gave me updates, but they were very vague. And I never know when Mabry is lying.”

I remembered what he’d said when he’d suggested we marry in Crete. It isn’t anyone’s damned business what I do. I had thought he wanted to escape Dottie’s prying, but now I knew better. It was Colonel Mabry’s observation he’d wanted to escape. I wrung out the cloth and dabbed the insides of my thighs quickly, my back to him. I was too enraged to speak.

“Don’t you wonder the same thing?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, the word coming out sharply. I could not bear to think about pretty blond German girls following Alex around like puppies. He would have had to fight them off. “I don’t want to know.” I rinsed the cloth and wrung it out again. My hands were shaking.

I heard him get off the bed, right his clothes. “Damn it, Jo. I can’t seem to say the right thing to you anymore.”